ALICE snippet

Better late than never: a new year's snippet of ALICE filmed last summer at BAC, featuring some of Caroline's amazing music. Can't wait to start working with her again on Ko...

We're Jammin'....

We are thrilled to be performing next week at the Jam, an evening of work-in-progress performances at the Junction, in Cambridge.

Nest Wednesday, 17th of November, we'll be scratching some ideas of our latest work Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice. We are very excited about the piece, and have been doing some brainstorming about what the difference between memory (a remembered thing) and fiction is. We also found some exceptional old footage of our family's life, taken a very long time ago. In black and white and brilliant technicolor. All beautifully silent still, of course.

Set in Space, in an imagined future, on a planet of rice, the play follows two astronauts as they are attacked by a mysterious force. The piece is inspired by 1960s Science Fiction, using the genre and breaking out of it, to talk about memory and our fear of forgetting, it reflects our anxiety towards aging and a nostalgic longing for a generation that is currently disappearing.

For more information about the Jam event, please visit: http://junction.co.uk/artist/257

We hope you can make it and give us lots of useful feedback!!

'...Ko' concerns

Today we had a meeting about the development process of our most recent project "Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice". Originally conceived during a SITE Residency at Tobacco Factory and Theatre Bristol this summer, the piece wants to tackle the themes of ageing, memory (and in particular memory loss) and identity. The piece is set in outer space, in a distant future, on an austere planet of rice, and we follow two characters, as they discover what the mysterious planet beholds.

In the last month, however, we've found many other companies and projects dealing with these themes,(in very, very similar ways!) and are struggling to work out how to reconcile our belief in our authenticity with the inevitable likeness to these other works. After all, we all know the fear of the artist, the utter frustration at, and ultimate need of, Comparison (to quote Taylor Mac!).

How to know what to do with an original idea, after you've seen it perfectly executed by someone else? Remarkably Fevered Sleep's On Ageing (http://www.feveredsleep.co.uk/current-projects/on-ageing/) at the Young Vic, which we thought was an extraordinary, and beautifully formed, contemplative piece on the subject. The use of mics, the simplicity in design, the delicate treatment of transcript and/ as text, the gaps between speaker, text and memory, the use of objects (accumulation on stage), object in a jar, are all elements present in the material we've already created for Ko.

Similarly Unlimited Theatre's latest piece "Mission to Mars" a co-production with Polka Theatre (http://www.unlimited.org.uk/shows/mars.php) is set - obviously - in space, and seems to be inspired, even indirectly by classic Science Fiction stories. Not to mention Stan's Cafe's touching and evocative use of rice by the tonne, in their durational piece http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/ofallthepeople/.

Can we, in all seriousness, present our story of two spacemen (surrounded by bucket-fulls of rice, uncovering the objects of memory-past, whilst speaking transcripts of interviews through microphones around the stage), to a knowing audience without them reading 'pastiche' - or indeed plagiarism ! - in our every move?

Where can we take our material now? How can we move forward knowing that what we've got has just been tried and tested, successfully, by others? How can we re-invent it, so that when people see the finished product they're struck by its originality?

...

for more thoughts on this see Richard Dedomenici's clever and witty piece titled 'Plagiarismo' (http://dedomenicitemporarywebsite.blogspot.com/)

Finding time for meetings whilst on tour...

Today we had a very successful summit meeting, during which plans for the next 10 months were broadly outlined. So expect 'Ko to develop further, with a scratch performance at The Junction on November 17th (http://www.junction.co.uk/), discussions for ALICE under way, plans for Heap and Pebble in the Spring and lots more!

In the meantime we're going to see On Ageing this Saturday. It's a Young Vic co-Production with Fevered Sleep, in association with our old favourites, FUEL!

(http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/on-ageing).

We're hoping it might serve as inspiration for Captain Ko - who knows?

Also looking forward to Black Watch at the Barbican and booking a trip to Paris for theatre festival in November (Peter Book's latest at the Bouffes du Nord is on the cards and Les Naufrages du Fol Espoir by Theatre du Soleil - not to be missed!).

Things are shaping up nicely!

Beginning of tour

Back on the road for the much awaited tour of 6.0: How Heap and Pebble took on the World and Won. The full list is here:

http://www.dancingbrick.net/upcoming.html

The show has changed quite a bit since its edinburgh incarnation, with a new ending and a satisfying growth to the show. We're really looking forward to showing it to lots of people over the coming months.

See you there!

Notes for work-in-progress showing of Ko

These are the notes we'll be giving out as a handout for the scratch of Ko tomorrow, which explains a bit what our process and thinking has been so far:

For this play, we set out to write something that grappled with the ideas of legacy, posterity and memory: ‘what’, we wanted to ask ‘would survive of our grandparents- or our memories of them- a thousand years in the future?’

From the outset we have seen this play as a science fiction. There’s something about the space you find in… space that we hoped would allow us to get a real distance from things that are very close to us in order to perhaps see them with fresh, or impartial eyes.

Beyond that, we love the naivety and bravery of classic science fiction astronauts and wanted to tell a story of two of these characters coming up against an enemy even more dangerous than a mutant spider or an atomic blob… memory. Those Sci-Fi films, we think, have always been about beautifully simplifying our most profound fears, in order to overcome them (or at least pretend for a while that you can) - so why not place our anxiety of forgetting into a malevolent planet that our intrepid explorers can overcome too?

What you are going to see today is the end of our very first explorations of these ideas (and a few more besides), and what will, we hope, form the basis of the rest of the development of the play.

Captain Ko

Deep in rehearsals for (what's currently being called) 'Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice' at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol, as part of the SITE residency. SITE has been a fantastic way of getting started on the show, as we've been able to work with a dramaturge (Lu Kemp) and a designer (Katie Sykes) right from the beginning. We're doing a showing on friday at the brewery (not public though unfortunately) and hoping to pull together about 20 mins worth of ideas around the subjects of memory, amnesia, and deep space.