Posted by: Robin Amer on October 22, 2005 12:39 PM | Comments (0)

For the first session of the conference we all gathered in the grand ballroom on the second floor of the hotel for the first panel of the conference, the presentation of this year's Short Docs. Four producers were selected to create 5 or 6 minute pieces around the theme of Games. The panel was moderated by All Things Considered hostess extraordinaire, Michelle Norris.

Here's a run down of the pieces presented.

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BLAKE ESKIN presented a piece that was roughly about go, the Chinese game that sounds similar to chess to the ears of a know-nothing. Apparently it's so popular in China it has two t.v. channels devoted to it. So it's like celebrity poker, only the game is like, 2000 years old. Really the piece was a profile of one of only two women in the game's history to reach its highest rankings. She also happens to be struggling with her husband's illness, and uses the game to talk about that.

I decided losing my husband is like playing go...sometimes I'm behind but what should I do? Resign? Give up the game? No, i can't. - Fung Yen, Go player

The piece had very simple sound elements: the quiet clicking sounds of the stones on the board, and the layers of the main character's voice.

The [sounds of the] stones follow the rhythm of the game. You play one down. Then you think for much longer periods. You capture them and put them in a dish, that rumbling sound. at the end you clean up and close the lid. I knew it would be a slower piece. The game is very austere and silent and I wanted the piece to communicate that. And thoughtful. But it's not one particular go game. If you listened to a professional go game it would be about 200 clicks over 9 hours. -Blake Eskin

Did he feel like he had to explain the game to listeners?

It's a hard thing to explain to people who don't play. It's a challenge. Either you fully explain the rules or you won't undersand unless you do it, or you leave people wondering how it works. If you picked up the sports section and didn't know anything about sports, none of the stories would really make sense. But if you said, the guy picks up a stick and hits the ball and runs around the bases, I don't know it would make any more sense. - Blake Eskin

So I guess he felt it was better to leave it out all together.

There was a really interesting moment in the piece. She seemed very calm, but there was a hint of aggression in her voice and her personality, that came out especially when you heard the tape of her dealing with her students.

Professional athletes burry their aggression until they need to use it. The person she's beating 35 to 28 is a 7 year old girl. And she took great pleasure from that. - Blake Eskin

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MELISSA ROBBINS - Play by Play

Apparently Melissa's original proposal did not predict the shape the piece would ultimately take. Her original proposal was to do a piece about how everyone plays games to get ahead. She planned to interview a homeless drug dealer, a policeman who plays cat and mouse game, a high school girl, a high powered attorney, a stripper and her 4 year old nephew.

I interviewed all those people and even the 4 year old nephew was fairly cooperative. Originally the plan was to have all these people talking about these different games, and it would sound like they were talking about the same thing, and they would be finishing each other's sentences. It was working to a degree, but I think collage is a really hard thing to set out to find. And i knew from the outset it would depend on the tape, but it still ultimately wouldn't come together. - Melissa Robbins

So apparently she didn't get the tape she was looking for. Except from the high powered lawyer, who surprised her with the personal information he revealed in the interview...about his fundamentalist upbringing, alienation from his conservative family who disapproved of his being gay, his valium addiction, and finally, his ultimate suicide attempt. So that ended up being the driving force behind the story.

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MICHAEL KAVANAGH's piece There was a Whole Lot of Hundreds was about high school students and the culture of cheating. It was mostly done with phone sound tape, and the best, most fun, interesting thing about the piece was how proud the kids were of themselves. How easy it is. And how fun. And how it's a gleeful challenge. That there's a creativity, and pride, that comes from getting away with it

There are kids who will cheat when they feel like they have to. Then you have a group I would consider hard core cheaters. It's almost a game to them, to see what they can get away with. - expert

It's so normal. People say, damn I should have sat next to that kid.

There's not a lot of sound there. I think that's the point. Cheating is something that's quiet! -Michael Kavanagh

I got much more outrageous stories. I got Watergate break-in stories. But they weren't told that well. -Michael Kavanagh

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JUDITH SLOAN - Tongue Twister

Judith's piece was the most sound rich of all the pieces presented. It was about the hand-clapping games played by her students from other countries, and how it helped them deal with the more painful parts of their emigration experience. It had layers of very rhythmic clapping and stomping and singing and even nonsense chattering, and then tons of tongue twisters in english and other languages.

The tongue twisters that happened in the beginning. I first had them do the tongue twisters and then tell me what they meant, and then an extended theater piece with character walks as if they were talking to the audience. They all had the clapping rhythms. They all had the same hand moves. The Afghani girls were doing something slightly different but all over the worlds the fils play these clapping rhythms...then teach it to the younger girls. - Judith Sloan

What came out in the conversation about the piece was equally fascinating. Judith formed a close relationship with one of her students, an Afghani girl who was being sent to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. Some people wondered about the disjunction between the lighthearted novelty of the games and the dark undercurrents of the stories behind the stories.

That's a really fun piece, and the kids are still performing, and they're always doing this mix of clapping games and songs and these really heavy stories because that's what their lives are like. -Judith Sloan

More from Third Coast Festival 2005 :
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