Category: Update

General, usually informal updates as to what I’m up to.

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Performance in the Pub event 4!

ANNOUNCEMENT! Commence self plagiarism:

I am delighted to announce the FOURTH Performance in the Pub, happening at the Crumblin’ Cookie, Thursday the 14th of June, at 7pm.

TICKET LINK (plus location details and event calendar export options)

Following the lovely line up of Performance in the Pub event 3, I’m ECSTATIC to be able to bring Leicester a double bill from two of the most exciting performers currently performing words what they have written in the UK today. This stage version of ‘The Oh Fuck Moment’ (orginally performed around a desk) is based on an award winning 2011/12 tour. Also including some stories from the masterful Chris Thorpe, and Poetry from Hannah Jane Walker. Hannah and Chris are bound to be electrifying, hilarious and heart stopping. You don’t want to miss this. And nor do your mates. I wholeheartedly promise you everyone will find something to love in this one. Invite friends to the facebook event over here.

More on the show:
You just fucked up. Now what?

Sometimes, fuck ups are so massive there’s no way back. Poet Hannah Jane Walker and theatre maker Chris Thorpe examine the poetic guts of mistakes in a bundle of words and poetry. Fucking up is the truest, funniest, most terrifying moment you can experience. You will make a mistake, maybe you’ll learn from it.

You should probably see ‘The oh fuck moment’ if you’ve ever stood on a rake. Or accidentally made party cocktails with bleach. Or locked yourself in a shed.

Or been caught cheating. Or followed your inclination to experiment and ended up in A+E with a traumatic wanking injury. Or crashed a plane. Or been responsible for someone’s death. Or watched someone die.

Or set fire to yourself. Or fallen awkwardly. Or fallen awkwardly on a rake. Or fallen awkwardly while flying a plane. Or while wanking.

Or put your tongue in the wrong person’s mouth. Or put your tongue in what you thought was the right person’s mouth and it turned out to be the wrong person’s mouth. Or got really angry because someone told you a story about a horse.

’The Oh Fuck Moment drills a burr hole in each of us, releasing the build up of guilty pressure beneath the surface. By the end, you’ll wear your cock ups with pride: life’s little battle scars; badges of humanity. To err is indeed human, but Thorpe and Walker don’t put a foot wrong.’ – Matt Trueman

Doors will open at 7pm, and the shows will start at 7:30 prompt-ish, with the Oh Fuck Moment as finale. Tickets are by donation, £5 helps us break even but as much or as little as you like. Donators get a STICKER. Imagine that. Sometimes I even give people cake and cookies when I’ve been in a baking mood and find myself with more baked goods than one person should reasonably eat.

TICKET LINK

And follow @performancepub on twitter, or like it on facebook. Go on. Click.

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A Conversation With… post-Sampled

So here’s some of the reviews and tweets from this weekend’s premier of the current version of A Conversation With My Father. Sampled was ace, and I was performing amongst some pretty humblingly awesome company; I particularly loved see Laura Mugridge and Tom Adam’s Watery Journey… after it’s Performance in the Pub work in progress sharing, and also loved Molly Naylor’s My Robot Heart with music from the Middle Ones (totally in mind for a future PitP), Andy Field’s fizzling writing about the city in Zilla!, and Chris Thorpe doing his astonishing and gripping thing with There Has Possibly Been an Incident. Gutted to miss Melanie Wilson, Curious Directive, and Ross Sutherland due to having to do my own show. But on that – I was incredibly pleasantly surprised, and learnt a lot. Ridiculously low on time right now (hence no linking up the above, you can google, right?), but here’s some of the stuff I learnt/found interesting about performing ACW:

  • goodness me audiences are different
  • either that or I need to get more consistent in performance
  • apparently I can remember words, which is good.
  • sometimes the sort-of-funny things I write turn out to be VERY funny, and I need to structure the performance to balance that
  • This is an important story, that appears to be reasonably approachable
  • It makes people cry.
  • I don’t like making people cry. I want to find a way of (metaphorically) telling people ‘it’ll all be ok’ afterwards, but don’t think it will unless I also make people want to Do Something
  • I don’t think it’s up to me to tell people what that Something is.
  • people are really interested in all of the stuff I pack for a protest, and want it explaining. No one ever works out that the number for GBC LEGAL that I write on my arm (with the label) is for a lawyer, and why you do that.
  • I think there’s something in comparing the ritual of readying for protest for both protestor and police office
  • the sound recording I have of me and my dad is not very good at higher volumes. This is rubbish and I need to get someone who knows more than me to fix it.
  • I think I’ve found a ‘TED’ version of this story – performance lecture, but would like to explore how it possibly becomes more performance, or maybe more story.

As for the future of it, I’m hoping to get a producer or director on board somehow, and spend a week on it in a rehearsal room somewhen and somehow to work it up into a 50-60 minute solo show. And I might even have some photos to show you soon.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with some some self-congratulatory highlighting of positive reviews/tweets:

Continue reading A Conversation With… post-Sampled