Ferment Festival January 2012
Book through bristololdvic.org.uk
I Went To Albania
Tom Phillips
Wed 11, 7pm
Why did Enver Hoxha build 700,000 concrete bunkers across the whole of Albania? Were beards illegal under his communist regime? Can you really buy a secondhand Kalashnikov on the streets of Tirana? And what’s any of that got to do with Lord Byron, Edward Lear and John Constable’s picture framer?
Part travelogue, part personal history, part practical experiment, I Went to Albania is a haphazard journey in search of a failed utopia, a debunking of myths, and a work-in-progress by writer/performer Tom Phillips in collaboration with director Andy Burden.
Tom’s previous work for theatre includes Hotel Illyria, Man Diving and Arbeit Macht Frei.
The Wrong Kind of Snow & The Martian Embassy
Alan Williams
Wed 11, 8pm (TWKOS) and Thu 12, 7pm (TME)
These performances are £4 a ticket or £6 for both
The Wrong Kind of Snow is a one man show about moving back to England in 1996, after fifteen years away.
“I hadn't spent much time with English people while I'd been away, but those I did all seemed to agree that what they missed the most was ‘the irony’. Sometimes they said, ‘sarcasm’, occasionally ‘rudeness’ - but I sensed they were all talking about the same thing. Everything I'd marked that day as particularly ‘English’ was a part of that humour, that I thought of mostly as just a refusal to do anything quite right.”
The Martian Embassy is the sequel to The Wrong Kind of Snow.
Alan is an actor and writer from Manchester , who cut his teeth with Hull Truck in the Seventies. He relocated to Canada from 1981 to 1996 and since returning to the UK has appeared in the original productions of Sarah Kane’s Crave and Warhorse, amongst many other things.
Wild Thing I Love You
Ella Good & Nicki Kent
Thu 12, 6pm
‘…My friends here are from England, and they were wondering about Bigfoot, if you had any like Bigfoot stories, experiences, anything like that...?’
Wild Thing I Love You is an enquiry into the existence of Bigfoot that documents a journey across America to see what is out there. The piece explores the human desire to believe in something unknown, and the want to search for something that transcends our everyday experience. Using extracts of recorded conversation from the people we met on the way, film, animation and live performance, we cross into a world where the wild can exist.
Alan first introduced his Trilogy, The Girl With Two Voices, to Bristol in 2010’s Ferment. We’re delighted to have him back…
A Love Like Salt
The Devil’s Violin Company
Thu 12, 8.30pm
This Bristol-based company are at the forefront of storytelling in the UK. They fuse music, sound and spoken word to hypnotic effect. Passionate, charming and chilling, their shows breathe new life into ancient tales. Storyteller Daniel Morden, together with Sarah Moody (cello), Oliver Wilson-Dickson (violin) and Luke Carver Goss (accordion), perform the very first outing of one of the central stories in our culture: The Wife of Bath’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
‘A scintillating combination of music, sound and story’ The Times
Search Party
Fri 13, 8.15pm
Search Party’s show is being presented as a double bill with Psychodrama. See them both for £4.
Search Party are going to present a little something of something brand new. They don’t know quite what it is yet. Well they know what it is, but not yet how it is.
Search Party are a Bristol-based performance company, who make immediate and playful performances for a variety of contexts. They’re interested in people and places, sport and relationships, communities and spaces.
You may have seen their acclaimed durational Semaphore project Save Me in Mayfest. Come and see this…
www.searchpartyperformance.org.uk
Pyschodrama
Sam Halmarack and Tom Wainwright
Fri 13, 9pm
Psychodrama is being presented as a double bill with Search Party's show. See them both for £4.
Psychodrama is a form of therapy that can uncover some uncomfortable truths that can be damaging if not managed with sensitivity. Unfortunately, Sam and Tom are reckless amateurs and their psychodrama session looks set to end in gruesome tragedy. Identity is confused and a play gets turned inside out. Tom is a writer and performer whose recent work at Bristol Old Vic includes Muscle and his Theatre Bristol/Bristol Old Vic co-commission, Pedestrian. Sam is a performer and writes music and designs sound for theatre. His Mayfest 2011 hit Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, developed in collaboration with Bristol Ferment, will tour in 2012.
