Desipulp in association with The Drum present a fresh reworking of the 1997 hit Arrange that Marriage.
Throw in a couple of hysterical parents and some confused young people… add a ‘liberal’ helping of emotional blackmail and some good old fashioned cultural pressure… allow to simmer … then sprinkle with music and dance from the Bollywood, Nashville and R&B genres…
What do you get?
The most frivolous and irrelevant theatrical examination of the arranged marriage paradigm!!
Catch this darkly comedic show from 9 – 14 November. To book tickets, call the box office on 0121 333 2444 or visit www.the-drum.org.uk
Tickets are £10, but if you manage to book before 10 October, it’s 2 for £10, and before 5 November you can get tickets for the Wed/ Thu/ Fri performances for £7 each. And as if that’s not a good enough set of deals, The Drum have a limited amount of free tickets for theatre goers under 26 as part of A Night Less Ordinary.
On 21 October, Geese Theatre Company ask “…but does it work?”: Researching Theatre with Offenders.
Geese Theatre Company invites you to “…but does it work?”, a unique event to gain insight into one of the leading arts organisations working within the Criminal Justice System and to hear from leading academics who have conducted independent research into the company’s work.
The evening will showcase excerpts from two Geese projects ‘Journey Woman’ – a performance for female offenders and ‘Stay’ – a performance for male perpetrators of domestic violence. There will also be presentations from Dr Gemma Hurst of the University of Liverpool and Professor Stephen Bottoms of the University of Leeds on the findings of their research.
“…does it work?” takes place at Pinsent Masons, Wesleyan Building from 6.30pm.
Places are limited, so RSVP to reserve your place by contacting Geese at mailbox@geese.co.uk or by calling 0121 449 6222
‘An evening of barely organised theatrical chaos!’
The next PILOT Light takes place on 14 October at 7.30pm, The Victoria, and is on the hunt for untested, unpolised and unfinished ideas from theatre artists. This is great chance to meet and share your thoughts with like-minded people, where mistakes are welcomed so long as you bring your passion along too.
It’s an opportunity for theatre artists from the West Midlands to test out 5-10 minutes of work that is right at the beginning of its developmental process in front of a curious, confused and courageous audience. It’s also a chance to find out who else is doing what in the area, and make new creative connections.
If this sounds like your kinda thing, email your proposals to PILOTlight@mail.com by 2 October, with the following information:
Contact/Company Name:
Description of idea (max 200 words):
Length of performance (10 minutes max):
Number and names of all people involved:
Estimate of travel expenses (we have a small budget for travel expenses that will be shared between participants).
Successful applicants will receive email confirmation by 5th October.
Picked this up at Artsfest. I can’t find much about it online, but it looks interesting.
20 – 22 September at The Victoria, Green Gorilla Presents – Polite Assassins – A play celebrating an almost forgotten heroine air-brushed out of history, Mary Seacole. Starting at 7:30pm, tickets are £7/ £5 concessions.
Here’s something new, Tin Bath Theatre Company are developing a revolutionary new way to caption theatre as part of a Theatre Sandbox award. They’ll be performing a scene from their new comedy ‘You’re So Happy I Want to Die’ at mac, using a new application for pervasive media.
Our captions are a mix of subtitles and video projection and are big, bold, colourful and responsive to the performer. We are testing out how these new captions work for an audience.
Pop down and see 10 minutes of this new show for free, followed by a Q and A session, at mac today (August 26) at 7pm. If you’d like to book a ticket, call 0121 446 3232 or emailinfo@macarts.co.uk
Following critical acclaim from Edinburgh Festival, 2010 Scotsman Fringe First Award Winner ‘My Romantic History’ is honeymooning at the The Rep from 1 to 11 September.
If you haven’t met someone by the time you graduate, you’re going to marry some idiot from your work. It’s that simple. Do you know how they get animals to breed in captivity? They put them in the same cage.
Tickets are £10 with concessions available, and you can buy online from The Rep’s website.
On Saturday night I took a couple of (out of town) friends to AE Harris for the Birmingham European Theatre Festival. We turned up a bit late so only managed to catch the last piece – one which would’ve been a fantastic spoof on art student theatre if it wasn’t for the fact they were taking themselves seriously.
Serves us right for turning up late – I’m told some of the earlier suff was ace. The night wasn’t over though, with a reasonably-priced bar, music from the TG Collective (in the rather dark pic above), some last-night awards handed to the companies that had performed, the results of the singing workshop from earlier in the day (audio below) and, as reported on Stan’s Cafe’s blog, music and dancing till dawn.
Despite some worries about ticket sales in the weeks beforehand, the last couple of nights of the festival were pretty much sold out and the various theatre companies who had come to the city seemed to have enjoyed themselves, with much talk of returning next year.
