Tuesday, 31 March 2015
So It Goes come to London
Not long until So It Goes reaches London! We're on at Shoreditch Town Hall for two weeks, from Wednesday 8 April to Saturday 18 April (not including Sunday 12 but yes including all the other days, including Monday 13).
We're very excited. Home crowd! In fact, we've been singing "So It Goes is coming home" to the tune of "Football's coming home" for over a week now.
Tickets available here.
David & Hannah x
Starting Blocks at Camden People's Theatre... it's over, sadface
On Sunday, we performed about 30 minutes of brand new
material at Camden People’s Theatre.
We’ve been developing new ideas there since January, as part of CPT’s
Starting Blocks scheme. We’ve also been
meeting with the other artists on the scheme every Monday, to share our
experiences of making work and to find out more about each other’s creative
processes.
It was fun to perform and we’re excited about how the show might develop from
here. There are some big creative
questions to answer, in terms of how we tell this story. But we’re confident that it’s a good story to
be telling and we have a clearer idea of why we’re telling it and the shape of
it.
(I’m being deliberately non-specific
here because I don’t like saying too much about a show before it’s finished!)
A heartfelt thanks to Camden People’s Theatre and our fellow
Starting Blockers.
Starting Blocks Class of 2015: Cape Theatre, Will Drew aka
Venice As A Dolphin, Sh!t Theatre’s Rebecca Biscuit, Owl Young and Caretaker
Ministry.
Monday, 16 March 2015
Thoughts on Battersea Arts Centre
The outpouring of grief and affection following the fire at Battersea Arts Centre has been extremely touching. Much has been said about BAC’s importance; these pieces by Dan Rebellato and Catherine Love are particularly eloquent.
My first visit to BAC was to see 1927’s debut show Between
The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea. I
didn’t live in London and travelling alone, with no understanding of London’s
geography, meant the tube and bus journey required to get from King’s Cross to
Battersea was quite an undertaking. But
that simply added to the sense of adventure and overwhelming
excitement when I finally arrived. I was
wide-eyed as I entered that stunning building.
What a building and what a show.
I came back a week later to see it again.
When I put on my first proper show, Machines For Living,
less than a year after leaving drama school, I invited every single theatre in
London and beyond. Only one
replied. BAC sent someone to see
it. When Hannah and I did a work in
progress performance of So It Goes, we invited everyone we could think of. BAC were the only people who came. For years,
I knew that it was a place where people a few years older than me had got their
first gigs. I’d known it was a place who
wouldn’t turn me away because my process didn’t start with a script. When that
place sent someone to see my work, it meant the world. And they were the only ones who did.
BAC are fundraising to allow them to rebuild and keep doing
what they do so well. You can donate
here.
Meanwhile, the show goes on and I’m looking forward to seeing Caroline Horton’s
show at BAC tomorrow.
David
Friday, 13 March 2015
A busy week
It’s been a busy week for On The Run. Our tour of So It Goes began with
performances in Ormskirk and Canterbury.
We had a fantastic time, thanks to lovely audiences and very friendly staff at
both venues. We’re having a great time on the road and it’s a real pleasure to
be performing the show again, after a six month hiatus. We’ve got a week off now, before we head to
Halifax, Leeds and Ipswich on 25, 26 and 27 of March.
*
I’ve just come back from a fascinating Q&A with Green
Party Leader Natalie Bennett, held at Camden People’s Theatre and attended by
artists and producers keen to hear more about Green Party policy on the
arts. I sensed, amongst the audience, a
desire to be idealistic, to imagine what the arts could be and the role they
could play in a different kind of society, but also a difficulty in imagining
any world in which our post-1980s economic consensus could be overturned.
In an age of austerity, it seems that the national
conversation is never about the best public services, or arts policy, only the
cheapest. Amber, from CPT, pointed out
that this means conversations amongst artists often descend into panic over already meagre funding levels going up or down by a few percent, which can prevent us
from thinking big. One person summed it
up brilliantly: “When financiers get together, they talk about art; when
artists get together they talk about money”.
I felt a little sad that we couldn’t allow ourselves to think
big and be idealistic, in a conversation about Green arts policy. What are the Greens for, if not
idealism? But some of the best
suggestions for policy changes were small but significant ways in which
government could grease the wheels of arts organisations, for example by
offering to tax breaks to philanthropists willing to fund the arts or cutting
business rates for arts organisations.
My own plea was for government funding bodies to stop asking arts
organisations to single-handedly cure all social ills through arts
participation, in return for their funding.
On this, the Greens cannot be accused of not thinking big as their
Universal Basic Income would automatically create a fairer society and
one in which more people had time to enjoy the arts. Whether or not that’s realistic is another
question.
*
In the context of this discussion, the announcement this week
that IdeasTap will be closing seems particularly depressing. It was not financially sustainable and didn’t
manage to find a way it could be (not for lack of trying, I’m absolutely sure)
but it did give us a vision of how young artists could be helped along in their
careers. In a different world, IdeasTap
would be an extension of the Arts Council and publically funded.
Hannah and I ran two workshops for IdeasTap members and got a
huge amount out of both of them. We met
new people, we shared approaches and skills we’d developed in our creative
practice and we had chance to tell people about our work. We’ve also run workshop in conjunction with
our friends Rhum and Clay Theatre Company and the money we’ve been paid to do
this has partly funded our regular night of short form work, No SuchThing.
Our Designer Emma Tompkins once told me that when she runs
skills or career workshops outside London, often in places where young people
with bags of talent feel geographically isolated or just don’t know how to get
a career moving, her biggest piece of advice was, “Join IdeasTap.” IdeasTap funded projects but more than that,
it was a way of people connecting and it was full of helpful advice which, crucially,
you could access whoever you were, wherever you were. I’m sad to see it go.
*
On a happier note, Incoming Festival announced its line-up
this afternoon and we’re on it! We’ve
been sitting on this news for a while so it’s great to be able to start
shouting about it. It’s a festival we’re
really excited to be part of and it’s always nice to be back at the New Diorama
Theatre, home of No Such Thing. We’re
performing alongside some good friends, including Little Soldier, Rhum and
Clay, Remote Control and Sh!t Theatre.
We’ll see as much as we can, so I’m sure we’ll discover some new
favourite artists there too.
Incoming Festival runs from 1-10 June and we’re performing So
It Goes on 2 June. Full festival line-up
and tickets here. Head to our website
for all the So It Goes tour dates.
David
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
So It Goes tour starts soon!
Starting with Ormskirk, near Liverpool, then Canterbury a few days later... then Halifax, Leeds, Ipswich, London, Gloucestershire,
Oxford, Southend, Margate, Brighton, Manchester, Exeter, Plymouth, Sheffield...
then London again!
We can’t wait to take the show far
and wide. It’s such a pleasure to get it
back on its feet having only performed it once since we premiered in Edinburgh
last August.
Full tour dates, info and links to buy tickets HERE. If you’ve seen the show already, do spread
the word. If not, we hope to see you at
a show soon!
David & Hannah xx
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