a return to EAT!
“A delightful evening full of stories of food, love and joy, interwoven with tragedy ensued, beautifully captivating the audience.”
The Birmingham Post, review by Mohini Howard
“engaging, thought-provoking and genuinely moving“
The Public Reviews, review by Selwyn Knight
Tomorrow we recommence rehearsals for EAT!, which enjoyed a happy opening run in October at The Roundhouse, Birmingham. The current incarnation, featuring a new team of choir-members and stewards, will see our four stunningly transformed caravans pitch up in the covered courtyard of the famous Chubb Buildings, once the industrial bastion of Wolverhampton locksmiths, now partly occupied by The Lighthouse Media Centre. The show is co-produced by Birmingham Rep and Black Country Touring and will perform there from 22nd May – 1st June.
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aces of spades
‘Bobbi Rage’ & ‘Dave the Roadie’ clear a pathway into The Furies lair. photo: Jon ‘Bungle’ Blackford
A glorious homecoming for Kindle Theatre’s The Furies last saturday, which, despite the best efforts of the weather, refused to deter the hardy fans who battled snowdrifts and iced-up roads to get there and who rolled up at A.E.Harris-venue wearing appropriate protective gear. Not-so Bobbi Rage and Dave the Roadie, who will perform any cheap stunt, it seems, to draw an audience. The Furies was presented as part of the fortnight-long Theatre Fever programme which was choc-ful of West Midlands talent. I spent week one performing in Stan’s Cafe epic adaptation of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, which was commissioned by and premiered at Warwick Arts Centre. In week two I was only too pleased to catch Soul City Arts’ If Walls Could Speak, Untied Artists For Their Own Good and Bodhan Piasecki’s Palimpsest City before time ran out. Dare I say it, I had too much on…
Hot news off the press reveals that The Furies next outing will be in Gateshead as part of the much celebrated GIFT Festival (5th May).
Ps. Regular visitors to this site will know that I’ve slowed down my contributions to this site to a sad minimum; I’ve been losing heart, there’s no better way of putting it. It’s not that there’s been nothing to write about – far from it – but sometimes that small space between action and inaction seems so monumental not even the efficacious tinctures from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (administered through a clyster-pipe) have been able to prod me into committing to the page. Now, in a rare moment of activity, I’m tagging this post ‘naked’ and ‘shovel’ in an attempt to stoke up the dynamism and encourage the traffic back. Apologies, all. Thanks for sticking with me through the lean times x.
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Tags: Ace of Spades, bare flesh, freezing, gaffer tape, hot-crossed buns, naked, naked shovellers, nude, Rage, Roadie, Rock, skin, snow, spadework
Marble Run
Documentation of a long and complicated marble run built in collaboration with students and staff of Billesley Primary School, Birmingham in 2012. The Marble Run was delivered by lead artists Johnny O’Hanlon and Jack Trow. The project is part of a long-term programme of creative work devised in collaboration with Billesley Primary School.
The Billesley programme continues and extends the inspirational schools’ work nurtured and conducted by Stan’s Cafe (and countless other arts organisations) through Arts Council England’s Creative Partnerships programme, which ran between 2002 and 2011, when funding was withdrawn.
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return of The Furies
The Furies at Old Vic Tunnels, photo by Simon Annand
This week Kindle Theatre bring The Furies out of hibernation for some choice dates in the wondrous cities of Cambridge and Wolverhampton. The Furies is theatre which resembles a rock gig. It’s a glam-rock music-driven interpretation of Aeschylus’s tale of Clytemnestra, in which the three vengeful Furies are summoned to exact punishment upon a brutish Agamemnon.
Wednesday 27th February – The Junction, Cambridge; DJ set from 7.30pm, performance starts 8.30pm
Friday 1st March – Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton University; performance starts 8pm
also appearing in the home town;
This will be exciting year for Kindle. The company has just enlisted the services of an independent producer, Jo Salkilld and are putting together a programme of work for the coming year, to include development of the solo projects previewed at Bristol Ferment last month and the development of ‘Come Heavy Sleep’, a new music-theatre twist on Othello, tantalisingly glimpsed in a work-in-progress at the RSC/Pilotnight event last July. Before then however, audiences will have to fend off the …. TERRIFYING SOUND OF THE FURIES !!!!!
