To the Sea!

Today, the Proto-type caravan makes its away across Yorkshire to the seaside of Scarborough. We will be in residence at the School of Art and New Media at the University of Hull, Scarborough for two weeks. During that time, we'll be working with 30 students exploring what it means to be lost, especially in a place that seems to be at the end of the earth. Using some of the structures from our summer school, but in a very different way, we'll provoke the students to think about making work in relation to site and then translate that work into a theatre. Looking forward to meeting the students and seeing what we can make together. But first I need to pack!

Besides preparing for Scarborough, we've had a busy year so far. We premiered Third Person (redux) to overwhelmingly positive response (phew) a week and a half ago at the Nuffield Theatre. Check out the pics below.




The premiere of Third Person (redux) has meant that our lovely intern Jenny is now finished with her internship. We'll miss her but are hoping to find ways of helping her build on what she's learned with us. I just went to Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester's Northern Quarter yesterday to listen to an audio piece that her company have made. The piece is called Chatter (great name) - check it out and you'll leave wanting a cuddle and a Sunday Roast!

We have also just returned from Bristol where we performed Virtuoso (working title) at the Wickham Theatre on the Bristol University campus. Always nice visiting Bristol and the Wickham. Such a nice team of people. Had a relatively full house and a good post-show chat. We have also been busy this year with a lot of behind-the-scenes activity... soon we'll have fancy DVDs of Whisper and Virtuoso (working title) for sale and we are also working on a book in conjunction with the Nuffield Theatre Lancaster about our Sunday Lunch Club programme. Add to that a fancy new administrator (Lisa, who will blog here soon) and a new room in which to store our equipment at the Storey Creative Industries Centre (thus returning our office to an office...not a storeroom). I've also been busy working on booking the autumn tour of Third Person (redux), so hopefully in the next few months we'll be able to announce some of the confirmed dates. In the meantime, you can catch it at the Greenroom in Manchester on 19 March. I'll head to the NRLA on the 20th and 21st March with Gillian - look for us if you are going to be there. Perhaps most exciting of all, we are now members of IETM which means I'll be heading to the plenary session in Berlin this April to do some mega networking. I'll also get a chance to see work by Gob Squad, Sasha Waltz, Rimini Protokol and Rene Pollesch. Looking forward to that.

After our residency in Scarborough, we'll start work on a new piece called cityEscape. It takes the city as its canvas and is a two-week long performance intervention. We're excited to leave behind the theatre for a while and spend some time developing locative / distributed performance. In early summer we'll do a test of it on the campus at Lancaster University. We'll post more about it as it develops.

Vote for Proto-type!

All-

Last year, many of you helped us to secure a coveted spot in the My Fierce Festival in Birmingham by voting for us online. Your votes made a huge difference for us, helping us to develop a higher profile in England for the work we make. Now, we need your help again.

Every year Talk Talk has an open submission process for their Digital Heroes Award. They choose three people in each region who have projects that are interesting uses of digital technology to be shortlisted on their website. The general public (that is you!) then votes online to select which one of the candidates will be selected to receive an award of £5,000 towards their project (plus free broadband). We are very proud to announce that our very own artistic director, Peter Petralia, is one of the three on the shortlist for the North West of England.

So, we beg of you... please vote online (and spread the word far and wide) by visiting this site: http://www.talktalk.co.uk/we-love-the-web/digital-heroes/north-west

Peter has been nominated in support of a project we are developing that has hereto been top-secret... You are the first (outside of our producing partners) to hear about this exciting new project. Code-named cityEscape (although this will undoubtedly change) and commissioned in part by Nuffield Theatre Lancaster, this project will radically alter the way that Proto-type makes work. cityEscape will be a multiplatform, multicity narrative and performance that unravels to its participants in real time. Engaging with the work through a variety of media including SMS, emails, postal mail, webcams and live encounters, participants will embark on a journey in which they write themselves into an ever-growing narrative. Audience/participants will sign up to a two-week long performative experience through which they will not only discover their often surprising place within the complex narrative cityEscape creates, but they will also re-discover a relationship to their communities.

We are just starting the development of cityEscape, and an infusion of funding from the Talk Talk Digital Heroes Award would make a massive difference. We have some tough competition, but with your support, we feel confident we can win.

Please vote now and spread the word to everyone you know. We are not sure if you can vote more than once, but it is worth a try!

Thank you for reading this email and for everything you do to help support new innovative new theatre.

Best,

Proto-type

(Gillian, Peter, Rachel and Wes)

Sunshine and Game Playing

It has been an inordinately sunny few weeks up here in the North of England, which has been lovely. Hard to want to do any work when it is so beautiful out. But we are staying busy as usual...

After the last post that Wes did, we finished up our spring tour at Colchester Arts Centre, a lovely re-purposed Church in Essex. It was a small but perfectly formed audience and a mellow way to end several months of hard work. The show looked lovely in the church - something about having such an enormous amount of height above the performance area adds a gravitas to the piece. With everything back in storage, we got busy planning the next phase of our touring schedule, started work planning our new shows and began putting the finishing touches on the summer school we are hosting this year. Although I can't release the dates just yet, we are definitely bringing Virtuoso (working title) to Bristol, Liverpool and Crewe in the coming year. I'll post the dates here as soon as they are confirmed. We are also in discussions with a bunch of other theatres across the UK (and in Europe too). Keep your eyes peeled for the announcement of dates.

Our new projects are starting to brew nicely. We are planning two pieces for next year, contingent on Arts Council funding (cross your fingers for us). One will be a re-imagining of a piece that we did in New York in 2005 called Third Person. This has always been one of my favorite pieces and since it has never been done outside of New York, we thought it would be interesting to have another look at it with the UK company members. The original version of the show used low-fi technology to tell the story of a dissolving love between two people - who may or may not be the two people performing. They talk only to the audience, using the third person voice (i.e., 'they') and show bits of 'evidence' using overhead projectors, slide projectors, audio recordings, and video. We are excited to re investigate this form and to create a new script that fits the cultural context (and the performers) that we are in now. This could all change, but you have heard about it here first!

The other project we are working on is a much larger piece that won't premiere until autumn 2010 most likely. It is being commissioned by the Nuffield Theatre Lancaster and all I will say about it is that it will take place in the space of daily life, over the course of a few weeks. 'Audience' members will sign up to be participants in a narrative/experience that involves them receiving communications from us, invitations to events and prompts to do things which all allow the narrative to unravel. As part of our research for this project, I went to a workshop on Weds at Soho Theatre that was led by Hide & Seek. It was about the ways in which games and gaming can be utilized in a performance context. During the day the 15-20 participants heard about different projects that use game theory, discussed elements of a good game, played some games and then developed our own performative games. It was good fun and interesting. Not sure if we will use any of this in the new show - but it certainly relates to what we are thinking about. In the evening, participants were invited to a Sandpit event at Soho Theatre which is essentially a scratch night for games. I played one called Soho Spy Squad, which was good fun - and my team won! Here is a photo of my team in the huddle at the beginning of the night.

We are putting the final touches on what we think is going to be an amazing Summer School this year. We have a few places left if you are interested in applying - deadline is 8 June at noon so get to it!