I'm writing a 'preparing for Edinburgh' blog for the British Council - over here. For completeness I'm posting them here, too, after a short delay, as that seems to be etiquette.
May 2013
Postcard from Poland
We’ve just returned from the
Teatromania festival in Bytom, Poland, where we presented What I Heard About the World. This is the start of a short
international tour – Paris and Rio de Janeiro next month – which serves as a
very nice precursor to taking the show back to Edinburgh for the British
Council’s Showcase at the end of August.
This weekend in Bytom was the
first time we had performed the show since last August in fact, which we split
between the Edinburgh Fringe and the Stage at Helsinki festival. In Edinburgh
last year we were fortunate enough to be part of the fantastic programme of
work at Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, which was simply the best Edinburgh
experience we’ve ever had. So I’m really pleased that Northern Stage have been
able to accommodate us again as a late addition to the St Stephen’s programme,
because we know that the space is right for the show, and the venue ethos one
that completely values the work.
However, because we are a
late addition, we’re taking a very early slot in the day – 9.30am. In any other
city or any other festival this would be unheard of. But the idea of Theatre
for Breakfast has been growing in Edinburgh over the last few years, we have a
swathe of great reviews from last year’s festival and we’ll be giving out free
pastries to the audience. So we’ll be aiming to entice international promoters
away from the Showcase breakfasts for one morning of the week, and to lure audiences
out of their accommodation that little bit earlier in the day. It is something
of a gamble, but most of us will be in Edinburgh anyway, and being part of the
Showcase is too good an opportunity to miss.
In fact, our Edinburgh
schedule is remarkably busy, but we’re asked to keep the details of it under wraps
until the Fringe Brochure is published and our venues announce their programmes
at the end of May. So more on that next time, perhaps.
At Teatromania we were
presenting the UK version of the show. What
I Heard About the World is a co-production with mala voadora, a company
based in Lisbon, and our partners Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos. We
tour two versions of the show. The UK version is performed in English, with a
couple of minutes of French (surtitled) and of Portuguese (not surtitled). In
the Portuguese version Chris Thorpe and I perform in English (surtitled) and
Jorge Andrade performs in his native Portuguese and also English. One
particular story is performed by Jorge in Portuguese rather than by Chris in
English…
Consequently, we have two
versions of the set - a strange hybrid of living space and locker room - that
we can tour from Sheffield or from Lisbon. This appeals for practical reasons,
but also because a theme of the show is one of authenticity – and the use of
replicas or substitutes. So, rather than rely on freight, we can drive the set
ourselves to a good area of Europe.
However, following our
successful experience with Presumption
(presented in the Showcase in 2007) of having sets re-made for us by festivals
in Moscow and Yerevan, we have embraced the same attitude for this show. If a
venue is too far for us to drive to, they have been sourcing a replica, or
perhaps more accurately, a substitute set for us.
My favourite challenge in
this is that venues are invited to find for us an “exotic animal”. In the
Portuguese set, the animal is a real, stuffed giraffe (well, the head and neck,
anyway), acquired, as I understand it, from a night club in Lisbon. The UK
version features a two taxidermy sculptures by artist and film maker Susannah
Gent, a stag’s head and rampant fox. In Helsinki they provided us with a gothic
looking owl to perch on set. And in Bytom they set the bar pretty high for
future set & props gatherers, as we turned up to find a full-size replica
zebra. Where did they get it? “It’s our office zebra,” they explained.
No comments:
Post a Comment