Sunday 28 February 2010

True Stories of Fake Things

We’re currently researching our next show, What I Heard About The World, and we’re looking for stories.

We’re looking for true stories of fake things. Not hoaxes, or cons, or ghost stories. Fakes or replicas used in everyday life, instead of the real thing. We’re interested in modern-day soldiers playing Medal of Honour when they are off duty. Plastic ducks and other toy animals being used to map ocean currents as they traverse the globe. Wallpaper with lifesize pictures of your friends on, TV broadcasts of open fires, cardboard cut-outs of soldier-dads who are away at war, a spherical planet (mis-)represented on a flat page, chocolate flavour coating, CDs that make it sound like someone else is home doing house work. The inauthentic used in the everyday. Facsimiles, replicas, stand-ins and simulacra.

If you have any stories, anecdotes, thoughts, facts, pointers… any ideas, in fact, that the theme triggers for you, we would love to hear them.

What I Heard About The World is a collaboration with the excellent Portuguese company mala voadora, and a co-production with Sheffield Theatres, Teatro Maria Matos and the Pazz Performing Arts Festival. We're also excited to be working with Worldmapper.org on the project, too.

We’ll be working together for three weeks in April, and showing a work in progress at Pazz and then at Sheffield Theatre’s Forge Festival in May. Then more work over the summer and into the autumn, before opening in Sheffield in October, and touring to Lisboa in November.

If you’d like to help us out with a contribution, please comment here, or email us at: alex [at] thirdangel.co.uk. Thank you!

5 comments:

Jaye-bird said...

Not a story so much as an anecdote. There's a pretty tight group of us who met at University and all ended up in London for a while. I'm unclear as to exactly when it started but I'm pretty sure it was started by Alex when she moved away to Cornwall. There began a tradition of her sending a stand-in for herself which was usually a photo attached to a stick or straw. So Alex or Niki (or whoever was absent) on a stick became a regular attender at birthdays and new years, sitting in a glass or propped up on a menu 'enjoying' the festivities with us.

Simão said...

The object here is a simple mirror.

When my friend João was a young boy, he was so lonely as an orphan that he used to take a mirror into bed when he went to sleep.

Every night, before turning the light off he took out the mirror from under the sheets, looked straight at it and whispered:

"Good night, João".

And João always replied,

"Good night, João."

Ian Eiloart said...

Here's a pointer. A rubber duck race to raise funds for the RNLI: http://www.greatbritishduckrace.co.uk/

Jaye-bird said...

Having just said "wave machines at the swimming pool" I remember being very scared of them as a kid because I couldn't swim til I was 9. My mum has never learned to swim and is scared of deep water so when I was very young the pair of us would sit and cower in the shallow end during the wave machine - it was fairly humiliating.

Admin said...

Curiously enough, someone posted nearly the same question (and got lots of answers): http://ask.metafilter.com/149601/Things-that-are-always-fake