blog

Hanoi and other updates

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 06:53:41 +0100

I've got a bit behind... So here's my news in a nutshell!

A Place at the Table not only went ahead, to great critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences at Camden People's Theatre and Southwark Cathedral as planned, but also had a one-off performance at Amnesty International. We've now started working on a new piece about the Balkans, peace and nonviolence. it feels like a massive turning point for the company. Pics of the show in situ at the Cathedral to follow soon.

I've been working as tour producer for The Rememberers, which is all very exciting. We've taken it to Northern Stage, Newcastle, as part of the really brilliant Juice Festival for young people, and we're planning our next trip, which will be Southampton, along with some more venues for the Autumn. Also for Apples and Snakes I designed Simon Mole's beautiful community project / performance / communal dinner Indiana Jones and the Extra Chair at the Albany, Deptford, directed by Peader Kirk. No pics yet though, I'm afraid.

Then I've been in Hanoi, working as a designer with UK director Rob Hale, actor-director Phan Y Ly and actor Ho Ngoc Bao Khiem at the Black Box Theatre in Hanoi, part of Ly's Life Art organisation. We're creating a new devised show. Work-in-progress performances are this week. And, funding allowing, we'll be finishing the show in due course.

Next up for me is finishing the designs for Wounded, an off-site production for Birmingham Rep, directed by Steve Ball. More to follow...

Daedalus... Exciting news

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:14:38 +0100

We're now just on the edge of having secured sufficient funding to go ahead with the completion of A Place at the Table, which we will then show at Camden People's Theatre and Southwark Cathedral. All very exciting. There'll be loads more news no doubt, but you can help with the funding campaign here and keep up with all the news by subscribing to our mailing list.

As ever, www.daedalustheatre.co.uk for more info!

A second Slice!

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:08:55 +0100

Slice is now on display at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green (Tayyabs provided us a veritable feast for the opening event!) and in Lahore, at the National College of Arts. Documentation can be seen on our Facebook page. There are only a few more days left though, so whether you're in London or Lahore, you need to hurry!

SLICE

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:45:11 +0100

After what feels like an epic few weeks of wrestling with video formats, Skype meetings, late-night carpentry, programming in Isodora, and experimenting with Oyster card tech, the gallery version of SLICE is now at Idea Store Whitechapel, before going to Rich Mix in Bethnal Green and the National College of Arts in Lahore. The online version can be seen at http://www.lahore-london.com/ - it's just a few days old though, so if you spot any mistakes or glitches give us a shout!

Here's a quick description, plus the gallery info:

SLICE is an international project that presents twenty new artworks created following a dialogue between UK and Pakistani artists.

SLICE maps an imaginary line that cuts through buildings and across streets from Lahore to London, establishing a new dialogue with the social and physical fabric of two iconic, complex and historically linked cities. Focusing on the first mile at each end of the line, which runs from Lahore Central Station to Liverpool Street Station in London, a group of Lahore and London based artists were invited to make a work each, inspired by a location on the slice.

The Gallery (4th floor)
Idea Store Whitechapel
321 Whitechapel Road
London E1 1BU
United Kingdom
28th July - 29th September, 2011
Mon-Thu, 9am-9pm
Fri 9am-6pm
Sat 9am-5pm
Sun 11am-5pm

Later in the year Slice will be displayed at:

RIch Mix, Bethnal Green, 1st September - 22nd September, 2011 (Private View: Thursday 1st September 2011 6pm - 8pm)

Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, Lahore, 8th September - 22nd September (Private View: Monday 12th September 2011 5:30pm)

Lahore to London

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:29:11 +0100

After many months of fundraising, negotiating with venues and spending far too long being administrators rather than creatives, we have our artists and we're making work. Fatima Hussain, Simon Daw and myself are co-curating a project by Other Asias and Scale called Slice. You'll be hearing a lot more about it but basically we've commissioned 10 artists (or collectives) from Lahore and 10 from London to make work in response to the two ends of an imaginary straight line connecting the central station in Lahore with Liverpool Street Station in London. We had an amazing meeting on Saturday, in which the artists in both cities all met by Skype to plot and plan. It's all being documented on a blog which we shall reveal when we launch the final work. The result will be an interactive installation and a website. It'll be on show in Lahore and London. And that's all I'm saying for now.

Except that I'm excited.

Two news items

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:17:58 +0100

The 'Transformation and Revelation' exhibition has ended, though you can get the catalogue from the SBTD website as well as the National Theatre bookshop, online at Amazon and at various other leading bookshops. The last day of the exhibition included a symposium on site-specific theatre which quite a few of the exhibitors attended. So it turned into rather a lovely social event. My entry in the catalogue and exhibition is/was A Place at the Table.

