Heap and Pebble Spring Tour...2010!

What better season for a come back, for our ice-less ice dancers, than Spring! That's right, your favourite ice-couple are sharpening their blades and polishing their smiles for performances throughout the coming months. Starting with...

25th & 26th March, Ustinov @ Theatre Royal Bath
http://www.theatreroyal.org.uk/how-to-book/

10th - 13th May, May Fest Bristol
http://tobaccofactorytheatre.com/book/

18th & 19th May, Arches Glasgow
http://www.thearches.co.uk/

11th June, PULSE Fringe Festival, New Wolsey Theatre
Ipswich
http://www.pulsefringe.com/47/book-tickets/book-tickets.html

and finishing in Dorset for the Devizes Festival 2010!

We've re-worked the show, making it even better, with the help of our lovely dramaturge Lu Kemp ("If that' all there is" - Inspector Sands) and our fantastic New York set designer Adrian Jones (http://www.adrianwjones.com).
We are very excited about the new version, and are sure you'll love it too!!
H&P

A L I C E

Hold tight! Dancing brick are working on a new project....

Everyone remembers, in some way or another, waking up as a child at six o'clock in the morning, to go downstairs while everyone else is sleeping, to switch the TV on to watch their favourite cartoon and....Bam! There she was. The little girl playing naughts and crosses with her somewhat scary doll. Did she ever move? Was she trapped in the TV? How long had she been there ?

The project, so far, is called A L I C E and is a creative response to the demise of analogue technology, a nostalgic celebration of an era of expectation and potential, and a cheerful goodbye to childhood. We want to explore video, test cards, 1980s technology, betamax, cassettes, synths and 8-bit computer graphics, and much much more!

We spent two weeks last month workshopping initial ideas at BAC with a group of actors and are now looking to collaborate with a video artist / video technician and composer for the next stages of the process.

We are very please to announce that the project has been commissioned by BAC for a Scratch performance in May 2010.

So watch this space....!

Scratch performances 5th and 6th of May

Hanna and Ike at Shunt

Last week we had the honour of performing Hanna and Ike at the LAST EVER Shunt lounge at London Bridge. Hanna and Ike is the play we wrote for the Napoli Teatro Festival last summer. Although it was originally designed for a large open space, it worked out even better at Shunt than we'd hoped; although a bit of the scale of the piece was lost, I think confining the image more meant the comedy of the reveals came across clearer.

There's a video coming of the Nasreen Mohamedi performance. One of these films was filmed at a gallery in the afternoon, the other was filmed at a nightclub at midnight. See if you can guess which is which...

Nasreen Mohamedi

Dancing Brick have been invited to do an installation performance at the Milton Keynes Gallery this weekend, in response to the works by artist Nasreen Mohamedi in the exhibition

Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes
"Reflections on Indian Modernism"

Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi produced a highly personalised language through drawings, photographs and diaries from the 1950s to the 1980s. The works Dancing Brick will focus on in the perfromance are what some consider her classic works, from the 1970s and 1980s: small scale geometric drawings, devised around the grid. These works, drawings so intricate and technical they remind us of an architect's blueprints correspond to the utopian planning of Milton Keyens and are strong emblems of modernist art and design. The drawings are highly technical but delicate, evocative at once of complex musical scores and intricate stitchwork and soft textile weaving.

For our performance we have also drawn our inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1962 film L'Eclisse, which tells the story of a man and a woman who attempt to fall in love in the estranged utopian landscape of the artificial urban space of the Eur, on the outskirts of Rome in the 1960s. We feel that the visual themes and the strong architecural elements used in the film are very present in Mohamedi's wrok, where the human presence is felt like a shadow, a whisper fading into the depths of the blueprint-like drawings.

Next week

Come and see us back at CPT by popular demand. 21:13 is on tuesday-sunday at 8:00pm. Last time we sold out the CPT so maybe book early to avoid disappointment. Full (UK) tour dates are:

22nd-27th September: Camden People's Theatre, London
30th September-11th October: Tobacco Factory, Bristol
14th-16th October: South Hill Park, Canterbury
19th-21st October: Artsreach Dorset
22nd-24th October: Madcap Performing Arts Centre, Milton Keynes

Getting ready to go on tour...

We're re-re-rehearsing 21:13 in preparation for packing it all up and going on our first tour...

Awards

Great news from the fringe is that 6.0: How Heap and Pebble took on the World and Won was

Nominated and Shortlisted for the Total Theatre Award for an Emerging Company

and

Won the Arches Brick Award.

As part of the latter the prize is a thousand pounds and a run at the prestigious Arches Theatre in Glasgow. Better than that, the trophy is an actual brick.

Valentina collected the prize (while Thomas and Panda were busy not winning Total Theatre) at the assembly rooms at a big ceremony, where Joyce Macmillan made the big Dancing-Brick-win-the-Brick joke. It brought the house down.

Both of those things have put a lovely gloss on a great festival for us. Can't wait to do the show again.

http://www.thearches.co.uk/theatre.htm

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/news/archesbrick09.htm