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.

Rumblings and nerves

No matter how many shows I make (over 20 so far not including education-related), I still get the pre-show nerves. I get them on the day of a show as the audience filters in, and in the weeks leading up to a premiere. I'd like to be one of those cool, collected people who don't worry about what others think, but the truth is I'm a big ball of nerves. I do care. I can't help but care what people think. Thats part of why I do what I do. I want people to be moved in some way by what we make as a company.

In a little over a week Third Person (redux) opens and its nerve-wracking as always. We have, oddly, had a few weeks off from rehearsals and are set to start up again this week to polish the beast. Its unusual for us to give ourselves time off this close to a premiere, but I think it has served us very well. From the moment we started making this show its been a different animal. Just looking back at some of our lovely intern Jenny's blog posts proves that point. We are normally very clear on our starting points and, although things change, we usually stick to our plans. This time, the show has stretched and pulled and morphed in a million different directions until finally returning to something oddly close to our starting point. Just a month or two ago it looked like we were going somewhere else, but here we are again. And that journey is exciting, but also highly unsettling.

Third Person - the original NY version - was created in 2005 (i think) as a response to a call our friends at the Brick Theatre in NY put out for the Moral Values Festival. The Brick is a small but perfectly formed space in Williamsburg Brooklyn that has the energy of a much larger space. Every summer, they organise a ridiculous festival that gives smaller companies a chance to make a new show that might otherwise not be feasible. We made Third Person in just under five weeks. It was me, Tigger, Carlton and an intern/stage manager named Abby in a hot studio in Gowanus Brooklyn slugging it out. The process involved something like a porn shoot (at my house! for the video and photos of the two performers getting very close to doing it), a lot of lugging around of equipment and some hilarious drawings from J. Morrison. In the end, the original Third Person was extremely well-received and very personal. It followed the dissolution of a relationship between two jaded New Yorkers, fueled by drugs, sex and an unhealthy relationship to money. Suffice to say, the piece was highly autobiographical...

Now, five+ years later, the landscape of the world is somewhat different and the new Third Person (redux) reflects that. Still concerned with love and death but now focused on the story of Bonnie and Clyde, the lecture-demonstration format of the original Third Person has stretched to fit new content. Its been a remarkable process and I'm constantly amazed by the energy, effort and brilliance of the Proto-type collaborators. From my perspective watching my words come to life, there is no such thing as failure - the opening will inevitably be filled with people who don't like what we've made and people who do. What is important, I suppose, is that we like what we've made. Watching Gillian and Wes do their delicate dance of edging close to becoming Bonnie and Clyde and then pulling back to reflect on the nature of love, death and of storytelling is heartbreaking. I fall in love every time I see Gillian making lemonade while imagining Bonnie's dreams of old age and I am in awe as Wes explodes with energy and passion as he describes the turning point in their story. Duncan's music came late in the process but somehow seems inseparable from the show; it's like a glove tailor made for our particular madness. And David's lighting is helping the show to emerge from the scruffy rehearsal mode into something sparkly and sculpted.

Making a new show is a lot like raising a child on intensely strong speed. You see it come out of you, grow and leave in a matter of a year or less. It is natural that I'd be emotional to see the show start to take its first steps without me. I cannot help but be nervous, excited, worried, insecure, proud of the lovely mess we've made together. I hope you all feel something when you watch it too - whether you hate it or love it, I hope it isn't a bland response.

Gay Paree

This weekend, I took a short trip to Paris to see some work in the Festival d'Automne and to try and conquer Paris for Proto-type. Although I can report that Paris is still French and not flying the flag of Proto yet, it was a fantastic trip filled with croissants, cafe creme and just a little bit of brouilly / cote du rhone...