There was a fantastic atmosphere and my friends went away impressed with the sort of thing that Birmingham gets up to, so well done all who were involved. As Graeme rightly comments:
It was worth being there for the sense of gathering alone
One last thing – it was a little odd to see AE Harris decked out as a ‘proper’ theatre but it scrubs up rather well. I’ve seen it used for all sorts of things since it opened – 24HR Scalextric, launch parties, a Christmas party, filled with rice by Stan’s Cafe and filled with detritus (including upturned cars) by Kindle Theatre. It fills a very important and individual gap in a city that’s not blessed with mid-size venues, so it’s encouraging to hear that discussions are ongoing to keep the place open past the initial lease.
The line-up for the first Birmingham European Theatre Festival (Wed 30 June to Sat 3 July) is now up. I don’t know enough about theatre (European or otherwise) to tell you whether it’s good or not, but really that seems like reason enough to get a ticket. Anyway, I’ve been assured that it is a good line-up.
Also, it’s only a tenner for an evening of entertainment. Tickets here.
Speakeasy is be a get-together for West Mids theatre folk hosted by The Drum and in association with The Rep. It’s on Monday 7 June.
Alison Gagen from ACE West Mids and Tyrone Huggins who the chairs the Sustained Theatre West Midlands Hub (which I’d not come across before) will be there. The general format will be:
A discussion of the landscape for theatre practitioners in the West Midlands in terms of funding and opportunities, together with a preview of forthcoming work and a chance for local writers, actors, directors, producers and venue managers to network and announce their latest news.
The REP have put tickets on sale for the second half of the year. What’s more, they’ve written an eminently copy/paste-able round-up in a blog post about it. That’s always good to see.
trying to run a theatre which aims to embrace and nurture young talent has been made almost impossible when clashing with raves and road closures. We appreciate the long standing reputation of the Custard Factory as one of Birmingham’s biggest party places but the knock on effect this has had on our customers and facilities has become too much
So off they travel.
They’re looking for interesting places to use and have looked at:
Railway Stations as well as arches, Churches, Post Offices, discussed Shop Fronts, pubs and even an old car forecourt and will be re-opening the Mixing Bowl Theatre in one of these unique performance spaces
They’re still looking too, so if you know of an interesting, disused site (or if you’ve got a good space) then contact them via their blog.
The hosts of the night time show Tuning Out know all about facing down the void. Each night they start the show blank, with nothing planned, armed with just a stack of charity shop records and six hours in which to calm the world’s chaos and settle its people down to sleep.
This is a theatre show, which is also a radio show. You can listen to Tuning Out at home on-line via our website but true excitement comes when you visit its extraordinary studio in the theatre and become privy to presenter’s deeply compromised off-mic World.
Here’s the Radio Z website. You can sign in to the News Room bit and, during the performance, interact with things, send messages and so on.
There’ll be a pre-show talk with James Yarker at 6pm on the Friday to discuss the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if the development of this show had something to do (at least in part) with commentating on a Scalextric race for 24 hours last year, but you never can tell.
Applications are now open to companies across Europe for the first ever BE Festival, which will take place over four days: 30 June – 3 July 2010
The venue will be A E Harris where, as Stan’s Cafe point out, a fundraiser will be held for this event:
Temple Theatre are going to be performing their production Out Of Chaos @ A E Harris on 21st May. Doors open 19.30 show at 20.00. Tickets £10. To reserve tickets email info@befestival.org with your name and the number of tickets you require
The show’s had some great reviews and it all sounds worthwhile considering.
Incidentally, if anyone’s looking to sell tickets online for an event, Eventbrite does the job pretty well.
Such Tweet Sorrow launched the other day; a retelling of Romeo & Juliet via Twitter. Telling stories via Twitter isn’t a new thing particularly, but the size and scope of this effort is what sets it apart. The RSC are behind this after all, and from what I gather rehearsals and workshops for this have been going on for aaaages.
Oh aye, and the Birmingham link is the involvement of Mudlark as producers, Substrakt as the website designers and Kate Beatty as the photographer responsible for the shots of the cast.
There’s a PILOT night tomorrow – an evening of ‘new, untested shorts from some of the UK’s most exciting theatre companies’. AE Harris are housing and Kindle Theatre are hosting. It’s only a fiver so get down by 7.30pm for this little lot:
The line up will include performances from Needle & Thread Theatre’s continuing project The Story Exchange, a brick built Ziggurat from The Resurrectionists, a comic twist on a Greek myth from The Company Project, a public pillory from Mark Butcher, an operatic performance from Kirsty Lothian and the dulcet tones of Greg McLaren from Stoke Newington International Airport.
The evening will be fanfared by the City Sings Trumpeters and serenaded by The Mellow Peaches
