Tag: a conversation with my father

Posted on by — 3 Comments

A Conversation With My Father in 2013

ACW at Hatch earlier this year, image by David Wilson Clarke

So earlier on this Autumn I was really happy to announce that I’d got Grants for the Arts Support to match funding and support in kind from 3 venues which meant I was going to be able to develop A Conversation With My Father into a full length solo show. I promised further details, and here, just two weeks before it all starts (eek!) are those.

For those who might not remember, A Conversation With My Father is a solo piece born out of a conversation between my dad (an ex-policeman) and me (his protestor daughter). A conversation about fear, grey areas, them and us, duty, and standing up to protect what you think matters. I don’t intend it to be a piece about which side you should take, and it is not addressed at the police, or protestors specifically, rather it’s a conversation between a daughter and father, who is proud of her, which also happens to expose the problems with the idea of ‘sides’ in the first place. This is my first solo show, and will (fanfare…) be developed in the first three months of 2013 with the support of ARC Stockton, Sheffield Theatres, Embrace Arts, MYSTERY VENUE NUMBER FOUR, Third Angel and an Arts Council Grants for the Arts award. (Early work in progress showings have been seen at The Little Festival of Everything, Hatch: Scratch, Contact Theatre’s Flying Solo festival and The Junction’s Sampled Festival.)

The MYSTERY VENUE NUMBER FOUR is an exciting addition of new support – a fourth week at another venue in Yorkshire – which I’m just pinning down, and will announce as soon as possible.

The process will be four weeks in residence in each theatre (spread over three months) in a room with Alex Kelly of Third Angel as mentor and director, plus a visit or two from my dad, writing, improvising, making, learning, thinking and developing the material I’ve already got into something fuller. Full-length, in fact. At the end of each residency there will be an invited or open showing to the public, and in ARC and MYSTERY VENUE NUMBER FOUR options to come along to workshops with me. The aim is to get a finished-ish piece up and reading for Edinburgh and/or touring in  2013/14.

So in the meantime, I’m sure I’ll blog progress as and when it happens (though I won’t bother you about all the learning about spreadsheets and other professional development stuff that’s happening at the moment) and, if you’re interested in seeing one of the work in progress showings, let me know, and I’ll make sure you’re added to some kind of list or other. Here are the dates for those (times closer to the time, like)

January 11th 2013 – Embrace Arts, Leicester (very early work in progress)
February 8th 2013 – ARC Stockton (mid-process work in progress)
March 1st 2013 – The Crucible, Sheffield (invited showcase)
Mid-late March tbc 2013 – Yorkshire  (open showcase)

See you in 2013!

Posted on by — 7 Comments

The development of A Conversation with my Father

Post doesn’t really come better than this. Almost ecstatically delighted to tell you all that I’ve been offered a small Grant for the Arts to develop A Conversation With My Father into a full-length tourable solo show beginning in the first week of January next year. The work will be in partnership with 3 major theatres, and I will be mentored throughout the process by the brilliant performer, director, and all-round lovely person, Alex Kelly of Third Angel. I’ll also be receiving some professional development on tour-booking and the like from their general manager Hilary Foster. All of whom/which have provided me with extremely generous support. I’ll blog with full details on the venues, expected process (including work in progress showings) and timings as soon as I’ve been in full contact with everyone, but for now: here’s a little bit about ACW, in case you haven’t heard/don’t remember me mentioning it before. Words, then a rough bit of video – all images and sounds from or of me, and my dad.

A Conversation with My Father is a solo (true) storytelling piece born out of a conversation between an ex-policeman and his protestor daughter. A conversation about fear, grey areas, them and us, duty, and standing up to protect what you think matters. The piece is based around a recording of Hannah Nicklin talking to her father about policing and protest. It is not about which side you should take, it’s a conversation about the problem of ‘sides’ in the first place.

I want to tell you what it feels like to face a line of riot police. Ask you to listen to my dad speak about what it feels like to be that line. To tell you how proud my dad is of me for standing up for things. How thankful I am for the courage he gave me. I want to ask you to think about the stories the media tell about ‘them’ and ‘us’. 

It is a story about:

Symbols
Legitimacy
About the power of stories.
About finding better ones to tell ourselves about the world.
It’s also about me, and my father.

“[…] as topical in these days of police ‘kettling’ and undercover provocateurs as it might be timeless in its questioning of the basis of a functioning civic society.” – Wayne Burrows