One of the main purposes of the trip was to see Young Jean Lee's The Shipment which was playing in a Paris suburb at a theatre called the Theatre Genneviellers. My good friend Mikeah (and frequent Proto-type collaborator) is in the show, and he kindly arranged a ticket for me. It was good to see the piece as there has been a lot of hype about it and I know its touring everywhere. Interesting to see the kind of work that makes an impact internationally. The Shipment is structured in three parts (with no intermission): the first is basically a minstrel show updated to the current context of the performance space, the second is a sort of 'after school special' kind of parable performed in an obviously over-the-top robotic fashion, and the third is a domestic drama set in an upper-middle class apartment (presumably in New York). The performers were fantastic -some really detailed and energising performances from all of them in different ways. There were also a few stand out moments, like one section which included a beautiful song in three-part harmony. I left feeling somewhat puzzled though by some of the writing and the direction in general. I was really not sure how to respond to the material - was it meant to be lampooning something in the first half or just doing a stand-up comedy/minstrel performance? Was the third part meant to be a kitchen sink drama? It felt like it was veering into the realm of soap opera but I couldn't see any commentary on the form. The first half was meant to offend, I think, but I couldn't tell where the commentary was there either. The middle part seemed an attempt to inject a bit of playfulness / stylisation into the piece but, again, wasn't sure if I was meant to care about these people or what they were saying really... And the link between the parts didn't exist in any strong way for me. Its puzzling because Young Jean is probably my favourite contemporary writer - she has written work that has absolutely blown me away in the past. Not sure why I was left so puzzled this time. I'm sure I just need to digest it a bit more because most of the people whose opinion I trust have said such good things about the piece. Need to see it again I think.

A lot of my experience of Paris this time around was centred on some of the street culture of the city. I filmed these high-school age boys doing a dance called Tecktonic while having a meeting at the Palais de Tokyo. It is a crazy, jerky, arm based dance that is a derivative of vogueing but as if you are on speed or are a robot. I found it mesmerising and could have spent all day watching them go at it. Some real attitude in the form. I love, as my friend Ben said, that on the streets of Paris the big craze is dancing (not gun fighting, stabbing or spitting as in other cities I've lived in/live in).

I also kept seeing some lovely street art in the Marais where I was staying. Here are a few snaps from my phone:






I particularly like that last one. Something very endearing about seeing an 'olde worlde' man in black and white on the side of a building. Its like he is peaking through time to visit us. These bits of art served as my markers in my walks around the city; navigation points that helped me find my way home each night.

I left Paris wondering about what Europe means.... England and France could not be more different, although something about the cultures of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands feel very related. I wonder if England is really in europe at all culturally. I think the English could learn a lot from the European approach to cafe culture and food, and certainly to the arts in general. I was literally bombarded by high quality art work everywhere I went in Paris that seemed to be well-supported and well-attended. What is England doing wrong that the arts are so poorly attended and valued? Maybe we all need to eat more croissants?

Rehearsal Video - Third Person (redux) Rehearsal Sept 09

Rehearsals for Third Person (redux) are well under way as of last week. We've been exploring some of the formal and content ideas form the 2005 version of Third Person that we did in NY. We are taking it down a different route, but still toying with the telling of a love story in the third person. This time, though, we are upping the ante in terms of the drawing of images as part of the story telling. At a rehearsal last week, we did a bit of playing around with drawing a version of the whole story. This video is a sped up version of one of the tests....



We will post more images and video as we have them. Some photos have been posted to our facebook fan page if you are interested.

Being an American

Being an American in England should be no big deal. We have a shared history, similar language and political systems that are intricately related, if not entirely similar. Despite the fact that the modern USA was forged in a war with England, our countries have been long time friends. When I decided to move here, I was eager for something different than the way of life I was leading in the US. I had grown incredibly weary of the Bush years and found myself really disliking a lot about American culture. England seemed like a good place to get a fresh perspective.

And it has been, for the most part. There are things I don't love about England (mostly the insane drinking culture, hen nights, and much of the 'cuisine') but there is a lot I love about being here (the relative liberalism, the mobility of people, the willingness to experiment). I am constantly wondering if this move to England is permanent, or is it more complicated than that? Is this the beginning of a co-habitation, of becoming a global soul (as Pico Iyer puts it). I am not sure, but in just a few short years, I feel I've made big steps in fitting in here, but I wonder if I will ever be truly integrated. It may sound slightly dramatic, but in many ways I feel like I will always be a foreigner here; always referring back to the modes of thinking/operating that have been ingrained in my from years of growing up in America. I find myself less engaged with politics here, for instance, because I don't have any rights. I can't vote. I can't impact change via the official political system. And I do miss that a bit as I am incredibly interested in politics. I stayed up until 2.30am last night watching Obama's speech on healthcare... that is how passionate I am about politics.

