Edfringe Diary 2: facing the audience

Postcards from the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, Week 1…

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I'm sitting in The Royal Dick pub in Summerhall, typing this with a bandaged finger injury that wouldn't look out of place in The Beano. The perils of cutting out quotes to put on your posters and fliers.

But that tells you where we are in our Fringe adventure. We have quotes to put on posters and flyers. Printed out on sheets of A4, formatted in such a way as to maximise use of paper and aesthetic clarity. Cut out with a scalpel craft knife (rather than scissors) for precision and neatness. Spattered with blood because I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing and almost sliced the end of my finger off. Effective marketing. (Thanks to John for the first aid).

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So I guess the obvious question is how did it go? How did we do with our first-ever-public-performance-of-this-version-also-being-press-night?

I think we did well. The show was ready to go in front of an audience and begin that stage of its development. The get-in had gone to schedule (shout out to the Northern Stage staff and technical & front-of-house volunteers – they are great). Jerry and Stacey did brilliantly, buoyed by a supportive audience. They got themselves in to trouble a couple of times, got themselves out of it without the audience noticing (I think), they found new stuff and we immediately learned some stuff about the show.

In terms of that first audience, some of whom were going to be writing about the show, it was a shame that our programmes were still enroute from the printers. It feels to me like an important and useful thing to know about the show that it is/has been performed by different combinations of nationalities (UK and Portuguese at least), and that the two roles aren’t written as gendered. The programme implicitly tells you that:

Some of the reviews are great, some are good and only one that I’ve seen has been really grumpy about the show, but gave it the same number of stars as some reviews that seemed to quite like it. Ah, star ratings. I’ve succumbed a little here. Much as I hate them, at the Edinburgh Fringe it is almost impossible to ignore them when it comes to selling your show. If you only put good quotes on a flyer, as we've tried to do in the past, it looks at a glance (I think) like you haven’t got anything better than a three star review. ‘Better than a three star review.’ I hate that it makes me think like that. But in such a competitive marketplace, you need better than a three star review. So I’ve relented and we’ve started putting star ratings on the flyers and posters – but always with a quote. Because – here’s the stupidly obvious thing again – we want people to come and see the show, and think about it, and talk about it.

All of those good reviews, alongside the medium ones and the grumpy one, all come from that Press Preview. So yes, I think that was worth it, and that gamble paid off. (See previous post to see what I'm going on about here.)

And… my two favourite quotes from the reviews that I have read (I’ve not read all of them), aren’t really ones that would work on a flyer:

"What would you do if you and a member of the opposite sex were tasked with starting the human race all over again? That is, er, possibly the scenario posited by Third Angel and Mala Voadora’s ‘The Paradise Project’..." Time Out

It's the 'possibly', of course, that I like in that one. And this:

"It is interesting to note that conception and design of The Paradise Project is credited jointly to both collaborating companies and the two performers, implying that the creation of the design was an intrinsic part of the devising of the piece. This is how it feels – words, physical action, and visual imagery seamlessly interweaved. Both actors are totally at home in their stage environment, a delight to watch and listen to – you really do forget they are acting a lot of the time, which is perhaps the highest compliment." Total Theatre

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And people are coming to see it – I think more than saw either the first week of The Lad Lit Project or What I Heard About the World – and, from what they tell us, thinking about it, and talking about it.

There have been some very nice tweets, too:

@thirdangeluk Can't stop considering and debating the questions raised by #paradiseproject. A truthful, human exploration of moral codes.

— Anna Dominian (@AnnaDominian) August 16, 2015

But most of my favourite feedback has come from conversations. Like all of our work, (all work?), it’s a bit of an audience divider. Some people find it a little distant, a bit hard work even. It really struck me this year that the standard Edinburgh Fringe show length of an hour (rather than the 70 minutes I think of as full length) is partly to get a cheaper venue slot, but it’s partly in deference to the fact that audience members will often be seeing your show as one of four, five or six per day. It's partly just about how long you can ask people to sit and watch and listen.

We’ve carried on working on the show a little each day, trimming, tweaking, and playing with the mood of it. And whilst it still doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, we have moved the heart of it closer to the surface. Jerry and Stacey have been finding those understated moments of kindness and awareness that tell us a bit more about how these two people are 'in this together'.