‘genuinely unpredictable and very, very funny… a phenomenal performance… painfully honest’ Audience comments from July’s Ferment
Loss Soup
Fri 13, time TBC
You are invited to join us for The Dinner of Loss, from a short story by Nick Hunt. Please take a seat at our dining table for a roll-call of lost species, vanished languages and disappeared cultures. Gather round, stir the broth and taste extinction on the tip of your tongue; the auroch, the laughing owl, the Barbary lion, the giant short-faced bear, the root-spine palm, Island Chumash, Skepi Creole Dutch, the Caribs, the Karankawa - blended together and stewed to eternity in the fabled Loss Soup.
We do hope you can join us. Formal dress optional. If you would like to attend please email bristolferment@bristololdvic.org.uk for further details. Directed by Caroline Hunt in collaboration with Gaia theatre collective.
Family
Greg Glover
A rehearsed reading directed by Sita Calvert Ennals
Sat 14, 5pm
Katie wants to kill Dave, just to stop him talking. Because now the whole town thinks that their son is ill - really ill - and everyone is suddenly falling over themselves to lend a helping hand.
As a family seemingly fractures it brings a community together and what starts with a stick of chewing gum, ends with the whole town staring at you.
Family is a dark comedy about being part of something that can tear you apart but can also put you back together again.
“I was having a chip roll when they told me. I knew it was serious ‘cause they were all like, ‘we need to talk to you’. I started bricking it, thinking someone had died, or that I was adopted.”
Greg Glover has had several productions staged at both Sherman Cymru, and The Riverfront. He was part of the Dirty Protest night curated by Gary Owen and has been mentored by the Royal Court/BBC as part of the 24 Degrees project. He has scripted a short film that was recently shown on BBC2 Wales.
Dmitri & Uncle Joe
Bozarts
Sat 14, 7.30pm & 9.45pm
These performances are £4 a ticket or £6 for both.
A theatrical response to an imagined encounter between two seminal figures of the 20th Century - the dictator Joseph Stalin and the Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich.
Set in 1950, this highly charged piece explores the confrontation and interaction between the Absolute Ruler and his prodigious People's Artist. This is the beginnings of an ambitious piece fusing text, improvisation and live music into a visceral collision of cultures with startling and revealing consequences. The ensemble is John Telfer as Stalin, Peter Swaffer-Reynolds as Shostakovich and Jon James as the live pianist.
Bozarts is Bristol-based company led by David Adams, who specialises in combining music with theatre. Previous work includes the 40-person physical theatre piece, Drawer of Dreams, which opened the new Colston Hall foyer.
‘breathing new life into entertainment. The format of music with theatre and visual projection works a treat. This is strong, original, and a bit of theatrical dynamite.’ Charles Hazelwood on Drawer of Dreams
*(Your feedback following the 7.30pm performance will then inform the 9.45pm event. You are welcome to join us for one or both of the showings).
My Robot Heart
Molly Naylor and the Middle Ones
Tue 17 Jan, 8pm
My Robot Heart is a storytelling show about love and fear, with gently interactive moments and a live soundtrack created by The Middle Ones. Three stories linked to an impending wedding are interspersed with poems, research, songs and autobiography as Molly laments her lost sense of romance and tries to figure out if love is a thing.
This work in progress is the beginnings of a funny, sad, lyrical and uplifting show about accepting fears as well as overcoming them. It's for anyone who's ever been in love. Or been afraid.
31 Years
Karla Shacklock
Wed 18, 7pm
The years 1980 to 2011 have been pickled in glass jars.
This evening, following a few days in the studio and an installation in her living room, award-winning choreographer and performer Karla Shacklock will allow 31 years to fall, seep and explode into the space, in a new solo work-in-progress, in which she attempts to unearth what it is to be Karla Shacklock. It is likely that Karla and her hundreds of jars will ricochet physically and mentally around the space in a highly visual mesh of experiences.
Bangladesh
Saikat Ahamed
Wed 18, 8pm
Where do we come from and what makes us who we are? Is our destiny written in the stars or stamped in a passport? Born on the very first day of a new nation, she grew up surrounded by tigers in the sunderbans and ended up keeping chickens in the bath in a Glasgow housing estate. In this brand new solo show, Saikat Ahamed traces the journey of his mother from Bangladesh to the UK and the journey of his motherland through bloodshed, trains, planes and a million bicycles. Saikat is a Bristol-based actor seen last year in Bristol Old Vic’s production of Treasure Island as Ben Gunn.
