Forest Fringe

Peter Brook Empty Space Award

2009-11-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

Some delightful news for the beginning of maybe the year's most depressing month (it's cold, it's not Christmas and the only thing to celebrate is the ineptitude of some 400 year old Catholics) - today Forest Fringe became the 20th winners of the Peter Brook Empty Space Award.

It was genuinely a total surprise considering the inspiring companies shortlisted - BAC, Soho, The Arches, the Bush and the Minerva. I also got to shake Peter Brook's old man hand. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT FROM A DAY?

At the ceremony, Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph had some lovely things to say about us so I thought I'd post them here for you all to have a read:

Who knows how this decade will come to be written about in the years ahead? It may well be viewed as a wretched one but perhaps it might be seen as positively halcyon compared to what will follow. One thing's for sure - it started with anxiety about a tech-driven financial bust that proved unfounded and ended with the real deal, the kind of recession that carves itself into people's lives for a long time. In the end, the big theme wasn't war or the clash of civilisations but the one that's never really been out of currency - money.

Money was the making of theatre this decade - there was a lot more of it to prop up the subsidised sector, and even if you couldn't exactly point to a golden time in the West End in terms of art, it was certainly a gilded one. Yet now that the whole house of cards has fallen down, it's probably time for theatre-makers further down the chain, who are most exposed to the vagaries of the economic climate, to say that if they're being forced to beg, borrow or even steal to survive, then 'twas ever thus - because so-called boom years had their downside, too, in keeping costs high, and curtailing unprofitable experimentation.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Edinburgh Fringe where spiralling rental charges have conspired to restrict the affordability of a festival that is supposed to be the greatest artistic free-for-all on earth. I've seen at first hand how deranged the economics of bringing up just a relatively straightforward monologue are, even during a downturn; the risks of working on a more ambitious scale seem to grow by the year.

Which is where one has to salute with all the force of a Tattoo gun at midnight the efforts of the team behind Forest Fringe, which has in the space of a few years become an essential fixture at Edinburgh without actually joining itself to the Fringe as such. In its adopted church hall venue at Bristo Place, it operates not merely, prosaically, as a festival within a festival - but as a sort of other world, a boundary-pushing playground where, thanks to multiple volunteer efforts it's not the money that counts at all, but the stuff that happens between performers and their makeshift surroundings and between performers and curious visitors. If I could have wished away the hundreds of other chores that descend on a journalist while covering the festival, I'd have happily hung out at Forest Fringe for the entirety of its duration.

It seems to me that in its back-to-basics approach, it is totally forward-thinking - and potentially revolutionary in scope. Whatever the next decade holds, the seeds of the next wave of theatre - and probably even of our recover itself, lie in the expansive, inexpensive miracle that is Forest Fringe.

Thanks to everyone, artists, audiences, supporters in all their various guises, who have been a part of Forest Fringe. All of you have been totally integral to getting us to the point when such flattering things can be said about us and where we can win such long-standing and well-regarded awards.

The £2000 that is the prize for this award will go a long way to realising some of the plans we have for next year - audio libraries, microfestivals rearing up across the country and of course once again looking to re-imagine and remake our place within the Edinburgh Festival season. But more on all of that very soon...!

Late Night Notes

2009-06-11T16:56:00.001-07:00

I don't have a desk in my room, only a too-low table in front of a sofa with a laptop on it. Around it is sprayed the following in a semi circle moving anti-clockwise:

A jacket given to me by a friend
A copy of Raw Notes by Claes Oldenburg

A series of installation CDs for the laptop which I had to reformat last week, losing everything on it

A note from a young theatre company in an old-fashioned air-mail envelope

The notes from a presentation I gave two weeks ago
A letter from O2
An empty bottle of red wine on its side
A digital alarm clock
My driving license
An empty can of coke
A handwritten to-do list for this week, 80% crossed out
A small blue pen of the kind I imagine they use in betting shops
5p
An empty packet of wriggley's chewin gum
A CD of show that I have half-watched
A plate containing the crumbs of a peanut butter and banana sandwich
A copy of Arkive City, open at an article by Paul Clarke
An unopen copy of In Comes I by Mike Pearson
An old, yellowing copy of From Russia With Love, face down and splayed open at the page I last read
A padded envelope
A copy of Alex Kelly and Annie Lloyd's The Dust Archive

A copy of Art into Theatre
A programme from a show at BAC
An A4 notepad with nothing written on it
My laptop case

If you took the laptop out of the room these items would form a perfect splatter around it, marking where it once sat - like the silhouette formed in ice cream when someone is shot in the film Bugsy Malone.