A thing I’ve found myself saying a lot this week is, “Of all the work we’ve made, The Paradise Project the most like a play.” To which I usually add, “Because it’s a play.” The biggest, most sprawling devising process we’ve been part of has produced the most clearly written show. Person A and Person B mainly talk to each other. They don’t face out much. They only occasionally make eye contact with the audience.

Talking to Jerry about this a few days in we noted that all of the work we’d seen so far, and this has remained true for me all week, all of the work we’d seen, turns right out to face and embrace the audience, and say "I/we are telling you this story". And this is a territory that we’re very comfortable in, that we’ve played in for a long time. We like work that acknowledges the audience.

But with The Paradise Project, whilst the show itself acknowledges the audience, the performers/characters don't do it as much in our other work. Because to turn out to face the people in the room makes much less sense to us in this instance, less sense in their world. They’re working this out alone. Although we see they are being at least observed or recorded some of the time. We’ve talked a lot about this in the process of making the show, and other members of the team think differently, but for me, the show works when it feels like someone might be listening, someone could be hearing them, but they never know if/when that is the case. There’s optimism in that.

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Now I’m in the car heading back to Sheffield, after a flying visit over to the west coast. Leaving Jerry and Stacey to build Paradise alone for a bit. Hilary and I are tagging Admin and Production Trainee Liz in as we go, and she’ll help them out for a week, and then Rachael gets to Edinburgh on the 24^th. I’ll be back to see the last two performances. It's always weird leaving a show, and I don't think I'll ever get used to it. During show time, there’s a strange awareness that it’s going on, somewhere else.

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What else? A fire alarm went off in the last few minutes of the show on Friday, and we had to evacuate the audience. We put the last scene on this blog for them. Five times as many people have clicked onto that post as were in the audience.

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I was really pleased to have been part of Here Is The News From Over There, this year’s Northern Stage show, building on the model of The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project that I was part of two years ago. It feels like a really important piece – one that is funny, chaotic, engaging and intelligent all at the same time. It’s different every night. I made a piece with Maya Zbib from Zoukak Theatre, who I’ve written about before, here. There’s a Storify of our tale, never take a skull home, here.

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The whole Northern Stage programme is great. Sadly I didn’t get to see Key Change, but the reviews and conversation around that piece are brilliant. I was really pleased to have been a small part of team making Daniel Bye’s Going Viral, which is doing really well. I saw an early performance of Zendeh’s Cinema which blended spoken and signed performance beautifully, in a very upsetting story. Five Feet In Front feels like a coming of age show for The Letter Room – a vengeance fuelled hoedown. And Tamasha’s My Name Is… is a masterclass in understated emotional and intelligent stage performance and verbatim theatre.

I had a brilliant day in Summerhall's Anatomy Lecture Theatre watching The Gospel According To Jesus Queen of Heaven by Jo Clifford (the most beautiful and caring start to the day, whilst also being quietly and strongly subversive), Portraits in Motion (which I’ve been wanting to see since standing listening to Volker Gerling's applause go on and on after a performance in Germany – whilst I was waiting to go on to the adjacent stage to perform The Lad Lit Project – "follow that"; it is just brilliant work and I was not disappointed) followed by Shit Theatre’s Women’s Hour which is the smartest, funniest and most entertaining hour of rage I’ve seen in a long time. I highly recommend that as a morning/afternoon combo. (Then come and see us next door.)

Elsewhere in Summerhall Ellie Dubois' Ringside is an exquisite and unsettling one-to-one performance with a trapeze artist. It's booked up, but well worth trying to get a return. Beautiful. Flanagan Collective’s Fable is a lovely hour’s story telling (which unexpectedly bounces off my ongoing obsession with the Voyager space probes). We saw the preview and it’s probably properly magical by now. Barrel Organ are one of the talks of the Fringe with Some People Talk About Violence - they are really striking performers, and for me, more than the form, the way the the theme of the title is explored is what speaks of their maturity and potential.

It seems pointless to recommend Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn's Fake It 'Til You Make It as it is properly sold out, but if you can get a return then go, it's emotional and important work.

Our kids (6 and 9) really enjoyed The Tap Dancing Mermaid (sit near the front if you can) at Summerhall, The Hogswallops at Circus Hub (we saw a slightly shaky first show, but the zimmer-frame trapeze scene is remarkable), the Trash Test Dummies (also Circus Hub and great fun) and both Tianna The Traveller and Basketball Man performing outside on The Mound.