Meanwhile, the project that I'm doing with Fatima Hussein of Other Asias and my co-director of Scale, is coming together quickly. We have our venues, our Arts Council money and almost all the artists, and are now just pursuing the last bit of budget. We're trying crowd-sourced funding through the WeFund website - please give us a few quid and spread the word!

Belarus Free Theatre

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:18:51 +0100

Belarus Free Theatre is a remarkable theatre company: they are both internationally renowned artists and a voice for the people of Belarus, a country suffering under the appalling regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, the man who said he wanted to "put an end to this stupid democracy”. Show your support for Belarus Free Theatre and Index on Censorship’s campaign by joining Tom Stoppard, Jude Law, The Young Vic Theatre, The Almeida Theatre and many other colleagues on Monday.

Join the march on Monday 28th March at 5pm, at The HQ of Grayling PR (who are currently attempting to lure investment into Belarus), Portland House, Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5BH. At 5.30pm we will walk to the Houses of Parliament where the Belarus Free Theatre and Jude Law will perform their play ‘Generation Jeans’ in front of MPs and 100 friends to ask the government for their help.

Facebook event here

Transformation and Revelation

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 02:48:01 +0100

Every four years the Society of British Theatre Designers organises a major national exhibition of its members' work, along with members of the Association of Lighting Designers. This time round it's in the new (so new it's still being built) building at the Royal Welsh Collage of Music and Drama in Cardiff. I have a small display there about the process of making A Place at the Table, which I choose as it answered the exhibition's theme of 'transformation and revelation' and a specific request for contributors to share their processes.

The exhibition opens to the public today, Fri 18th March. As always, part of the exhibition will be selected to go to the Prague Quadrennial, the world's leading international theatre design exhibition. And for a second year running a smaller version of the exhibition will also be at the V&A Museum in London.

Outreach (in general) and the Young Vic Schools Project (in particular)

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:19:09 +0100

With The Rememberers now taking a rest prior to touring, I'm full steam ahead with my next project: the Young Vic's Theatre Festival for Special Needs Schools. Directed by Abigail Graham and Rachel Bagshaw, it involves six special needs schools in the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark and is based around the idea of flying. It's a lovely project and is a good example of how, in the best outreach projects, you don't have to choose between participation and excellence. Hurrah to the Young Vic and their very brilliant team.

How practising artists can best engage with schools is very much at the front of my mind at the moment. I've also been planning schools workshops that will run as part of Slice. More on this soon but, in a nutshell, professional artists from Lahore and London will make work, using a variety of art forms, in response to sections of their respective cities. A school from each city will be making work in parallel. We also have started developing an outreach programme for Daedalus, and we're pencilled in to work with schools in September as part of an exciting programme of work centred on A Place at the Table. Again, info to follow as pencil becomes ink. One exciting titbit - if all goes well it should involve Southwark Cathedral.

For most of my career there was a clear divide between professional work and outreach work. The aim was either excellence or participation. I still think it's problematic when professional projects are forced to generate artificial ways of providing outreach. It's frustrating that excellence alone is sometimes not considered a sufficient 'tickbox' for funding. However... Current projects, especially the process of setting up Daedalus Theatre Company, have made me think a lot more about how working within the community can be incorporated into great professional work without compromise. In fact, it seems only natural that, when making work that uses documentary and verbatim material as we do, the generation of that material shouldn't just be a one-way harvesting of raw data. Once one has realised this it suddenly seems incredibly obvious. There has to be a more symbiotic relationship, at least for the kind of theatre we're making.

Our techniques, employing various art-forms to explore and express materials from such research as interviews, should be of as much benefit to the interviewee (for example) as the interviewer. Both can and should benefit from the search for understanding, for the articulation of difficult ideas, for empathy, for balancing conflicting narratives. Working with communities and making plays could all be part of one small, mutually-supportive ecosystem. This doesn't make much difference to how we work in the rehearsal room, as these techniques are already fairly well-developed. But it makes a world of difference to how we see ourselves as a company and how we interact with society.

Big ideas and all very exciting.

Meanwhile though, it's back to the Young Vic and a far more pressing problem. A man has fallen out of the sky. How do we teach him to fly again so he can return home?

The BBC

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:24:43 +0100

The Rememberers made it onto the local TV news yesterday. You can watch here on iPlayer - jump to 15 mins, 30 secs to see our segment. Some very nice reviews coming in too.