Journal

5th February 2024

Site visit to Bristol Avon

We've started working on our new project, Future River Soundings. Last week we visited the source of the Bristol Avon, which is in a hamlet called Didmartin. We visited a really old church that only had access via a muddy field, and then followed the river to Sherston, a village on the edge of the Cotswolds. By this point it was a flowing stream. We ended up in Malmsbury, where silk mills were housed on the edge of the river up until the early 1940's. Next week we're heading to the mouth of the Avon...

Posted by Jess: 5th February 2024

30th January 2024

Story of Uninvited Guests by Maddy Costa

At a recent board meeting we asked Maddy Costa to write some thoughts on the story of Uninvited Guests. This is what she wrote:

"When I think about Uninvited Guests, I think about a couple standing up on the other side of a long table, holding hands while we listen to a song that speaks to their love for each other.

I think about gazing into the eyes of a stranger and feeling the room around us dissolve.

I think about parading through Battersea to the sound of a trumpet, and the people who campaigned to improve the quality of life there.

When I think about Uninvited Guests, I think about slips of tissue paper burning away the ills of the world, and a crowd of people chanting together: make better please.

I think about standing in the dark in Soho, part of a group redesigning the architecture, seeing our madcap ideas merge before our eyes.

And a quiet night in Malvern, watching rocks and trees shatter and reform, my heart expanding with every movement.

When I think about Uninvited Guests, I think about what the future might look like, with the playfulness I struggle for elsewhere, and I think about the past that brought me here, and feel glad that it brought me here.

I think about how all of these works I’ve seen – Love Letters, The Good Neighbour, Make Better Please, Give Me Back My Broken Night, This Last Tempest, To Those Born Later – were made in the years when Jess and Richard were raising families, when Paul and Jesse were in Bristol while Richard was in London, when Paul was navigating the corporatisation of universities, and Tory attacks on arts education, when all of them were struggling with cuts to arts funding, and I think about the tenacity it takes to keep going in such an environment. The dedication.

So when I think about Uninvited Guests, a lot of what I’m thinking about is social change, and how rare it is for Uninvited Guests to address the idea of social change without an invitation to audiences to listen to each other’s voices and ideas, to think and feel together. With the result that, when I think about Uninvited Guests, I also think about and remember their audiences with an unusual clarity. If I believe in Uninvited Guests more than I do in many other theatre companies, this might be why: that sense of participating with, not being performed at.

Inevitably, then, when I think about Uninvited Guests, I’m also thinking a little about myself: who I am in the world, what I bring to a community, what my role might be in the slow movement toward social change. I recognise a connection in being roughly the same age as the company, and that this might have a little something to do with why their work resonates with me so: how often I felt them articulate a thought I didn’t know I had, or sharpen a thought I did.

I also think about myself as a board member for the company, in particular a conversation we had together – some time in 2017 perhaps – in which we wondered about the dramaturgy of the company, what connects the seemingly disparate kinds of work they make, so different from each other in form: performance on stage, walking shows involving audio, participatory work, some reliant on advanced technologies. The through line we reached (and I still have the notes we took, the diagrams illustrating this, I found the conversation so inspiring) was that Uninvited Guests examine the past to better dream the future, project the future to better understand the present. And in a decade when it’s been harder and harder to be hopeful, when I think about Uninvited Guests, hopeful is how I feel." 

Posted by Anonymous: 30th January 2024

27th February 2023

Love Letters performance

Thanks to everyone who came to see Love Letters Straight From Your Heart last Saturday! 

It was a brilliant way to begin our 25th Birthday celebrations... 

Posted by Anonymous: 27th February 2023

27th February 2023

Reflecting on our 25 years together

Leading up to our recent performance of Love Letters Straight From Your Heart we chatted to Fuel, who have been producing the show since 2006. We talked about how the company formed and a few highlights from over the years...

 

Can you share some highlights or favourite projects from the last 25 years of the company?

 

Highlights (and lowlights) over the last 25 years would include:

·      hearing that couples had decided to propose to each other after attending performances of Love Letters Straight from Your Heart.

·      whilst on tour with the show It Is Like It Ought To Be, having to take a very long (and terrifying) zip wire down from the Great Wall of China after being told ‘this is the quickest way and if we don’t do this you’re going to be late for the show tonight’.

·      Billennium, a theatrical guided tour of the future of a place using AR, has taken us to some amazing cities - Eindhoven, Budapest, Bilbao and Belgrade. Because the show requires local research into the history of that place we have met and talked to some fascinating people over the years. For example, we met Toti in Bilbao, a gregarious and entertaining author who knows a lot about the Basque region and history.

·      Jess, about 4 months pregnant, accidentally falling off a bed onto a floor of fake blood and ketchup in Schlock (which was in part a homage to horror films). The get out involved mopping up litres of the aforementioned fake blood and ketchup.

·      getting carpet burns from fighting each other at the end of Offline, our show about internet chat rooms (the set was a beige carpet and not much else). 

·      Richard pretending to be Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now for the show Film, but hurting his back doing so and having to lie in bed for a weekend with some frozen peas whilst everyone else went to a cool festival to perform the show with an understudy.

 

 What does it feel like to be returning to Love Letters post-Covid 19 lockdowns and the digital iteration?

 

What piece of advice would you give to theatre makers at the start of their careers today? 

 

Posted by Anonymous: 27th February 2023

13th February 2023

Performing Futures Video

Check out this VIDEO about a project called 'Performing Futures'.

 In 2022 ‘Performing Futures’ used two shows, Billennium and To Those Born Later, to test innovative, more inclusive and sustainable performing arts touring and distribution models.

Funded by Perform Europe and in partnership with IKUSEEARTE (Spain), Students’ City Cultural Centre (Serbia), PLACCC Festival (Hungary) and Fuel (London).

Posted by Jess: 13th February 2023

6th February 2023

Performing Futures at PM Studio

It was the Pervasive Media Studio's 15th Birthday celebration last Friday. We showed documentation of a number of shows that have been in collaboration with the studio over the last 12 years: Give Me Back My Broken Night, Billennium, Future Places Toolkit and Future Soundings.  

Posted by Jess: 6th February 2023

30th January 2023

New Project - Future Soundings

Future Soundings is a new project made in collaboration with Duncan Speakman. It is part workshop and part performance. It was recently performed as part of Hopeful Futures, a two-day event exploring the future of creative technology in Bath and Birstol, run by Bristol + Bath Creative R&D.

As you take a wallk through your city an app on your phone prompts you to imagine travelling through time. It asks you to describe what you might see and hear in the places you pass. When you return, a science-fiction story made collectively from the futures that you and other participants imagine is performed live with an improvised soundtrack. 

Posted by Jess: 30th January 2023