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And now I'm back in the office in Sheffield, putting the links into this blogpost and catching up with all the non-Edinburgh Fringe jobs. Nice, but weird.

Edfringe Diary 1: Thoughts on the train

Here we are, on the train, on the way to Edinburgh, one of my favourite cities. I’m looking forward to it.

We’re also on the way, specifically, to the Edinburgh Fringe, and I wanted to write something about that. But Facebook and Twitter are full of people making the same journey, on trains, on coaches, in vans and cars, so I don’t know how much I have to add.

It’s fair to say I have a love/hate relationship, (or at least a love/dislike relationship) with the Fringe. This won’t be an unfamiliar mix of feelings to many people, and the reasoning behind it is articulated more fully in this piece I originally wrote for the British Council back in 2001. And actually, in terms of articulating the mixed feelings I have about the Fringe, as well as providing some really useful advice, I can’t do any better than this post by Bryony Kimmings.

But of course each Edinburgh Fringe is different, and the task we set ourselves is different, too. This year we’re there for the whole of the fringe, and are (kind of) opening a new piece. We’ve done the ‘whole festival’ once before, with The Lad Lit Project in 2005, and we opened Cape Wrath at St Stephens in 2013 – but not right at the start of the season.

The Paradise Project is on as part of Northern Stage’s programme at Summerhall. We’ve worked with Northern Stage in Edinburgh twice before, and this year the collaboration with Summerhall seems to be a really exciting one – Summerhall being one of the homes (along with Forest Fringe) of 'our sort of work'. This feels like a good place for us. And the Northern Stage team allay many of the concerns discussed earlier.

The Paradise Project, as I’ve noted before, has a shifting team of collaborators that is reconfigured, it seems, each week we’re working on it. A truly collective process. A process that started as a two-week sprawling conversation that included sociologists, a theologian, a mathematician, an art historian… and progressed through a devising and group writing process that has brought us to clear, focussed situation: two people whose job it is, each day, to figure out a new set of rules by which to live (for themselves, and by implication of the rest of humanity), and to catalogue our (humanity’s) previous attempts at building utopia – or just trying to make the world a bit better.

And although the show is ‘made’, we’ve been reworking for Edinburgh, and have a new cast combination – Jerry Killick (who has performed the show before) and Stacey Sampson (who hasn’t). I’m really excited to share the work with an audience, and watch Jerry and Stacey learn more about the show. We’ve got a bit of work to do over the next couple of days, but we’re on schedule. This new version is snappier, a bit more upbeat perhaps, more optimistic; certainly it’s a bit clearer about what it’s “about”.

You carry on learning about a show for as long as you perform it. But it’s fair to say that you learn the most in the early performances. Theatre makers and performers talk about a show “finding its feet” or “getting up to speed.” What we mean (or I mean, at least), is we’re finding the rhythms a show has when it has an audience. We’re understanding our ‘journey’ through the show (I know, I know). We’re learning how to best communicate what the show is about, for us. For some of us this is an intellectual process, for others it is quite instinctive. Either way, we’re learning on the job.

However, because it’s the Fringe, the curveball we have thrown ourselves is that we have agreed to a press preview on Thursday 6^th. That’s the first performance of this version of the show. Why would we do that? The idea of having just one performance where we specifically invite the press is strange enough (let’s talk about that another time). To do it on the first performance is even stranger.

But. Here’s the thing. We want people to see the work. And at the Edinburgh Fringe, amidst the thousands of other shows, we need people to be talking about the work, so other people might decide they’re interested, and come to see us, come and see what they think. And an early preview is a great opportunity to get that ball rolling, to start that conversation.

Part of me believes that if a show is ready to be put in front of an audience, then it’s ready for people to write about it. But I also know that this will be the start of a new chapter for the show, so of course that is a little nerve-wracking. Third Angel turns 20 years old in October, but the nerves I feel with each new show don’t get any less. Because the show we’re opening is what’s on our minds at the moment. This is what’s bothering us. This is what we want to talk about, and how we want to talk about it. It’s understandable, I guess, to be nervous in advance of what you think or hope will be an important conversation.

And this is the love part of that relationship. Not only is it a beautiful city, full of great architecture, cafes and bars – and it’s in Scotland for heavens’ sake! - during the various festivals in August, Edinburgh is full of people – some of them great friends and brilliant artists - interested in theatre, in stories, in performance. Interested in experiencing shows and talking about them. There’s nowhere, and nowhen, like it.

