Editorial/Rant – Page 11

Posted on March 25, 2012May 28, 2012 by Hannah Nicklin — 16 Comments

Performance in the Pub 3

Home, exhausted, busy but brilliant week. Just in from a lovely finish to the recent Story Map tour (you can see everything I did over at whatiheardabouttheworld.co.uk), and just before that Thursday saw the second Performance in the Pub; a greater turnout, higher average donation, and more and more people getting to see amazing, brilliant, funny, affecting theatre in a pub in Leicester. This makes me HAPPY. Here’s some things people said/have said about it.

“back from a brilliant night watching @performancepub […] you’re a twat if you miss it” – @churlishmeg
“lovely fun” – @spunshon
“I’m not a theatre goer *at all* and it’d normally be something I find intimidating, but @performancepub proved…that there’s more to theatre than stuffy pantomime and shakespeare and it can be all kinds of entertaining & provocative =)” – @frivolousshrig
“heart meltingly beautiful stor[ies]” – @discoverbrevity
“try the latest Performance in the Pub at the Crumblin’ Cookie on Thursday night” Lyn Gardner The Guardian

The next one’s a little further away, this time, because I have this pesky PhD thing to deal with, but without further ado, here’s completely non-proofed information written by my tired brain on event THREE. Did I mention you get a sticker for donating? BECAUSE YOU DO.

We are delighted to announce the THIRD Performance in the Pub, happening at the Crumblin’ Cookie, Thursday the 24th of May, at 7pm.

TICKET LINK

Following the lovely and funny line up of Performance in the Pub event 2, we’re excited to be able to bring you a double bill of established and upcoming Leeds/Sheffield-based talent. We’ve put these shows together because they both look at words and stories; how and what we tell people about ourselves. The two performers are really lovely, and conversational, there may not be glowsticks this time, but there is the downing of a pint of beer.

The up-and-coming Jodean Sumner, of Trace Theatre, will be bringing us It Starts Like This. It Starts Like This plays with words. Words from your favourite song, words from that poem in that film with Hugh Grant in, maybe words that someone wrote for just you; how they can be perfect, how they can trip you up, how they can mean everything… and nothing.

Jodean Sumner is a solo artist as well as being part of Trace Theatre. A recent graduate of the Leeds Met ‘performance works’ MA, she makes site specific and interactive performance as well as performance that talks about being yourself – not playing other people. The work Trace makes is based on the actual conflicts of trying to make things together.

“Trace Theatre’s Once Upon a Something was all heart. It genuinely made me laugh out loud […] Beautiful.” – Vee Uye

And the internationally touring company Third Angel will present the one-man show The Lad Lit Project. The Lad Lit Project is about men/blokes/lads/mates/chaps/fellas and their stories; stories of mates, of wanting to belong, stories about girls, (mercifully brief) stories of sex, stories of love and of loss. Lad Lit is like chick lit, but, y’know, for lads. A fun, semi-autobiographical piece about how you might fit your life into a story.

Established in Sheffield in 1995, Third Angel makes work that talks openly and playfully to audiences. They make work inspired by films, comic books, novels, television, radio chat shows, music. Third Angel has shown work in theatres, galleries, cinemas, office blocks, car parks, swimming baths, on the internet and TV, in school halls, a damp cellar in Leicester and a public toilet in Bristol. The company has taken work to festivals and venues across the UK and mainland Europe, including Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, France and Spain.

“consistently innovative and challenging… extraordinary performances” – The Times

Doors will open at 7pm, and the shows will start at 7:30 prompt, the first show is 30 minutes long, and the second approximately 55, there’ll be a 20-25 minute break in between for people to get more drinks. Tickets are by donation, £5 helps us break even but as much or as little as you like. Donators get a STICKER. What more could you want?

TICKET LINK

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Hannah Nicklin — 3 Comments

Unfinished Thoughts: God/Head

Image shared via CC by Craig A Rodway

On Wednesday I went to see God/Head at the Ovalhouse Theatre. You’ve probably missed the boat unless you’re reading this before Saturday night, if you haven’t, do go see it. I should really curb my habit of only ever being able to fit a show into my life right at the end of the run. Anyway HERE FOLLOWS THOUGHTS. And probably spoilers. Consider yourself warned on both counts.

I’m pretty tired at the moment. Pretty exhausted actually. I have every day up until the 1st of September planned in detail, and only a very few of those say ‘day off’. I’m burrowing into the last 5 month dash of my PhD, training for a triathlon, trying to get people to go to the second Performance in the Pub event, writing an EP with my mate Simon, preparing for two consecutive weekends doing Story Map with the ace Third Angel, gallivanting off to Cambridge and London and Lincoln, trying to find a dress suitable for an observant Muslim wedding. That kind of thing.

This isn’t about me. But it is. Because I’m writing it. In fact to pretend that I don’t feel all of those things, and that they’re not effecting how I react to a show and what I write, is a bit like lying, really. The bad kind. The kind that doesn’t ask you to come with me on the crest of a lie, but that pushes your head under the surface and tells you to breathe in.

I’m pretty tired at the moment. I fell asleep briefly 4 times while trying to read today. I understand Chris when he stands on a stage and talks about a full mind, and yet still filling it with sound, and shopping lists, and having to do those tasks that keep you alive, and then how you’d feel if suddenly, suddenly something continuum-shattering happened to you; ‘I don’t have the time to feel this’.

That was one of my first thoughts when I had my heart broken last year; ‘I don’t have the time to feel this’. This isn’t about me. But it is. Because when Honour Bayes – Chris’ guest for the night I saw the show – when Honour told us about a time when she had lost control in public I remembered fainting in a station in Leicester. I remembered not recognising the new layout of Loughborough station, missing my stop, crying, sobbing, and fainting in Leicester station.

This isn’t about me. It’s about God/Head. Which is a fucking brilliant title, really. It’s a show about a true story. It’s a show that is true, both in content, and about the fact it is a story. It is a show that contained the incredible, brilliant, grounding presence of Honour, who looked out into the audience with her kohl rimmed eyes, and read lines like they were words on a page Chris had written for her. I never saw someone look so much like a boy you imagined in your head as Honour looking up from her page, and fixing us with her gaze that said ‘I’m reading this out because Chris asked me to’.

God/Head is about writing. It is about being God. About being inhabited by God. About words. About The Word. It is about a boy. It is about voice, and the rhythms that infect us, breath, and inarticulacy. Repetitions again and again remind you that you are hearing a story. The weight of God inside a writer. The opportunity when the boy gets to speak to his creator. Theatre as a form of incantation.

This isn’t about me. It’s about God/Head. In which Chris talks about the sound, the rhythms of religion. About dreams, too. And psychosis. Words fall away. Repetition dulls the story. Symbols rise to the surface. Hieroglyphs are performed away from us. And then we’re left with the rhythms, then the instructions, then the objects.

“In this world of states reduced to symbols, phenomena such as sound and light, for which linguistic representations are lacking, are coded and added to the world of objects. As contagion becomes transmission, matter is redefined in terms of the signal, and bodies turn into beams of light” – p.39 Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media, Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture.

Chris and Honour tell a story about falling apart. At least, that’s what I see.

It felt less ‘finished’, to me, than the work in progress of Keep Breathing I saw last year. I think it was meant to, or even if it wasn’t, it was right that it should do so. ‘This is an unfinished story’, it says, with equal emphasis on both words.