Making Days and Manifestos

(Melanie Wilson at the Forest Fringe Microfestival at BAC, image by Ludovic Des Cognets)

This is a call for all the artists and actors and makers and doers who are thinking of heading to Edinburgh this summer. This is a chance to do something different with your time whilst you're there.

We wanted you to be able come together during the festival and make something new. To learn from some incredible artists. To be fired up and inspired. To leave Edinburgh with a new project, new collaborators and a different way of thinking about theatre.

To that end, we have two projects for you:

Forest Fringe's Making Days

13, 19 & 21 August 2010

Thanks to the support of the lovely people at the Jerwood Charitable Foundation we've been able to bring together an eye-wateringly exciting collection of artists to help us with a new project we're calling the Forest Fringe Making Days.

Part scratch, part workshop, part discussion, each making day is a chance for a group of artists to explore a different way of making live performance. Beginning at 10am, over the course of each day you'll create a new piece, something very raw and new in which hopefully will be the seeds not just of a new future project but of a broader understand of a whole way of making theatre. Spread over the course of the festival we'll have three of these making days, each led by two incredible artists:

Friday 13 August - Audio Performance: A chance to explore the diverse possibilities of making audio work, experienced via headphones, led by Duncan Speakman and Melanie Wilson.

Thursday 19 August - Intimate Performance: A day spent looking at the kind of intimate relationships that theatre can create between artists and performers, led by Adrian Howells and Deborah Pearson.

Saturday 21 August - Site-specific Performance: A day for exploring how performance can be site-specific and what that might mean for the relationship between a place and what we make of it, led by Grid Iron's Ben Harrison and Geraldine Pilgrim.

Each day will finish with a sharing where an audience can experience the result of your day's work, followed by an informal discussion involving artists, audience and anyone else who might be interested.

The Making Days are, like everything at Forest Fringe, a totally free opportunity. If you're interested in being involved please email andy[at]forestfringe.co.uk with a brief description of who you are and why you're interested.

There is unfortunately a very limited amount of space for each day. You don't need to have any prior experience in any of this kind of work to take part but if you could let us know why you're interested that will help us try and make the very tricky decision as to who can be involved. For the same reason we'd appreciate if people could apply for no more than two of the Making Days and state which of those two they are most interested in.

Take This Longing:A DIY project by Simon Bowes

20-22 August, 2010

For a weekend, outside Edinburgh, off from the Fringe, we will encourage each other. Participants will negotiate between themselves (and then name) an achievable outcome – a project for the future – enriching our various practices and creating a point of convergence between us. Together we will identify needs, wants, and frivolous wishes and aim, somehow, to fulfill them. We might discover common ground or shared need (or we might discover we have nothing in common). Whichever the case, we will find a way to agree on what needs to be done. We may end up calling this “a project”, a practice”, “an ethos” or “a movement”.

For more information please have a look here.