Moments Before: Island Shakespeare Festival
On Display at the HUB Gallery, Bayview Cash Store, Langley, WA from July 19-September 8th, Artist Reception August 19th at 5pm
Photographs by Quinlan Corbett
This is our backstage: a mossy expanse of grass abutting the woods, behind cargo containers that function as dressing rooms, entrances, and stage architecture. What is it like to wait in the wings? What goes on back there?
Moments Before is an ongoing project exploring the mystery and culture of performance through backstage portraiture and candid photography. The photographs displayed here are from Island Shakespeare Festival's 2024 summer season, when I was acting in the company. We performed two plays in repertory, alternating between Shakespeare's King Lear and Aphra Behn's comedy The Lucky Chance.
The culture and atmosphere of a backstage space have everything to do with the day; is it opening night, or a four show weekend a month into the run? Is it a comedy or tragedy? In the case of outdoor Shakespeare, is it sunny or cloudy, cold or hot? A matinee in blaring sunlight or an evening of thunderstorms and mosquitoes? Beyond that, does the company like each other? Has the assembled group of people gelled into a cohesive and functional company? In the case of ISF 2024, the answer was a resounding yes. This group of performers from many backgrounds, geographies, racial identities and genders, cohered into a supportive and ebullient group, which is also a testament to ISF thinking proactively about representation in a time when diversity intiatives are under attack.
As a photographer I'm perhaps less interested in "documenting" what happens backstage as being open to the eccentricities and photographic possibilities that present themselves. There is a lot of mystery to me; I don't know anyone else's thoughts, I don't really know how they prepare. But I can observe and sometimes share in what they do, and that is interesting to photograph.
Backstage we are all united by that fact that soon we will make an entrance and do a thing in front of a group of stangers. We will go from a semi-private space to a public one. We will take on some aspect of character, we will say lines that a playwright wrote, perhaps from four hundred years ago. We will make them our own. The preceeding minutes and hours are the Moments Before.