There is something about the massive scale of the US and the incredible geographic diversity that I think haunts the souls of people born and raised there. I don't mean to generalise, though, so I will bring it back to my experiences.... the sense of scale that you I have become used to in the US (giant houses, cars, meals, people, roads, horizons) means that I am always aware of the existence of 'more'. This makes me feel constantly like I need to strive for more, achieve more, make more out of my work. Which brings me to Proto-type more directly. This past year has been an incredible experience for me, and for the company. I have been so proud of how we have gone from being a very loosely organised group here in the UK to a machine where each company member is truly integrated into how we function. The scale of Proto-type is expanding, developing, evolving towards a shared vision of what it means to make performance now. We don't want to just make shows that are entertaining (although that is crucial) or that are thought-provoking. We want our work to stick with the audiences who experience it; to in some way alter a little part of the way they see the world. This is ambitious, and we don't always succeed but we always give it our absolute best. Maybe it is the American in me pushing the four of us to think big. Possibly, but equally I am being pushed by Rachel, Wes and Gillian to keep on keepin on - to trust that our ambitions are achievable.

We have a big, busy, complicated year ahead of us that matches our ambitions: we are doing a sited series of video projections on the walls of the Roman Gardens in Chester, touring Virtuoso (working title), teaching several workshops with higher education students at Bristol, MMU and Lancaster Universities, conducting a two-week residency at the School of Art and New Media in Scarborough, hosting an intensive Winter School themed around the seven deadly sins, building a new show called Third Person (redux) which will tour in the spring of 2010 and starting development on a complex and exciting project code named CITYeSCAPE that will unravel over the course of two-weeks and de-centre performance out of the theatre. Some of these projects are just in their infancy. Others are developing fast. I've put links in to any of the ones that we are able to announce information on. Keep your eye on this space for more about the others. In addition, I'm going to Germany in November to participate in a conference called Movements between hearing and seeing, where I will be presenting a piece of writing I've done about our show Whisper. We will also be traveling around Europe meeting presenters, venue managers and other artists as we seek to develop a European touring scheme. Whether it is American ambition, or a result of the gusto of the combined Proto-type members' passion for performance, this year promises to kick up a lot of dust. Look out.

Behind the scenes video footage

I was looking through some photos and video of the tour of Virtuoso, and I found a short video that I took of the performers warming up and setting the stage before our gig at Colchester Arts Centre. I thought it might be interesting for some of you to get a view of the space that you would not normally have, and to see some of the antics the performers get into as they prepare.

Television and Virtuoso

For the past several months, I have been working on a piece of academic writing about Virtuoso (working title). Having just completed an article for Contemporary Theatre Review about Whisper (which should be out sometime next year), you might have thought I'd be ready for a break. Well, I am, but deadlines are deadlines! This new piece will be excerpted in a book next year (I'll let you know when it is out) that focuses on intermediality. The full piece of writing deals with the notion of the pixel, televisions, screens in performance, and Proto-type's Virtuoso (working title). It is way too long to post all of what I've written here, but I thought it could be interesting to share some of my thoughts. It is worth noting that the full piece of writing is about 40 pages long, so suffice to say this is really an excerpt. What follows, is the introductory three paragraphs (very much works in progress). I might put more up here if it seems of interest to anyone...

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in American suburbia, where everything seemed just out of reach: the ongoing Cold War, Reaganonmics, the evolution of the personal computer, the start of the AIDS epidemic and the mythology of the nearby space programme. I was born in 1974 in Melbourne, on Florida’s east coast near the Kennedy Space Center where the Space Shuttle launches. As a child, I watched the increasingly frequent lift-offs from our front lawn, from the beach or from the football ground at my elementary school. When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 I watched it live. I remember thinking nothing of it when it happened; it just looked a little bit odd, but not necessarily apparently disastrous to a twelve-year old boy. When I replay what happened on that day in my mind, though, I am uncertain of the authenticity of what I see; the images that come to me bear a striking resemblance to archival footage of the explosion (including the perspective and shot framing). Is it possible that my memory of the experience of watching it live is not actually my memory at all? Immediately after the Challenger disaster, I watched, passively and actively, hundreds of hours of video excerpts of the explosion cycled on my television screen. These images may have become my own. Sixteen years later the scene repeated itself in a different, more aggressive form. I was exiting the subway at Union Square in New York City when a plane flew into the World Trade Center. I saw it happen, but again, the visual images that remain in my memory are untrustworthy. In the moments, days, weeks after the World Trade Center was attacked, a twenty-four hour parade of disturbing, repetitive images of the event played on every television channel in America. In the words of Victor Burgin (1996: 226), “the actual events mingle indiscriminately” with the ‘memories’ as replayed on television. Perhaps this is because memories are not a cognitive act of recalling stored data per se. Instead, as Tim Ingold (2000: 142) says, “it is through the activity of remembering that memories are forged.” It should be no surprise, then, that my memories of these two highly broadcast disasters have been clouded with visions that originated on the television screen.