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Tags: Fury, Kindle Theatre, The Furies
memento mori
In the Stan’s Cafe rehearsal room, working on “The Anatomy of Melancholy”, our adaptation of Robert Burton’s Jacobean compendium on health & wellbeing. The show premieres at Warwick Arts Centre, 12th – 15th March.
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Tags: melancholia, melancholy, memento mori, Robert Burton
their eminences
Backstage @AEHarris venue, home of Stan’s Cafe, prior to the final performance The Cardinals. 2/2/13
(Gerard Bell, Craig Stephens & Graeme Rose. photo courtesy of Rochi Rampal)
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Tags: AEHarris, Cardinals, Stan's Cafe
Cardinals in The Roundhouse
In a rare visit to the Capital, Stan’s Cafe are performing The Cardinals this week at the Roundhouse Studio, Chalk Farm.
The show is part of a programme of visual theatre that makes up this year’s London International Mime Festival. Like our Roundhouse neighbours, the Argentinian adrenaline-junkies Fuerzabruta, who are currently performing in the Main House, Stan’s Cafe are pulling out all the technical stops in an attempt to dazzle the audience. Here’s what Rochi’s onstage operating desk looks like;
The week started with two sell-out shows to warm and vocally appreciative audiences, but there are tickets still available for the remaining performances, which conclude this saturday, 19th January.
Here are some (not uncritical) reviews from the opening night;
The Cardinals, reviewed by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian
Mary Halton for ThePublicReviews
Jill Truman in The Islington Gazette
Ps. I’ve omitted the link to Dominic Cavendish’s Telegraph review, which describes the show as “dragging us across the threshold of patience into new realms of tedium.” You’ll have to hunt that one down yourselves (…always a pleasure to piss the Telegraph off).
Don’t take anybody else’s word for it. Come along and make your own mind up.
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Faster Than Sound: GAME
Documentation from GAME, a collaboration between composer Richard Baker and sound artist Brian Duffy (Modified Toy Orchestra), commissioned by Faster Than Sound / Aldeburgh Music, and performed at Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh on 17th November 2012.
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Tags: AldeburghMusic, Faster Than Sound, GAME, modified toy orchestra, richard baker, Snape Maltings
built to win you over
Loft Filtrations #2
Last respects given to hoarded items as they are finally despatched : Here are ads from an Evening Mail supplement to celebrate the NEC hosting the British International Motor Show for the first time, in 1978. At the hub of the UK road network and in the heart of the motor industry, the recently-opened National Exhibition Centre was an obvious choice of venue, with the Motor Show supposedly attracting a record-breaking 900,000+ visitors.
At the time it seemed as if half of the dads in my cul-de-sac were employed by British Leyland (or Austin Morris as it may then have been called) at the nearby Longbridge car plant. And every vehicle on the street (except one; next-door Sheila’s quirky 2CV) was British-built. Through net curtains anything else seemed Bohemian or strange. Today of course the reverse is true – even withstanding the fact that there must be the biggest concentration of end-of-the-line Rovers playing out their retirements in these neighbourhoods.
Finding this prompts a reminder to self about how important it is to continue to MAKE things, against the odds, in the great tradition of this region. We know now that neither ‘The Austin’ nor the Rootes group ‘won us over’ and we know that out East, Coventry’s Horizon was facing an inevitable rising sun. As the marketplace opened up to the cheaper/more efficient Japanese imports the lion’s share of the British car industry slipped into its terminal decline.
The MG Rover track closed at Longbridge in 2005 and the final Motor Show in 2008.
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Tags: Birmingham, British Leyland, Chrysler Horizon, manufacturing, Motor Show, NEC
After Toledo
A walk into the midday heat of the hills outside Toledo, May’95.
Follow the lane with gaze fixed on the townscape to the left, trying to pinpoint the ultimate vista. The Alcazar crowns the skyline; pantile roofs tumble down. I was thinking of El Greco. I was also thinking… ‘I’ll remember this moment for the rest of my life’.
This is not Toledo at all, of course. It is a fantasy landscape, full of anomalies and architectural curios, plundered from any number of remembered elsewheres, and concocted in the weeks afterwards. If I remember the moment, I remember it largely via this diversion.
[One fragment from a Loft Clearance project, now framed-up to fuel the imagination of a boy on his 12th birthday.]
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