The signature on my email at the moment is a lovely quotation from Lyn Gardner from over two years ago in which she said that Forest Fringe 'should revolutionise the fringe'

I just got an email from a friend of mine that simply said, in electric pink font:

So when are you going to stop fucking around and revolutionise the fringe then?

A good question.

I can't stop listening to Pictures of You by The Cure. It's addictively desolate, especially at ten past one in an otherwise silent house.

Drowning in a sea of very tiny light bulbs

2009-06-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

Ok. So picture this.

It’s five in the morning. You’ve been up for about 42 of the last 48 hours. In that time you’ve seen three spectacularly beautiful shows, one that passed you by in the moment but when you attempt to explain it to someone in two weeks time it will have become your favourite of the entire festival, an inadvisable comedy show with the soul destroying title ‘LOLacaust: The Musical’, a miniature encounter that made you cry in a good way, four pieces of paint-by-numbers devised theatre all of which involved a movement sequence to a Sufjan Stevens song and an outdoor show that would have been euphoric if it hadn’t been raining. You’re sitting in the corner of an overcrowded bar trying to hear the music over the raised voices around you. Big, exhausted thoughts chug lazily through your head, floating around aimlessly for a while before disappearing again. You are the fuzzy silence at the end of an old cassette tape.

Suddenly though, smuggled in amidst all the floatsam, is something different. An idea. A really, really good one. Though initially tiny it quickly expands, filling the inside of your head, bleeding out into everything you see around you. Now you're no longer gazing vacantly off into space, you're frantic - scrambling to find a pen and a piece of paper and somehow anchor it down before it disappears.

So there it is. An a fragile, wonderful idea caught in a series of frantic scribbles on the back of somebody else's programme. Brilliant. And then what?

Well, traditionally not a lot in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a place for showing not for making. For all that it is crammed to the point of delirium with spaces for putting on shows, there’s virtually nowhere to actually create something, to try anything out – in public or in private.

To me that just feels like such a crushing waste. Here is a city overflowing with potential collaborators, with supportive, generous producers and critics and audiences, with unusual spaces. With brilliant people doing nothing all day other than handing out flyers and sitting in their flats watching episodes of the Wire to try and avoid spending any more money. This bizarre month of excitement and inertia could (should) be the perfect environment for not only having a good idea but for pinning it down, for allowing it to take its first steps.

When BAC first created the One o clock Scratch back in 2005 it was a revelation. An opportunity for artists at the festival to try out a new project in front of an audience. The TEAM, Third Angel, Rabbit and dozens more created work there that blossomed into a whole family of brilliantly diverse, successful pieces. When it returned to the festival last year at Forest Fringe you could again feel the giddy excitement of the artists given this space and the audience who would have the opportunity to see what came out of it.

For us at Forest Fringe, that model (and the collective excitement generated from it) continues to be an inspiration. We want to provide more space and more time than ever before for new ideas to prosper.

We’re devoting a whole day at the end of the August to things dreamt up in bars and on walks and in conversations over the course of the festival. But more than that, we’ve tried to encourage a whole host of diverse opportunities for artists at Forest Fringe to explore a new idea – whatever form that idea might take. And so we have platforms in which a new idea can become an interactive experience, or a brief one-on-one encounter or piece of new writing. Hopefully almost anything, no matter how strange, will find the right space in which to happen. Because its often not just about providing a space and a platform, but ensuring that its the right way for an idea to be realised.

