As part of The Performance Corporation’s continued commitment to creating space for professional artists, we have secured additional space at Castletown House for artists to work. This programme will be run throughout the year on a submission basis and based on artists’ needs.
More InfoWhile myself and Irene are in the office preparing for auditions next week, the other half of the company are in Berlin preparing for a show.
Tomorrow, Saturday 4th July, Jo Mangan, Tom Swift, Lisa Lambe and Jo Thomas present Cool Fresh Milk at the Electronic Church in Berlin. Irene and I will of course be with them in spirit. Our bodies will in Cork and London respectively though, oh what a jet set bunch we are! Cool Fresh Milk explores a new strand of theatrical possibilities for the company, with a mix of live electronic music and performance. It’s all new and exciting ground for the company and we’ll keep you posted as to how it goes!
Watch this videosnap shot to get an idea and we’ll have more when the team come back from Berlin.
For the second year running, Jo Mangan and myself attended this wonderful conference in York, run by Pilot Theatre company. They did not disappoint. My brain is still spinning with ideas and inspiration.
The conference this year was run over two days, filled with speakers and more ideas that you had room to fit in your notebook. Check out there ‘NING’ community to see all the details or Pilot Theatre website for a breakdown of the speakers.
The highlights for me were:
www.thesanchoplan.com - a wonderful meld of music and live graphics
mediasnackers.com - a wonderful website that will explain much better than I can the web 2.0 developments that we need to pay attention to.
FriiSpray - a lovely little invention (open source)
www.dothegreenthing.com - because we in the Arts definitely need to.
http://kodhspace.com - a company that uses the wonderful world of online 3D to make collaboration global!!
If you are not already you should be tweeting, get on TWITTER. You can follow us @PerformanceCorp
Ideas and nice quotes that arose:
Concepts of play - a way of being, a design theme and a means to creativity, - are essential to understanding how culture will develop in the 21st century.
If you’re aren’t aware how fast the web is moving forward: Shift Happens a nice and scary little video
A show begins from the first moment you hear about it and finishes when you stop thinkging about it. - how do you engage with your audience more with this in mind?
Make a mess online - click on buttons.
Document and evaluate your process - online and offlne.
Busy old period at the moment.
I’m off to Cork for the Midsummer Festival this week, then to York for a great conference I attended last year with Irene called Shift Happens hosted by Pilot Theatre and then we take our latest piece “Cool Fresh Milk” to Berlin.
“Cool Fresh Milk” is a piece evolved by Jo Thomas (composer resident on the SPACE Programme earlier this year), Tom Swift (writer) and Lisa Lambe (performer). Its a live text/live electronic music/live performance event which is to be performed at the Electronic Church in Berlin (a music venue). Anyway its all new and exciting ground for the company and we’ll keep you posted as to how it goes!
Hello!
We hope you are enjoying our new website, as we have been carefully rebuilding it over the last few months, so that works better for you and for us.Let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions.
The Performance Corporation and its team; i.e. Jo, Kelly and myself are constantly striving for innovation. This includes our online networks, theatre is alive online as well.So this year, for the second year running, Jo Mangan and myself with head to York in England, to the Theatre Royal and Pilot Theatre company’s annual conference Shift Happens.
This conference focuses on web 2.0 and online networks, specifically for theatre companies. Through lectures and hands-on demonstrations, Jo and I will be able to engage with some of the new and best sites on hand to theatre companies, whether that is for administration, rehearsals, coordinating shows or marketing. The possibilities of theses sites can be very broad.
Last year we discovered a number of useful websites that have now become a backbone to how we organise elements of our work:
Wikispaces:
A very simple website, that allows you to create your own working space.
Within your site, you can create pages (very similar to word documents) of information.We have found this especially useful in our production process. We store design ideas – images, video and sound online and all our team can access all the information remotely.This provides a wonderful opportunity between production meetings for information to be kept updated.
Meetomatic:
The handiest thing for administration that I have seen in a long time.
You create a meeting, add your availability over a period of time, email a link to the other required attendees and wait.When an attendee inputs their availability, you get an email.
You can see as people input their availability, the possible meeting dates.
You can make certain attendees VIP, so dates will correspond with their availability.
It’s truly an excellent time saving tool.
The tale of the other side…
For those of you who know my work, I am the Project Coordinator for The Performance Corporation, which to date has included management of shows, company administration and many other organisational aspects.
However, yesterday for the first time, I explored the other side. I performed with the company for the Business to Arts Awards reception.
Yes, I joined the other side for a short sweet period, as a singer. The piece was devised and performed within three days, a daunting task, but I relished every moment. Costumes were created using newsprint from the Irish Times print house and designed by Oisín Byrne. With Castletown’s grand entrance hall and staircase as the backdrop the piece was created to stunning visual effect with music composed by Jo Thomas.
White Out is a collaboration between The Performance Corporation, visual artist Oisín Byrne and composer Jo Thomas, based on work that was explored at this year’s SPACE Programme.
With just two days to rehearse, I was thrown into rehearsal alongside 8 other artists:
Brian Bennett
Louisa Carroll
Emma Fitzgerald
Robert Jackson
Lisa Lambe
Regan O’Brien
Hilary O’Shaughnessy
Stephen Swift
I haven’t been quite this particular kind of tired in a long time. But it is satisfying and I hope you like the photos of the work….
The video will follow very soon….but here’s some photo samples of what to expect:
