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.

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.