Tag: Performance

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Under the Wire

a cake painted with food colour to look like the cover of deja entendu by Brand New

It’s a picture. Of a cake. That I made. For my friend Andy’s 21st Birthday.

In unrelated matters it’s the last day of the month and I have only filed 3 of my 4 monthly quota’d blog posts.

Chapter two went well, will post it up here, maybe in sections, maybe when it resembles something akin to the English language. The Umbrella Project looking more and more exciting, with an upcoming test of the message system which will play with some collected stories –  more on that soon, too. I’ll probably be talking about related matters at Ted X York in a few weeks (eep!)

Oh, and if you’re in the East Midlands this Thursday, I shall be chairing a really exciting event being run by Broadway Media Centre – as part of their Making Future Work project they’re hosting several ‘Future Work’ events. I shall be introducing the Making Future Narrative event at LPAC in Lincoln, expect 10 minutes of blistering hyperbole followed by a couple of hours of overly complex ‘you’re running out of time’ gestures. I want them to look like the baseball code they use as a comic vignette in American TV shows.

And finally, here’s a cryptic clue to something I’m going to be doing avec the insanely talented Steve Kilpatrick in London at the end of July. It may or may not involve 22 performers.

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Mezze

image of Tea is an Evening Meal

Image shared by Third Angel on Flickr via a CC license

Every time I come to Leeds I’m more and more impressed with what the venues and companies here are doing. This Thursday it was the turn of the Mezze festival, from the brilliant team at the Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre, hosted by and in the Northern Ballet building. A mini festival of participatory and intimate performance, Mezze was transforming and importing spaces in and around the venue, 3 of which I was able to get to see.

Running on Air was the first piece I saw/did, a piece from the comedian Laura Mugridge performed in her yellow WV T2 camper van, ‘Joni’. In a break from tradition I am going to try and describe a small performance I enjoyed without using the words ‘intimate’ and ‘gentle’; it was both these things, but they don’t do justice to the feeling that her storytelling imparts. Instead I would compare it very much to feeling of camping as a child. Quietly magical, slightly wild, with a feeling of ‘playing house’; made of plastic cups and tiny sinks and a tin opener that doesn’t quite work; everything a brightly coloured representative of real-life counterparts. Mugridge’s cried tears as Joni repeatedly breaks down fill glasses that become musical instruments, paper mâché hills stand in for the real thing, memories seep into the cracks and suddenly the driving wheel is a paper plate. A warmly told story about always being a bit lost, I left Running on Air feeling like Laura was one of my best friends. Which is a cheat-y way of saying ‘gentle’ and ‘intimate’.

Lecture Notes on a Death Scene was the second piece I took part in. A piece for one audience member by the emerging company Analogue, Lecture Notes was a more challenging piece to decipher (no bad thing). A story that traces it’s route like the tree branches of life it describes, occasionally letting you glimpse the paths that branch off, the versions of yourself that fall by the wayside. A piece about feeling lost, strangely visited, and bereaved by a version of yourself you maybe wish you were, played out using mirrors, angles, reflections and in a hoody that smelled like Boy. Continue reading Mezze