It is with cautious uncertainty, then, that I recall anything from my childhood, although the memories of the 1970s and 80s that are most vivid for me are domestic, not cataclysmic or of international significance and are therefore less likely to have been broadcast-worthy. I remember my childhood in ambers and greens, in wood panelling and shag carpet, in Long Island Iced Teas on the patio and unfiltered cigarettes smoked at the dinner table. Mine is a childhood filled with the banality of rented homes, whose anonymous halls and cinder block walls sat at the end of cul-de-sacs, or across from the local park; of the ‘woods’ at the end of the street where I had my first cigarette, of the eerie light of a cathode-ray television screen beaming its messages thorough the neighbours’ windows at night. I remember (barely) the time before video games proliferated and, yes, even the sound of the living room, pre-MTV. I remember standing on the lawn in our front yard to watch the Space Shuttle lift off, a visible symbol of America’s belief in the new. Something of the fantastical snakes its way through my childhood memories as well. Melbourne was not only at the heart of the American space programme, but also only a short drive to the pinnacle of fantasy: Disney World. In fact, my grandmother had a stroke at Disney World and died in the Disney hospital. Disaster and death, again, but this time in the fantastic realm of the pinnacle of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1994: 12). These flashes of my childhood are relics of what Stephan Berg (2007b: 11) has called “the unspectacular America” that is “a picture world whose credibility largely derives from its feeling like the sum of all those images of America one has already seen.” My childhood memories are, in his words, “a reality of the second degree that comes across with the convincingness of primary reality” (Ibid.).

How strange to be possessed of memories that bear the mark of images that the world has already seen and which I cannot even confidently claim as my own. In many ways, this is the fate of being an American who grew up in suburbia, for American suburbia has long captured the imagination of critical thinkers and artists, and has been endlessly dissected and replayed. Jean Baudrillard (1998: 56) says of America that “the whole country is cinematic” in his account of travelling through the American west in the mid 1980s. I cannot argue with the notion of America as cinematic, but, upon reflection, I think a more accurate description of my nostalgic memory of being a child in suburban Florida is televisual. Rather than fleeting encounters with the great expanses of the western American deserts and the unending highways of Los Angeles that Baudrillard describes, I am possessed of a long, drawn out set of experiences that appear more like episodes on small green screens in the living room of my memory. America, for me, is a country of the screen-appliance, not of the cinema.

Tweets

Just a reminder to any blog readers that we are on Twitter too. If you are there and fancy following us, look for Proto_type - thats us!

School's Out

Summer school is officially over now. We had a fabulous week that ended on day six with a the showings of work from everyone. We spent the morning putting the final touches on pieces, giving/getting feedback and setting up the spaces. At 4pm when the festivities kicked off, a good size crowd turned up; it was nice to open up the week's worth of work to a sea of friendly faces.

The first up was Leentje, who used the ground floor bar for her piece. Early in the week Leentje and I had a chat and she described something she was interested in relating to the way that 'women lose their minds in housework.' For her showing, she played a recorded, original text of her speaking (to reduce the need to memorize on such short notice) while she moved through a series of household tasks: peeling potatoes, ironing the clothes, hanging the clothes out to dry, washing the floor, eating a treat. Meanwhile the recording ruminated on the time waiting for 'him' to come home. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this piece develops!


After Leentje's piece finished, we went upstairs to the second floor where all of the other work was shown. Before entering the hallway of the second floor, though, audience members were invited by Rachel to decorate a cake with a precious text message from their phone. She has been interested in the way that some people keep texts and other people delete them without even thinking about it. Without saying a lot more about it, she simply asked people who had special texts on their phones to transfer them onto a cake with icing. More on that below. Once in the hallway, everyone grabbed a glass of wine or juice and then we opened two rooms that had durational performances in them. One, by Jacob was a timeline of history from different angles and using different scales. He drew this on the floor of a studio in chalk, and added key items along the way for illustration. By the end of the showings at 6.10, he was still going, so we had to leave history hanging in the balance.