We're hoping that some, many even, of these small sparks will end up growing into full projects that come back to Forest Fringe next year. Or maybe they will have found their perfect incarnation first time around. Either way I'm excited to be able to say that I have no idea what what's going to happen.

Places for new ideas at Fores Fringe this summer:

The Miniaturists

24 & 25 August

Stephen Sharkey and Glynn Cannon programme a series of brilliantly diverse pieces of new writing, all of which have to be less than 20 minutes long. A celebration of the fact that even the smallest piece of written can deserve realising with all the effort and creativity of a full play.

Hide&Seek Sandpit

26 August

The brilliant people behind the Hide&Seek festiv al will be bringing their unique brand of social games & playful experiences to Forest Fringe. Strange interactive experiences scattered across the building and disappearing out into the streets around it.

BAC One o Clock Scratch

22 & 29 August

BAC’s legendary fringe forum for new ideas. See up to five different artists trying out 10-minute skits of brand new ideas. The birthplace of work by The TEAM, Third Angel and Rabbit amongst many others.

Stoke Newington International Airport’s Live Art Speed Dating

26 August

The boys from STK International, East London’s newest and bestest venue, are going to be filling the building with brand new 4 minute one-on-one encounters by some of the most exciting artists at the festival. See as many as you can.

BAC Nuit Blanche

24 August (Scratch Sharing the next morning)

BAC will be offering artists a chance to take part in a unique all-night residency at Forest Fringe, hoping that the peace, quiet and delirious creativity of the middle of the night will mean that there will be something memorable to see by morning. Artists interested can send ideas and pitches to lauram[at]bac.org.uk, using the subject line Nuit Blanche and anyone can come for breakfast and a sunrise Scratch sharing, followed by a group walk up Arthur's Seat.

Forest Fringe’s Great Unknown

29 August

Following BAC’s One o Clock Scratch the rest of the day has been left totally empty – to be programmed according to whatever absurd and brilliant ideas people come up with over the course of the festival. Just drop into the Forest at any point and tell us your ideas.

Stepping over the threshold

2009-06-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

Image via

I’m on the train, gently gliding past the back gardens of red brick houses somewhere on the outskirts of Leeds. The sun is smudge of white light in a pale evening sky. Everything outside feels very far away, an exact 1:1 scale model of the world bathed in perfect sinking sunlight.

My mistake, its York not Leeds.

We’re on our way back from the first trip to Edinburgh in preparation for the summer, now a little bit over two months away. This was a spectacularly brief 5 hour visit; a swift walk and a few sit downs in a very familiar city in unfamiliar sunshine, then back on the train again to head to Bristol. It’s left me feeling a strange mix of nostalgic and excited. Forest Fringe smells the same, it feels the same; if it had been raining it could have been last summer.

Yet it also feels pleasantly different. Not just the double-take acknowledgement of little tweaks and changes (a beautiful new bar nestled in the corner, a familiar face under a new haircut) but a different feeling. Just a little of the armour of almost defensive pluckiness seems to have dropped away. I walked into the hall and it seemed to have opened up its shoulders a bit, it was breathing a little deeper and a little slower.

I stood in the centre of the room, the light cascading in from the enormous uncurtained windows, and for possibly the first time Debbie and myself did our best to explain the full extent of the things we hope will happen in there in two months time. Epic pillow fights, furniture torn to pieces and remade as a house, audiences led singing down into the street, ketchup fuelled Westerns, all night performances, forty one-on-on shows squeezed into every corner of the room, a man dancing across the stage on his 75th birthday, funny things, achingly sad things and some things we don’t know yet and won’t know until the festival has already started. Shapes moved across the empty room, impossibly exciting, spectacularly intimidating. I imagined what I hoped to see, and wondered what I would see.

We actually are in Leeds now.

Forest Fringe will be different this year. Last year we were a dot, a single isolated point. A refuge maybe, from the rain or from the overpriced bars or the militia of purple-clad, Smirnoff-branded, flyerers or just from the unsustainably breathless busyness of, well, everything. And it was nice being a refuge; seeing familiar faces, standing at the door of the venue staring out at the damp street beyond like another country.

