"Quarantine is quite simply a marvel, a company that's right at the forefront of British theatre…..immensely touching, totally human yet also intellectually rigorous in their examination of the nature of performance and the raising of questions about what makes theatre seem real and reality so strongly theatrical."
- Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, October 2009
FIRST, FIND YOUR AUDIENCE
DATES: Fri 9th to Sun 11th April
FIRST, FIND YOUR AUDIENCE is an in depth practical investigation with Richard Gregory. Participants will work with ideas that explore intimacy, hospitality and honesty and will potentially challenge or even exchange the roles of audience and performer.
Richard is founder and Artistic Director (with Renny O’Shea) of Quarantine, since 1998.
piss up with rules - was that it ?
ReplyDeleteWe set ourselves the task to gather the strangers of Aber and have them take part in an impromptu party .
The theme was toasting and it turned into a twitchy bum mad hatter tea party . We stood up with the people we found and toasted to: Shoes and happines , sensual satisfaction in marriage by eating food and listening to music, we toasted to philosophers that call us sailors lost at sea constructing our life-boats forever without a bottom to start from . We stood up toasted drank sat down, stood up toasted drank sat down and in between felt awkward.
The mission we choose to accept was to invite people to toast their lives and dreams and request a song to underscore their sentiment . The warm weather drew out the adventurous and the beautiful . There was a French woman from Marseilles with a smilling new born babe , her partner decked in cowboy boots and a smile , a stragelled young man with a drooping black hat dark sun glasses and a Hawaian shirt slung across his chest, a couple of boys who finished a game of football in the sun , students on a study break , a young fresh faced band arrived to string some tunes for us . We sat in gloom and bright lights and toasted to the bits of our life.
It threw up questions. Were we the gatherer-performers who constituted and construed our audience or was it a communal event ? Did we stick to the rules we set ourselves (probably not ) ? How diid we feed off of and navigate awkwardness, how did we accommodate our guests? How did we deal with the performative dynamics of hosting and maintaining hospitalilty ? Was there content or richness in the experience ? Did it matter ?
Up down toast
Great fun!