Total Theatre Award

We have been nominated for a Total Theatre Award. Only about 15 shows from the whole of the fringe have been nominated and we are obviously delighted to have made it onto the list. To be recognised by Total Theatre Magazine seems to us a real achievement as it has been judged by people with a great deal of experience actually in the industry, moreover for 21:13, which has been pretty hastily put together and is still very much a work in progress, to get nominated is a real compliment. We have been nominated in the ‘Graduate Company’ category.

Reviews etc.

The reviews of the show have been really positive, both from the press

http://ed.thestage.co.uk/reviews/297

http://www.broadwaybaby.com/edinburgh/fringe/reviews/10

http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview.php?showName=21:13

and more importantly individuals who have come and spoken to us afterwards. Both Valentina and I have been really touched by the personal responses people have had about the show. In fact, this is the first year I’ve ever enjoyed flyering on the Mile because of the amount of people who have come up and spoken to me about the show.

Up at the Fringe

We have now started at the Edinburgh Fringe and the audiences have already started to build. There’s no doubt that the major reason for this is word of mouth running through C Venues and we’d like to thank all the hard working volunteers at C who are supporting the show. Some pictures of the show are viewable at

http://picasaweb.google.com/Quixoticfruit/2113?authkey=7qUj4WjL2PA&pli=1&gsessionid=AOty7U_P2-15o9c1L9reoQ

And below:

Thanks

Dancing Brick would like to thank all the people who worked so hard on 21:13. Most importantly, Jane Gauntlett, Andrew Sommerville, Chloe Courtney and Natalie Jones.

The Sound and Soundtrack

We knew from an early stage that we wanted sound to play a really important part in the show, not just as a filler between scenes but to take on a space of its own and to really give the audience a taste of how richly diverse the sound of different languages can be. For the initial material we recorded our friends at school, and compiled a library of languages including Spanish, French, Persian, Ivrit, Portuguese, German, Finnish, Mandarin and Russian. Our composer, Ross Blake used these recordings (and many more of his own) to concoct the different sounds we used in the show itself. Ross created the soundtrack completely from samples of the human voice, the idea being that everything heard in the show was, in some form, a human attempt at communication.

If you liked the soundtrack and want to know more about Ross’ work visit
http://www.myspace.com/buttonhead
or email him directly at polojunky2000@gmail.com

Rehearsals for 21:13

After the end of term in Paris Valentina and I threw ourselves into rehearsals for 21:13 almost without a pause. Because we had been thinking about the subject for such a long time and knew that we had our first performance in little over a month we made quick progress, writing and rehearsing the whole show in about four weeks. We started with images, both ones that we imagined and ones we found; in magazines, museums, on the street. It was from these images that we started to construct the feel of the play and from there we improvised ways of transposing the images onto the stage. At no point did either of us say ‘here we need a mask piece’ or ‘here we need something with geste’ but we found that each idea quite quickly proposed a style of transposition. We didn’t have a director or an ‘exterior eye’ on 21:13 but found that we could tell quite quickly (and usually agreed) on what was working, or could work, and what wasn’t. Importantly, both of us trusted the other with ideas and images, and had confidence that, with time, all of the separate components would come together to make something richer precisely because we didn’t always stop to think about how, for instance, swimming linked to two mobiles moving in space.

Animation Trailer for C Venues Press Launch