This year though we want to step over the threshold. To not simply ignore or avoid the rest of the city but ask how it might be different; how we might look at it differently, how we might remake the way the festival engulfs it. Because it no longer feels like we’re a dot; it feels like we’re part of something that’s growing; points connecting across the city; a new network or shared ideas and shared hopes based on something other than a joint marketing strategy.

Today we walked through the sunshine between Forest Fringe and St Stephen’s Church, the gentle stone giant of a building that until 2008 was occupied by the much-loved Aurora Nova. After a year where it sat sulky and unoccupied it is becoming the festival home of The Arches, Glasgow’s most consistently daring and exciting theatre. They have almost-impossible, stupidly brilliant plans for the festival, including staging the whole of Nic Green’s three-hour-long Trilogy every night; the festival hasn’t seen anything so daring, ambitious and genuinely radical for years.

On the meandering journey between our home and theirs we were also joined by a bunch of folk from BAC, who will once again be supporting and collaborating with Forest Fringe in a whole myriad of ways, without them there’s no way we would have been able to construct the kind of delirious, make-believe programme that we have. Together, we walked the space between these two places. We imagined what we might do in that space; the journeys, stories, adventures that might be constructed around it. We imagined other people walking it; artists, visitors, local people, together looking for something, or just collectively wandering. Already it felt like here was a fragile connection stretching across the city, one to be nurtured and enjoyed. One that can strengthen and grow with every person who walks that gap.

I felt like no one in that conversation was satisfied with a refuge. Everyone knew what they loved about the festival and what they found almost beyond parody; everyone had ideas for what else might happen there. It felt to me like this was the beginning of an attempt to try and make some of that happen, one which more and more people will hopefully become a part of.

With people like BAC and the Arches around in force, collaborating with us, sharing their thoughts and tips and ideas, I’m sure its going to be a good festival. And it’s going to be sunny. I’m sure of it. Gloriously sunny.

Nic Green

2009-05-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

If you're around in London on Tuesday I'd recommend you get down to BAC to see Nic Green's complete Trilogy. She performed some sections of it at Forest Fringe last summer and it was one of the most delightful moments of the festival.

Recently Tim Etchell's rightly said on his blog that politics 'shouldn't be left to the realists'. And Nic Green's epic, three part show - historical re-enactment, direct address, singing, dancing, euphoric collective action - is an incredibly inspiring demonstration of what political performance work could and should be. Honest, engaged, funny, inspiring, heartfelt and beautifully realised.

Nic's taking over BAC's enormous Grand Hall for one night and I think it's going to be quite a special moment. I recommend you drop pretty much anything and get a ticket.

If you're not based out of South of England though there's going to be ample opportunity to see (and maybe even be involved) in the show in Edinburgh this summer as brilliantly, the Arches (normally to be found in Glasgow) are going to be presenting it all month out of St Stephen's church as part of their new festival programme. Forest Fringe has all kinds of love for the Arches and we're really excited to have them across town from us.

Oh, and apparently it's going to be a long hot summer. Everything's coming up roses.

Volunteer at Forest Fringe – Reduced prices! Secret shows! The Fame! The Glamour! The improved sense of self worth!

2009-05-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

(photo via)

Forest Fringe is an award-winning new venue providing a home for experimentation and play in the midst of the Edinburgh Festival Season. Now in our third year, we’ve supported works-in-progress, one-on-one encounters, beguiling puppet shows, interactive adventures, installations and live art from our beautiful old church hall in the centre of Edinburgh.

This year the work at Forest Fringe includes internationally renowned companies such as Curious, Third Angel, Rotozaza and Action Hero. We also have a number of other projects lined up, including epic journeys across the country, secret experiences in caves and on the streets of Edinburgh and a series of late night events like nothing else in the city. All still for free or pay what you can.

We want you involved.

Forest Fringe receives no public funding. We exist and thrive on the creativity and passion of our volunteers. Volunteers work alongside the artists at the venue to man our box office, the front of house and to help make the shows happen. We encourage a collaborative approach to staffing at Forest. As a volunteer, you will help create our venue. You will often be one of the first points of call for audiences at Forest, or possibly a guide to a show in a hidden corner of the city, and we want you to think as creatively about that as you dare.

