a dark lady #1
With composer Luke Iveson and musician Gretha Tuls earlier today @AEHarris, developing ideas for a forthcoming bassoon/voice duet drawn from sonnets in Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ sequence.
This project, selected as part of the forthcoming RSC/Pilotnights programme in July, was partly inspired by readings performed of a series of Shakespeare’s sonnets at the Cheltenham Literary Festival 2010. I accompanied poet/musician/Renaissance man Don Paterson, whose illuminating commentaries of the sonnets (published by Faber & Faber) prompted many a murmer in the packed-out theatre at Parabola Arts. My memory of that event, sadly, is overshadowed by the fact that I performed while nursing chronic tooth-ache, the result of dodgy self-dentistry in a Tokyo hotel room 3 weeks earlier. The Cheltenham event with Don was a terrific opportunity to animate those gutsy, vibrant texts but I was pleased just to have survived without blacking out.
At about the same time a new next-door neighbour moved into The Grove – further extending the Boho international credentials of that little corner of B16. Entranced by the gymnastic scales-practice seeping through the walls as Gretha (principal bassoonist with the CBSO) put the instrument though its paces, I resolved to find a project in which a collaboration might be possible.
The mysterious ‘Dark Lady’ is the object/muse/recipient of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence 127-152. In attempting to unravel something of her presence – often bleakly rendered by WS – our objective is to find a voice for her beyond the text, using the instrument to illuminate and liberate the figure of The Dark Lady from the shadows of verse which have caged her for posterity. These first exploratory sessions have been about exploring the range and timbre of the instrument whilst conjuring up a grid-map for a performance in which voice and bassoon can interact.
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sounding out the drum
Tonight until Saturday (26th May) Stan’s Cafe bring The Cardinals to The Drum at Plymouth’s Theatre Royal. Here’s a pic of the set – all dressed up and ready to take masses. Link to the TRP Box Office
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The Furies do MayFest
Live footage of Kindle Theatre’s ‘THE FURIES’, performed at The Vault Festival, Old Vic Tunnels, Feb 2012.
Filmed and edited by Harry Winteringham @ www.harrywinteringham.co.uk
Sound by Jonathan Blackford & Phill Ward, recorded at Supersonic Festival 2011
The Furies crash-lands in Bristol next week for the annual performance extravaganza of MayFest. As with previous years, an excellent programme of new theatre takes over a range of venues in the city. Kindle bring The Furies to the Old Vic Studio, which I think will be a terrific place to catch the show – with a markedly different dynamic and vibe to the experience of the recent gigs at The Old Vic Tunnels, London.
As for the rest of the MayFest programme I’d urge audiences to see any of the shows I’ve already encountered – Gary McNair’s mind-shifting Crunch, Belarus Free Theatre’s vital and extraordinary Minsk 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker, Little Bulb’s uproarious Goose Party and our Brum neighbours The Other Way Works in the up-close-&-personal Avon Calling, which I saw in development 3 years ago. I’m also hoping to catch Tania El Khoury’s work Maybe if You Choreograph Me… We met Tania at Stan’s Cafe during early stages of developing The Cardinals and she has a wonderful quality in performance – edgy and brave .
The Furies will perform at Bristol Old Vic Studio on friday 18th May and saturday 19th May. Shows start at 9.30pm
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Tags: Kindle Theatre Furies Mayfest Bristol
creatio cieli et terra
Adam & Eve get a dressing down in front of the Tree of Knowledge – from today’s rehearsal of The Cardinals at AE Harris. Though the day felt full of purpose and good humour, Graeme Braidwood’s furtive camera-work reveals me as nothing short of man possessed. (see other pics here)
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Return of The Cardinals
By lunchtime on Day#1 we knew that the warm, comfortable facilities of the Rep rehearsal space just wouldn’t cut it. It wasn’t that the luxuriousness of the green room had blunted our purpose but rather a lack of ceiling height finally put paid to the idea. So back to the ‘Australia’ room at AE Harris we returned, the place which gave birth to this show 14 months ago, before its official premiere at Domaine d’O, Montpellier.
The Cardinals is being unpacked and painstakingly reassembled for a series of performances at Warwick Art Centre and The Drum, Plymouth. Trying to unlock the mystery of how we delivered the show is something of a challenge though, even with the aid of video documentation, because it is in the dimly-lit backstage areas that the real action is taking place.
In the above pic, prop-builder/stage manager Harry Trow muses over an elusive item, while James, Gerard and ….er,… Harry continue to hunt for it.
The Cardinals, Warwick Arts Centre, 9th -11th May 2012, 7.45pm
The Drum, Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 22nd – 26th May 2012, 7.45pm
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stunde null
Stunde Null : Edit from imitating the dog on Vimeo.
Previewed in January at the Platform Theatre, Kings Cross, Stunde Null (Zero Point) is one of two new shows from Imitating The Dog and Pete Brooks. The show extends the company’s trademark style of using hi-spec editing and projection technology to create a distinctive filmic aesthetic.