In another room, Marcus was setup with an hour-long piece where he sat in a tent in the room, with a microphone and a camera pointed on him. The camera had a live feed to a television screen. On the floor when you entered the room was a set of instructions saying that you could ask Marcus anything, or chat to him about anything at all, but that you had to grab a playing card first and read it out before asking your question. In the development of this piece, we found that there was a delicate playfulness happening that brought up a number of interesting issues about surveillance, control, and innocence. During the workshopping of it, the questioners always stayed on one side of the television, but when I walked into the room to see how it was going on the showing day, I was surprised to see people queuing up to talk to Marcus at the tent itself. Very interesting to see how different people respond uniquely to work.


At 4.45, we opened the door to a room filled with cakes. Rachel and Krissi decided to collaborate together because there were a number of similarities in their interests, one of which related to cakes. The cakes that had been decorated by audience members earlier, were laid on the stage separated by fourteen smaller cakes on doilies. Krissi and Rachel gave a performance that dealt with Krissi's upcoming trip through Europe looking for the Polish diaspora and Rachel's project of translating text messages into other forms (including needlepoint/cross stich). Some highlights for me included the one-by-one destruction of each min-cake by Krissi as she described the ways a city could be lost and Rachel's 'brace position' for when you are about to lose something in public. The entire audience practiced the brace position, which I'm sure we'll all be using forever more.



After Krissi and Rachel performed, we had a brief amount of time to visit Marcus and Jacob again before seeing David and Lucy's piece. David and Lucy also decided to work together a few days ago. For their piece, the audience entered through the space to the far wall, where they were pinned in by a line of twine on the floor. In the corner of the room were David and Lucy with their feet in wash buckets, washing their feet. When everyone was seated Lucy and David started moving through the space in a series of traces - David moving forward, Lucy following initially. The piece was very meditative and made me think a lot about the way that memory works. Because their was no text and no music score, I was able to craft my own path through the work. It felt like it was teasing something out about relationships, intimacy, emotion (or the restraint of), and ritual.


After Lucy and David finished, we went back into the main hallway for more drinks and snacks while Mike prepared his piece. He began by asking everyone to hold a piece of black paper and some bluetac. One by one he took the pieces of paper and sketched simple chalk drawings that represented snapshots of a walk through Lancaster. These started out along one wall and then (with the introduction of a narrative about his cousin) they spread out through all of the second floor. Some audience members were asked to hang pictures, to make tulips, or to become the figures in a photo. The drawings themselves, although simple, really made me think of the frames of a comic book or of newspaper drawings. I loved the way something two-dimensional (a drawing) was becoming three-dimensional through the abstraction of them in space.


At the end of it all, we ran only 10 minutes over (!) and I think everyone had a good time. We all cleared up the rooms, put things away and then ran off to the Borough for a yummy evening meal. Everyone was disappointed that Rachel and Lucy couldn't be there, but travel to/from Lancaster proved a bit tricky on a Saturday evening. Here are a few shots from the evening:




For anyone who came to the showings, we'd love your thoughts. Please feel free to submit a comment.

Summer School Photos

For anyone who is interested, we have been posting images from the Proto-type Summer School on our Flickr page. Check it out by clicking the image below.

Summer School Day Two

We are well into summer school - its day three now - and things are getting sparky. I thought it would be useful to follow on from Gillian's post about day one, with a post about day two. Wes or Rachel will add something about day three soon.

Day two started with the morning coffee/tea ritual and then we gathered in the big messy rehearsal room for the second provocation, from Wes.



Wes took us through a presentation about being lost in the city that ended with the participants being split into pairings: Rachel and Jacob, Marcus and Krissi, Leentje and David, Mike and Lucy. Each pairing was given an envelope that had a map, although some of these were not immediately useful, and a list of questions. The task was to go into the city and try and answer the questions in photographic form. After taking these photos, the pairings returned to the Storey and uploaded their images to a laptop.

After uploading their images, the pairings did a bit of remixing following some rules that Wes set. At first it was about responding to the randomly changing images in pairs (and each pair had 10 images to respond to)... This then morphed into a more open response where anyone could respond. Here are a few images:



After the photo-jams, I did a little test presentation/performance about raiding the archive, looking for lost things in the back catalog, if you will. I have been unearthing memories and photos from the 13 years of making work with Proto-type and I've crafted some small texts...these largely focus on spaces I've worked in and often include the awful things that have gone wrong in a process or a performance. In a way, it is a catalog of my failures (and a testament to my resilience, maybe). I think I might want to make these into a book of some sort.

Hilarious Poster

Just wanted to share this ridiculous poster that I saw when we were down at the Exeter Phoenix doing Whisper.
It is for 'professional wrestling. Nicki and I came across it at the taxi office on our way out. We were kicking ourselves that we couldn't stay to catch it. Some really scrawny men on the poster (and one or two beasts). Would have been good fun. I have a soft spot for 'pro' wrestling. Or 'wrastling' as it was known where I grew up.