This year our perks for volunteers include:

A special ticket discount on the Arches programme at St Stephen’s church
A heads-up on all Forest Fringe’s secret events during the festival
An invite to our free volunteer’s dinner for all those (including the artists) who have worked at the venue
The love, admiration and respect of your peers.
The chance to discuss theatre with an artist whose work you admire while you help each other do something unglamorous, like recycling.

You are free to do as many or as few shifts as you choose.

If you’re interested in potentially being a volunteer with us at the Forest Fringe this year, please email ellie[at]forestfringe.co.uk* with your name and contact details. Emailing at this stage does not mean you have to volunteer, just an expression of interest. You can decide you are too busy at any point. We look forward to hearing from you!

[*replacing the [at] with the @ symbol]

Vantastic

2009-05-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

A lot of stuff arrives in Edinburgh in August. A lot.

Thousands of performers, a rainforest of flyers, all the bad weather that Scotland has been holding back in reserve especially for this occasion.

Mainly though it’s just vanload after vanload of kit. Enough garishly painted wood and plastic to make you weep. Poorly-built low budget sets, workmanlike soon-to-be-going-on-tour sets, breathtakingly complex European theatre sets, tables and chairs (like they don’t have tables and chairs in Edinburgh…), doors, microwaves, bookshelves, books, toy guns, fake guns, real guns, small glow in the dark statues of the virgin Mary – EVERYTHING has made the journey to Edinburgh.

Now generally there are about 3 options for this awkward voyage:

1) Try and fit everything in your car. Last year at Forest we had one company turn up with a metre square piece of turf wedged in the back of their tiny hatchback, along with four performers, as many umbrellas, a projector, a watering can, a colander and a Cyndi Lauper CD.

2) Rent a van. OH GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO MY BUDGET… DO YOU THINK WE CAN ALL SLEEP IN THIS VAN.

3) Find someone else who has a van.

Unsurprisingly option 3 generally tends to be a favourite, but that really requires that you know enough people with the resources to have a van that you can be squeezed into.

So we were thinking. Surely there has to be another way?

All those disparate groups desperately trying haul as much as possible into the back of their dirty grey Vauxhall corsas. All those folk optimistically posting on gumtree and facebook for fellow travelers. Maybe we can help.

As part of Forest Fringe this year we’re planning on programming an entire weekend of Bristol based work. Part of the joy behind such a thing would be that hopefully all the companies coming up together for that weekend could figure out a way to share the load and hopefully save themselves some money.

So why not try and do that on some larger scale?

Here is our plan. If we can get as many people as possible to say where they are from, what they need to get to Edinburgh and when they need it there for – maybe we can all start to organise ourselves into car and van shares. Maybe we’ll even find some brilliantly benevolent people who have vans or trucks or ferries they don’t need for the summer. WE CAN BUT DREAM. And of course if there are considerably less half laden vans winding their way up the A1 towards Edinburgh then everyone benefits, really.

Forest Fringe will certainly be looking for some friends to share a van up to Edinburgh with and I’m sure many of our companies will be too. So don’t be shy – let us know.

This is just a beginning. If you think this sounds like a good idea we'll definitely find a better way of organising it.

Les Petites Ampoules

2009-05-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

Exciting news fringe fans. Forest Fringe is massively proud to announce that our resident company for this year’s festival will be the delightful Little Bulb Theatre.

Based out of Canterbury, Little Bulb are a new company already doing some brilliant things. Their show Crocosmia was undoubtedly one of our highlights of the fringe last year (and one of it’s songs features in the Experimental Theatre Mixtape which by now of course you’ve all seen/admired/downloaded/playedtoyourfriendsandlovedones).