Gymnast
Bodies in Flight
Thu 19, 8pm & Fri 20, 9.30pm
In their 17th performance project, Bodies in Flight delve into our fascination with the athlete’s drive to physical excellence; their supreme attention to bodily task, the high point on the parallel bars, the thousands of minute adjustments needed to hold that still.
In collaboration with video artist Tony Judge, composer Jen Bell and Night Bus Choir, Gymnast uses the training session as both source and structure, from warm-up routines to the display of gymnastic exercises, from novice to expert, to explore the continuing power of the Olympian ideal of athlete as interface between human and superhuman, the mortal and the divine. This is a Dance4 Co-commission with Bristol Ferment.
Rain
Jack Dean
Fri 20, 6.30pm
Rain is being presented as a double bill with Prosthetics. See them both for £4.
MC, Poet and Bard Jack Dean uses the hip-hop poetica to explore two great British institutions: clinical depression and talking about the weather.
Fresh from his recent performances of Under Stokes Croft in the Studio, this is the beginning of a short autobiographical piece with music, lyricism and a whole bucket of pathetic fallacy.
Prosthetics
Hannah Silva
Fri 20, 7pm
Prosthetics is being presented as a double bill with Rain. See them both for £4.
Prosthetics is a triptych of new work exploring meaning built through sound, vocal techniques, and linguistic experiments. The first piece, Citadel, layers articulations using a loop pedal to create a soundscape for poetry about Plymouth’s tunnels. The second, Gaddafi, is a letter written by a ten year old boy to Colonel Gaddafi, in which he explains a game where an important word is chosen and repeated until the meaning is lost, and then transformed. The third piece, Prosthetics, is built around a line taken from a US documentary: 40% of those with prosthetic limbs will go back into war.
‘Radical, political, courageous’ What’s On Stage
The Bullet and The Bass Trombone
Sleepdogs
Fri 20, 8pm
There’s a concert orchestra, trapped in a city during a military coup. As violence erupts around them, the orchestra become separated, lost – desperately trying to find their way back to each other. The composer is left to tell the story.
The first part of this experiment in last July’s Ferment saw Sleepdogs accompany a whistling bird with an invisible orchestra, and tell a 400-year-long joke. This time, the story continues, who knows where: a murder in a forest of music stands, an antique harp used for target practice, an exhausted song on a plane as it leaves the city…
Good Grief
Bocadalupa
Sat 21, 3pm
Our performance-making is motivated by how intimate, personal experience collides with the public, socio-political realm and the interplay between them. To this, we bring a comic sensibility and a diverse theatrical tool-kit. Recently three people in Jenny’s family died. And we wanted to make a show about that. You’re not laughing any more. But we want you to. The show must go on, mustn’t it?
‘Brilliant… You were funny. I don’t know if that is what you wanted but you were just very funny… Great take on grief. Great timing… Amazing. Really brave’ Audience comments from Prototype.
And Then Come The Nightjars
Bea Roberts
Sat 21, 5pm
As the devastating Foot and Mouth disease epidemic of 2001 rips through the countryside, disgraced vet Jeff is sent back to his old friend Michael’s farm. Ten years later, he’s still there.
Tender, funny and unsentimental; a portrait of two old men, twenty years, thirty cattle and a broken Rayburn.
Bea is a Devonshire Playwright and writer in Residence at The Canal Café Theatre. She has also worked with the BBC Writers Room, Tobacco Factory, Old Vic, Soho, Pleasance and Underbelly. This is a rehearsed reading of her brand new play developed with support from Bristol Old Vic.
‘Winning, funny, yet ultimately moving...you find yourself not only laughing at the characters but crying with them too’ The Guardian on The Darkling Plain
Fuel presents Inua Ellams’
Black T-Shirt Collection
Sat 21, 8pm
‘What would you do for your brother?’
From Fringe First winner Inua Ellams comes a new story about two brothers building a global t-shirt brand. On their journey from the markets of Nigeria to the sweatshops of China, Matthew and Mohammed discover what brotherhood really means.
Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria in 1984, and moved to the UK as a teenager. Inua’s work merges visual art, spoken word and theatre, and he is known for his iconic imagery, beauty and attention to detail. The poet and performer who brought us The 14th Tale and Untitled, performs a work-in-development showing of his new piece, Black T-shirt Collection prior to a national tour in the spring, which will include dates right here in the Studio.
Developed with the support of the Arvon Foundation and the National Theatre. Funded by Arts Council England.
