At the November Fletton Shuffle...

Little Bulb Theatre performed their latest piece, Help; Sasha Milavic Davies and Lucy Railton played and moved 2 pieces to cello, by Matt Shlomowitz; Luke and Nadia were The Behemoth; Remote Control got badly Burnt; Aitherios ran their Rat Race; Tiani Ghosh and Raph Shirley performed Stockbroker; Wig Industry went Back to Old Kent Road, and Theo Bard sang. 

Dancing Brick would like to thank all the artist who participated. She hopes to give you more Fletton Shuffles, more opportunities to show-off your latest work, and be inspired to do more. The first shuffle at the Museum in Docklands was a lovely evening of entertainment which perhaps started too late and ended too soon. But there will be more, so watch this space!

Thursday 'Late' at the Museum in Docklands

Dancing Brick are curating the first of our Fletton Shuffles, an evening of haphazard gatherings of sketchy theatre, theatrical sketches, music and comedy. The Fletton Shuffles will provide a platform for young theatre makers to try out new work in front of an informed, informal audience.

Each night will be loosely themed around something that's interesting us at that moment and seeing as how the first is at the Museum in Docklands, in the heart of the city, we're putting on work that deals with commerce, crashes and the city. It's on the 6th November from 6-9pm at the Museum in Docklands, part of the Museum of London, right by Canary Wharf DLR.

Blurb:

Dancing Brick and her Friends present an evening of theatrical upstarts crunching the problems of the city in the jaws of the Docklands. Enjoy some sketchy theatre, some theatrical sketches, some music and some comedy from the best of London’s new theatre makers.

21:13 in London

Good news for those of you who missed 21:13 in Edinburgh (or for those who saw 21:13 in Edinburgh but want even more): we will be performing the show for six nights in London, from 2nd - 7th December at the Camden People's Theatre. We'll put up more details soon. We're really looking forward to performing it again and hope that lots of you can make it down.

Website

Our website is now up and running. The design is temporary until the proper site is finalised but all the information about the company, our shows and what we're working on is up there. We will be updating the website regularly leaving the blog free for comments, notes and thoughts on what we've been up to. Have a look:

www.dancingbrick.net

Last Night's Scratch

Thanks to everyone who came yesterday and especially for any feedback given. It was really interesting to perform some ideas at such an early stage of development. If you do have any other thoughts on last night's Scratch please do email us or message the blog, we'd love to hear them.

We now plan to develop the piece further around the central ideas we tried out last night:

The idea is an image: two people in ice skates trying to perform a graceful number in a space but failing on account of the skates. Eventually we realise that, in fact, they are failing not because they are wearing skates but because the room has no ice. We like the ridiculousness of this image and the pathos that might come afterwards. We are interested by the immediacy of the performers’ need for ice and the inability of the room, the theatre, they are in to provide it at that moment. How can the ‘show go on’ and what might this say about the environment on a bigger scale and of people’s ability to adapt, to create, to continue?

We are interested in the double act – in sport, in performance, in life – and the dynamics of dependency inherent in them. A figure skater depends on their partner and both depend wholly on their environment. The image of the skaters without ice inspires themes of loss, of endings (global warming, melting ice), of grace and beauty, of enormous spaces and of triumph in the face of adversity.

We feel that theatre, as an art form of the immediate, is an ideal forum for debate about environmental change and are interested by the three-pronged approach our central moment inspires:

Nostalgia and the past: Ice dancing, the music, Torvill and Dean and the 80s, the kitch-ness, the changing of the sport over the years, reflection, the interviews and analysis of the past performances.

The Present moment: The struggle the skaters have to perform for the audience they have now, in the room they are in now, in the environmental circumstances they find themselves in now.

The future and how to adapt: How do the skaters cope? Do they cope?

Freshly Scratched at BAC

Dancing Brick’s newest show will be ‘Scratched’ at the BAC on the 25th September. It will be a ten-minute try out of the initial ideas we have for the show. At the moment those ideas amount to an image: two figure skaters in a room without ice.

http://www.bac.org.uk/whatson.php?view=current

Workshop

Thanks to everyone who came to our workshops at C Venues. For those that didn’t we gave two (due to popular demand an extra one was added) workshops entitled ‘Meaning from Movement’ which explored the themes in 21:13. The workshop highlights the partitions of the body and how the actor can use the isolation of these partitions as a starting point for developing characters and stories. We have since been asked by a number of Universities to come and run workshops.

If you’d like more information about the workshops or would like to inquire about the kinds of workshops Dancing Brick runs please write to thomaseccleshare@gmail.com

A taster of the workshop is here: