Development
SITE Residency Programme
Space Ideas Time Expertise
Call for Proposals 2011 - 2012
Tobacco Factory Theatre and Theatre Bristol are working together to provide a studio residency programme for 1 company/artist in 2011/2012. The programme includes producer support, space and a fee of £3000. It is an open, international call aimed at mid-career artists (people with at least 3 professionally produced shows to date) wanting to make a NEW show. Makers of all kinds of live performance work (dance, theatre, live art, circus, puppetry etc) are encouraged to send in a proposal. DEADLINE: Monday 1st August. To find out more, please download the Call Out and FAQs documents to the right of this page.Below you can read about the 4 companies who've worked with us through SITE over the last year and find out a bit about their work under development. The slideshow at the top of the page and the images below show images from their previous productions. You can click the "who?", "what?" and "find out more" links to expose more information about each artist or company
You can also read a Theatre Bristol interview with the four SITE producers here.
Dancing Brick: Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice
- Who?
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Dancing Brick are performers and writers Valentina Ceschi and Thomas Eccleshare. Valentina and Thomas graduated from the Lecoq School in Paris in 2008 and together aspire to make work in which image and the spoken word carry equal weight. They tell intrepid, youthful stories, which often have a problem at their heart: people with no common language; ice dancers with no ice; lovers stranded on rooftops in the middle of a flood. They are inspired by the larger-than-life style of genre story-telling, e.g. Noir, musical theatre, Sci Fi, sports films, superhero stories, and aim to blend their audacious colour with a poetry of their own. Dancing Brick were short-listed for Total Theatre Awards for their shows 21:13 and 6.0: How Heap and Pebble Took on the World and Won and won the Arches Brick Award in Edinburgh 2009.
- What?
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Ko is the story of two intergalactic explorers, far, far into an imagined future, who find themselves stranded on a beautiful and austere planet. With this piece we want to talk about memory and what it means to remember. Setting the piece far away in time and space allows us to tackle certain subjects with an innocence and purity that lends them appropriate weight. What happens to our two explorers and their relationship as they excavate a lost world? What happens to the audience throughout the course of the play, as they discover, along with our characters, what the planet has seen?
We start writing from an image. We choose images that imply a story we don’t yet know, or a problem we can’t yet solve. The development process becomes an unravelling of that image, an exploration of how it came to that point, and what happens afterwards. With this project we want to start with the image of two astronauts alone on a planet made of rice.
SITE Residency De-brief... 1/ Tell us about what you did during the residency During our month at the Tobacco Factory we workshopped and developed our very initial ideas with a dramaturg, a designer and a sound engineer through research and play and at the end of the residency performed a work-in-progress of some of these ideas to an invited audience. 2/ What was the value of the residency; what could you do that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to? For our previous plays, we have always started with a clear premise that has played out, in some ways quite simply, over the course of the show. For our next piece we wanted to challenge ourselves as artists to make something that was narratively, thematically and visually more complex. The SITE residency allowed us the space, at the very outset of the process, to try to do this. To set out in making a show where we weren’t sure where it would end. We started with themes and images and ideas and the site residency, if you like, allowed us to explore what we wanted to explore. It gave us the opportunity to test the unknown in the rehearsal room so that, by the end of the month we had discovered the kernel of what interested us with our themes and provided the perfect start to making a show that was more complex than anything we had attempted before. Beyond this invaluable resource, we were able to collaborate with other artists – a process we are still learning about. Of particular value was our work with the dramaturg Lu Kemp. We had never worked with another writer so early on in the process and it was extremely profitable to hear her thoughts and develop our ideas with her at such an early stage.
- How to find out more...
Kid Carpet: Little Pickle Pumpernickel
- Who?
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Kid Carpet is Ed Patrick, a solo artist who began making music as a bit of a joke which pretty soon got out of hand. Ed went to his local car boot sale with a ten pound note and returned with a plastic guitar, keyboard, tape deck and some old scratched records. He put his name into an online anagram generating machine and Kid Carpet was born. Kid Carpet has released 2 full albums - Ideas and Oh Dears and Casio Royale. He is a festival favourite and has had the pleasure of performing in Japan, Hong Kong, Iceland and throughout Europe.
- What?
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I'm designing a show for pre-school children which combines electro pop punk performance with puppetry, projection and storytelling. Taking inspiration from Maurice Sendak, Oliver Postgate and the Beastie Boys, it is my ambition to create an environment of sensory wonder whilst encouraging participation and a wild rumpus. Songs and stories are currently in production. Since having a child in 2008 I've been writing songs for children and imagining how a show of this kind could work best. I am inspired by the songs I sing with my son and I am driven to make work for an audience of this kind. It's a lot of fun.
Since becoming a father I have a new desire to expand my artistic output and I've rediscovered the theatre as a welcome platform for all types of performance. My developments with spoken word, music and visual performance have led me to believe that there is a wonderful opportunity to combine these elements within a new dynamic performance project. I'm designing this show to be much more than a pop concert: this is about Gorillas, a Hicca-potamus, electric guitars, dancing and freedom of expression. I will be collaborating with film-makers, puppeteers and illustrators between now and early 2011 to help me design, evolve, rehearse and perform this project.
Working with a producer and the Tobacco Factory gives me increased confidence that there can be life for this show beyond an end of residency performance. Little Pickle Pumpernickel wants to get out there...
- How to find out more...
Toby Hulse & Vicky Andrews: The Secret Garden
Inspired by the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Who?
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Toby Hulse and Vicky Andrews are Bristol-based theatre makers. Toby is a playwright and director who specialises in theatre for family audiences. Recent work includes: Gulliver’s Travels (Watermill, Newbury), Around the World in Eighty Days (the egg, Bath), The Lost World (Bristol Old Vic) and One Small Step (Oxford Playhouse). Vicky Andrews is a designer, illustrator and maker, who also runs the internationally renowned puppet company Pickled Image. Recent work includes: Wolf Tales (Bristol Old Vic), Hunger and Houdini’s Suitcase (both Nordland Visual Theatre). Toby and Vicky have collaborated on many projects, including The Lost World and Around the World in Eighty Days (both Bristol Old Vic), Travels with Grandad and The Chatterbox (both Pickled Image) and Bath Time (Oxford Playhouse).
- What?
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We have imagined that the story of The Secret Garden has been buried in the earth, and is now lying there, dormant, ready to be nurtured back to life. The audience, with plenty of warning about what they are going to do, arrive in a barren space filled with earth. Armed with forks, trowels and their bare hands, and accompanied by a gardener whose job it is to encourage and provoke, they proceed to dig the story out of the ground, bringing it back to life by uncovering artefacts that are fragments of the narrative. As they dig deeper and work harder, they plant and water the fragments, constructing a garden around them, a garden that is also a story, the story of The Secret Garden. And, as the garden buds and eventually blooms around us, we hear birdsong, smell the perfume of flowers and feel the warm sunshine on our faces – there is life again in the garden, life that we have created by growing a story together.
Over the residency we will be exploring, in a mixture of indoor and outdoor spaces, the key performance elements with actors, a film maker, a sound designer, a gardening historian and most importantly a group of school children drawn from the local primary Ashton Gate. The children’s work will be recorded in word and image by a group of their peers trained in documentation. Our aim is to present what we have discovered in the form of a short performance and an exhibition at the end of our residency in April 2011, with the intention that this will in turn lead to a fully realised production.
- How to find out more...
- Toby is happy to be contacted on tobyhulse[at]googlemail.com.
Full Beam Visual Theatre: Inspired by M Butterfly et al
- Who?
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Full Beam is a touring theatre company dedicated to bringing puppetry to a wider audience. We are committed to producing work for people who like to think and have fun at the same time. We have a growing reputation as one of the south west’s most innovative theatre companies, unafraid to lift the lid on issues still clouded by taboo. Our most recent production The Lesser Spotted Collectors’ Club transformed At-Bristol into a post-Apocalyptic environment to explore our relationship with the natural world and the value we place on it. Our current touring production My Baby Just Cares For Me fuses puppetry and upside down physicality with a Space Hopper to chart a daughter’s relationship with her father through thick and thin.
- What?
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Inspired by M Butterfly by David Hwang, we will explore relationships between East & West in the Digital Age and reflect on the themes of identity and self-representation which Hwang famously explores. We envisage the finished work using digital media, music, live and puppetry performances to juxtapose three stories from different ages which have as their common theme humanity’s willing suspension of disbelief in the pursuit of love. In Puccini’s operatic tragedy, Madam Butterfly, the protagonist waits for a husband, who we know will never return to her. In Hwang’s play the civil servant chooses to believe in the fantasy of his Butterfly despite dire consequences. In the 21st century online dating and mail order brides have, in turn, made the manipulation of self-representation a global phenomenon and created real life drama from the possible fulfilment of a fantasy.
During our residency we will work with a musician and performers to explore the potential relationships between puppetry and opera. We think that the strong contrast between the richness of the operatic tradition and the simplicity of puppetry will fit the tone of a piece that explores representation and illusion. Both forms (puppetry and opera) require audiences to make a conscious decision to suspend disbelief, thereby mirroring the actions of the protagonists in the piece.
As a Bristol based company with strong connections to Tobacco Factory Theatre, we are delighted to be working at the theatre and look forward to working on our SITE residency in this exciting and dynamic environment.
Photographs © Rhys Davies
- How to find out more...