Quick Shots From the Road

We are down in Exeter today getting ready to do WHISPER at the Exeter Phoenix. It is our first time in this venue and so far, so good. If you've never been to the Phoenix, it is worth a trip. Its a lovely building that has a nice cafe bar (with a large outdoor space), gallery, working spaces for rehearsals and a good sized theatre space. They do a lot of music events, it seems, but some good theatre/performance/live art stuff too. There is a real buzz in the building which makes it feel like an exciting space to be in. So often venues are a bit dead; its great when they are fully utilized. We are looking forward to the show tomorrow, especially since it has been several months since we last did it.

We are here as part of the Exeter Festival, which is supported by the Exeter City Council. Here is a banner hung in the street for the festival:


I always think these big public signs are interesting because it makes me feel like we are 'real' somehow. Might sound strange, but I need these little reminders that there is someone somewhere doing things to get people to come see our shows. Nice when a festival or venue really puts some effort into it.

To get ready for the show, we had some healthy grub at the Phoenix after checking out the space. Here are Wes and Nicki enjoying the deliciousness of the pomme de terre (they are going to be really pleased that these ended up on the blog):



Gillian is still recovering from a being a bit under the weather, but she'll be in top form tomorrow, I'm sure. Oh and that Corona isn't mine. No sir. :)

More later.

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!

Fantastic Night in Manchester

We had a great night in Manchester on Thursday, performing Virtuoso (working title) to a full house of friendly faces at Greenroom. The tour has been great in general, but there was something very homey about performing at Greenroom. I think it has something to do with the good vibe in their bar after the show. There is nothing worse than being on tour at a venue that has no after show energy. Its a bit disheartening to exit the theatre and see everyone trailing away to other pastures. So - good job Greenroom!

Here are a few photos of the space as we were warming up and from the run of the show too.






It is amazing how much the lighting affects the way the space looks, isn't it? The top two photos look so much less inviting (and polished) when compared with the bottom two, I think.

We had to squeeze the space a bit to make the show fit. I think we trimmed about 3 feet off of the depth. Virtuoso (working title) is very technically precise, so the distance between each scenic item is measured to exact millimeters. We even have the spike tape for camera positions measured precisely. Em (our stage manager) made this intense series of drawings for the piece that not only shows how far apart each scenic item is, but also has a scene-by-scene breakdown of each camera position, complete with photographs of each camera shot. Its a lovely document. When we realize Greenroom did not have as much depth as we thought, Em and David (production manager) figured out the math of how to cut down the size of the space, and it looked fabulous. We raised the televisions off the ground a bit as well to help with sight-lines in the back rows. Still slightly obstructed, but it was the best we could do, really. Em and Daivd are two very sharp worker-bees. Nice to feel like everything will just appear as designed and planned on the road.

We have also found out that some new tour dates will be added for Virtuoso (working title) soon. We'll be in Bristol in February 2010 and in Crewe in October. We'll post the full details on our touring page once everything is firmed up. Now we are just getting ready to head down to Colchester for the last gig of this short spring tour. Be sad to be done, but really need a break, so probably not a bad thing. It will give us time to get prepared for our summer school, which is shaping up nicely. There is still a bit of time to apply if you are thinking about it but have yet to send your app in. Get on it! Also been pleased to see some interesting posts over at our Apologies blog. Submissions always welcome.

Welcome to our new public blog

This is the first post of Proto-type's Lab blog. On it we'll share thoughts from our process of creating work and anything else that comes up that we think the world in general might be interested in.

To get things started, I thought I would put up two photographs that a photographer named Imran Ali took of us while we were working on Virtuoso (working title) at the Bluecoat earlier this year. He shot a few candid photos of the company before and after our work in progress.

This first one is the pre-show circle that we always do before a performance. I love it (despite the giant bald patch it shows off!) because I'm always in the circle and don't get to see it from the outside. It reminds me of baseball, actually - when I was a kid playing baseball I remind we would huddle like this before every game.


This photo is Wes after the show in our post-show discussion. He had only bleached his hair two days before, I think, so it looks very yellow in this photo. What is great about this image is how you can see the exhaustion (and exhilaration) in Wes. It proves how much work performing the show actually is.


I will post more soon, and so will the rest of us. For now, this is a pictorial beginning.