We’re passing Berwick upon Tweed. I can see the sea. I’m nervous. And excited.

The Paradise Project at the Edinburgh Fringe

Third Angel & mala voadora present

The Paradise Project

                                     /  Projecto Paraíso

8 – 30 August 2015 (not Weds 12, 19 or 26)

NORTHERN STAGE at SUMMERHALL

Book tickets here!

Every day they come in and try again.

The Paradise Project is a show rebuilt - slightly differently - each time it is presented. Of all the shows we’ve made, perhaps this is the one where the process, form and subject matter all seem to intertwine the most.

Two companies create a show about two people whose job, it appears, is to come up with a better way for people to live together. A better way to be people, together. Some days they make progress. Some days they make new discoveries. Some days it all falls apart. But every day, or so it seems, they come in and try again.

   photo: José Carlos Duarte

I say ‘so it seems’, because it feels (to me, at least) like we discovered these two people doing this job, and, as a collective of two companies, we then began to figure out the rules of their task. Each time we revisit them, it feels like we learn something new about them, and their endless work. As we constructed their environment in Warwick Arts Centre back in February, sound designer Ivan Mack and I began to wonder if there weren’t actually many of these rooms, with many pairs of humans, trying to figure out a new set of rules to live by.

Each time we build a new Paradise Project (so far, anyway), it is a different combination of performers. Although there isn’t a defined female role or a male role, so far there has always been a man and a woman.

 photo: José Carlos Duarte

For our Edinburgh construction, I am delighted to announce that The Paradise Project will be constructed by Stacey Sampson and Jerry Killick. We have worked with Jerry a number of times over the years, going back to Where From Here in 2000, and he joined the Project at Warwick Arts Centre in February. Stacey we are currently working with on the next incarnation of Labour Intensive. We’re really excited to see how they do this job together.

You can read more about the making of The Paradise Project on this blog, and in an article in Contemporary Theatre Review. 

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Members of The Paradise Project team have other shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, too, all of which are well worth checking out:

• Chris Thorpe is performing in Unlimited Theatre’s Am I Dead Yet? and his solo piece Confirmation, made with Rachel Chavkin.
• Lucy Ellinson is in The Christians, part of her on-going collaboration with The Gate Theatre.
• Jim Harrison will also be looking after Forced Entertainment at Summerhall.
• Mark Maughan is Associate Director of Made In China's new show, Tonight I'm Gonna Be The New Me.
• And I am a mentor on Daniel Bye’s new show, Going Viral.
• Chris, Dan and I (and many others) are also guest contributors to Here Is The News From Over There, this year's Border Ballad-style piece from Northern Stage. 

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The Paradise Project

8-30 August 2015

Northern Stage at Summerhall

Edinburgh Fringe

Performed by

Jerry Killick & Stacey Sampson

                       

Conceived, devised and written by

Jorge Andrade, José Capela, Alexander Kelly, Chris Thorpe and Rachael Walton

In collaboration with

Tânia Alves, David Cabecinha, Fernando Villas-Boas and Lucy Ellinson

With creative input from

Hannah Butterfield and Mark Maughan

Scenography

José Capela with image editing by António MV and Tiago Pinhal Costa

Lighting Design

Eduardo Abdála
 and James Harrison

Sound Design

Ivan Mack, Rui Lima & Sérgio Martins

Technical Manager

Craig Davidson

Technical Intern

Michael Gooch

Video Documentation

Jorge Jácome

Publicity Design

du.st

Production & Management:

Manuel Poças, Joana Santos and Vânia Rodrigues (mala voadora)

Dep Arts and Hilary Foster (Third Angel)

With special thanks to:

Renske Doorenspleet, Steve Fuller, Peter Marshall, Maria Do Mar Pereira, Ian Stewart, Nathaniel Tkacz and Emilie Whitaker; Daniel Pinheiro; Daniel Worm d'Assumpção; Prado; Matt Burman, Paul Warwick, Ed Collier; Sheffield Theatres; all of the staff at Teatro Maria Matos and Warwick Arts Centre.

A co-production with Warwick Arts Centre, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal and House on Fire, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union. Supported by Companhia Nacional de Bailado, Largo Residências and Caixas Baratas.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Sectretario de Estado da Cultura and DG Artes.

#theparadiseproject

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