I first worked with Pete when (as one of his original cohort of students at Lancaster University) he directed the inspirational Sleep Has It’s House, drawn from Oliver Sacks book “Awakenings” – a series of accounts of patients trapped in a state of catatonic sleeping sickness. That was May 1986, when Pete was winding up his own company, Impact Theatre Co-op in the wake of their ultimate piece, The Carrier Frequency. Our proto-show became in turn the model for The Sleep, which toured the following year as the inaugural production for Insomniac Productions, featuring Sarah-Jane Morris. Pete’s arrival and tenure as Fellow-in-Theatre marked an incredibly vibrant period of creativity at Lancaster. With Impact Co-op as a model, Pete encouraged four of us to form a company of our own, Glory What Glory, producing 3 touring shows in as many years under his mentorship (1987-90) – all hi-physicality and with more than a trace of the film-derived visual aesthetic which Pete would develop more profoundly in the work of Insomniac (eg. L’Ascensore, Clair de Luz) and later Imitating The Dog. Composer Jocelyn Pook provided the soundtracks to this early work, which featured at the National Review of Live Art 1988 and graced many an Arthouse venue across the UK at a time when a touring network really existed and where it was possible to book a 30-date tour for a young, virtually unknown company and deliver it within a 2-month period.
When it became clear that Glory What Glory had run its course, I teamed up with recent Lancaster graduate James Yarker and returned to my native Birmingham with the newly-formed Stan’s Cafe. The seductive influence of Pete’s work remained and continues to remain, however. I worked with Pete on several Insomniac and related projects in the early 90′s and some notable Stan’s Cafe pieces acknowledge his aesthetic – notably It’s Your Film (1998) and Constance Brown (2007). More directly however, James managed to persuade the programmers of Birmingham’s ‘Towards The Millennium Festival’ to support the re-staging of Impact’s The Carrier Frequency at the Crescent Theatre, in May 1999.
The Carrier Frequency, restaged by Stan’s Cafe. Performers: Charlotte Vincent, Jake Oldershaw, Mike Kirchner, Cait Davis, Heather Burton, Graeme Rose. Photo: Ed Dimsdale
Stunde Null by Imitating The Dog will be touring the UK from October 2012
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Tags: Berlin 1945, performance, pete brooks, zero point
memoirs of an amnesiac
On this night, 12th April, twenty years ago, Stan’s Cafe premiered the company’s second full-scale piece of work, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, to a sizeable and appreciative audience at mac, Birmingham. The show was presented as part of “Towards the Millennium”, a ten-year Festival initiated by Simon Rattle (then Principal Conductor of the CBSO) as means of re-evaluating the cultural achievements of each decade of the 20th Century in the run up to the Millennium. For the “1992″ programme, the decade 1910-1919 was celebrated – and by chance at that time James Yarker, Richard Chew and myself were being seduced into the enigmatic world of Erik Satie in preparation for Memoirs. The premise of the show; through the cipher of lonesome office bureaucrat Eric Smith, Memoirs provides a tantalising glimpse into the composer’s bedsit, as imagined by a Satie obsessive. In reality Satie’s true residence, in the unfashionable Parisian neighbourhood of Arcueil, had reportedly never received a visitor. When friends arrived to sort through his possessions after his death, they found chaos. And beneath this chaos dozens of identical black umbrellas, several matching ‘velvet’ suits, two pianos (one upturned upon the other) and piles of unopened letters.
Our show Memoirs became an homage, but also a cautionary tale about the perils of hero worship. Insufficient to hold us off though, Satie continues to beguile and charm us. James has looked for opportunities for Stan’s Cafe to revive the old show as part of a retrospective and recently an opportunity has emerged for Various People to present some of the Satie canon in the context of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival this coming June. The Velvet Gentleman will be a collection of songs, sketches and scribbles illuminating some of the more obscure, playful and surreal fragments from Satie’s life and work.
link to ABC promo to Cabaret Festival
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Tags: Erik Satie, mac Birmingham
MTO en La Suisse
“Groupe Anglo-Saxone ” The Modified Toy Orchestra arrive in the picturesque setting of BICUBIC, in Romont, Switzerland for a programme of three gigs at this venue attached to the town’s High School. Music teacher Quentin saw the band play at the Belluard Festival in nearby Freibourg back in 2009 (the first MTO performance for Sean and me). Quentin (foreground in pic, avec Gauloise) was then determined to expose his students to a dose of Hula Barbie and three years later here we are.
Shows; tuesday 3rd April 2012 – 2.30pm and 8pm; wednesday 4th April – 10.30pm
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On the heels of our Gaol sentence with the Adelaide Festival I’m asked to deliver a Festival Eulogy in a performance tomorrow night at West Terrace Cemetery, entitled “End of the World”. The audience will be transported from the Barrio to this secret candle-lit location, where the passing of the Festival will be marked. The cemetery here is the final resting place of the Victorian pioneers who founded this settlement back in the 1830′s/40′s and as a the boneyard is a fascinating insight into the social and ethnic history of the State.
Co-incidentally my oldest friend from home Andy Lee asks me to track down four Victoria Cross recipients whose bodies are interred in this green grass/red earth. Andy – a collector of old stuff since our boyhood ‘bottle-digging’ trips – has been logging the sites and conditions of VC. graves for the past 13 years or so and has built up an impressive, perhaps obsessive database.
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…and as in a scene out of a Nevil Shute novel (imagined but not read), an astonishing scene from the apocalypse breaks out over the South Australian Seas. Donner und blitzen – sadly not captured here – accompanied by torrential downpours.
Back at my host Rick’s up in the Hills (and precipitated by the deluge) a plague of millipedes invades the house. The neighbourhood Kookaburras, Kangaroo and Koala were cute, but these mini-beasts threaten to tip the balance. Nature is fighting back against our colonial ambitions. They are in the shower, on the piano and in my bed.
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