Although hidden somewhere in the soul-destroying greyness of an impressively bleak Radisson Hotel just off the Royal Mile, Crocosmia was able to generate more warmth and atmosphere than pretty much anything else I saw at the festival. And beneath it’s beautifully crafted aesthetic – all fragility and vinyl records and Battenberg cake – lay an unsettlingly dark exploration of storytelling; a world of uncertain fantasies that left you reeling. Basically we loved it and so we got them to come down and do some songs at our final goodbye party last year, which they did and were, once again, delightful.

Since then they have performed Crocosmia at the Arches in Glasgow, BAC in London. They’ve also created a new show, H.E.L.P/H.O.P.E which was at Mayfest in Bristol and can soon be seen scratching at BAC’s staggering BURST festival.

And if that wasn’t enough they have also been at various places with An Evening of Edible Mistakes, which in it’s weird way perfectly sums them up in its indescribability. It’s almost a cabaret. Or a music set. It’s funny. It’s surreal. It has good songs. Some might be made up on the spot. Some obviously aren’t. They are all brilliant musicians who work incredibly well together. Yet they have miniature fights, disagreements, they make mistakes. But the show is about mistakes, almost a celebration of them. How much of anything is to actually be believed. Layers of fiction are constantly rearranged like the pieces of a Lego set whilst the music and the jokes and the audience interaction wash through you with an almost overwhelming amount of charm.

At Forest Fringe this year they will be our resident company – taking the evening slot for the whole two weeks that the Paper Cinema were in last year. For it they will be creating a brand new show, Sporadical. The plan is that this show will collapse even further into each other the strange fictions of Crocosmia and the bizarre musical cabaret of Edible Mistakes. That’s pretty much all we can tell you at this stage. But we’re stupidly excited. As should you be.

Not only this but as Forest Fringe’s resident company Little Bulb will also be hosting a night of live music and other delights, performing some secret gigs in unusual spaces and potentially even doing a couple of very special performances of the award-winning Crocosmia over the month.

A lot to look forward to basically. So welcome to you Little Bulbers to Forest Fringe – we hope you enjoy yourselves.

Very soon we’ll be announcing more of the line-up for this year as it begins to fall into place terrifyingly quickly. Keep your eyes peeled here for more updates as they come or join our facebook group (no seriously please do, we’ve been stuck on very nearly 700 members for an achingly long time and it’s killing me.) or join our mailing list by emailing andy [at] forestfringe.co.uk (and replacing the [at] with @).

Music to watch shows by

2009-04-19T07:10:00.000-07:00

So there we were, crumpled contentedly on the sofa, itunes whirring down the alphabet. Through conversation and tiredness the music was simply washing over us. But suddenly with only the first five seconds of a song we didn't even know the name of, we were somewhere else entirely. The song was French duo Air's Don't Be Light but to us it wasn't really a song any more, it was a chunk of memory, a slither of Action Hero's Watch Me Fall torn from its context and sat here with us in the living room.

This was more than just a nod of familiarity. This was pop music equivalent of a tea-stained madeleine. This was transporting, like those songs that make you 14 or in love again. Because this song wasn't an accompaniment to a show, an accessory, a well-chosen aural flourish. This song was a vital part of the whole experience of being there; the power of its whirring, accelerating beats and its distorted vocals a necessary element of the show's unsettling, euphoria-baiting climax.

A song in a show is always an alien body. It is another work of art smuggled in. The power of a good show is in acknowledging that. In admitting that any work of art is a collage of borrowed thoughts and ideas, half-remembered quotations, conscious and unconscious allusions and echoes and pastiches and the memory of everything that might have happened in that space before you. The most thrilling, exciting, beautiful shows revel in that, in being a startling combination of the strange and the familiar, the borrowed and the new.

These shows understand what good pop music can do when it's given a proper part to play. When it is knitted into the fabric of the show, when the two are inseperable so that you hear that same song in a living room six months later and you the whole show is suddenly there in your head.

The more we thought about it, the more we realised that a lot of our favourite shows, those truly sublime experiences that live you fizzing with excitement, used music in this way. We found that many of our best show memories were formed when a brilliant song merged into, was an essential part of, an incredible theatrical moment. We started to tally them up in our heads and then as the list grew and grew we did what felt like the only appropriate thing - we decided to make them into a mix tape.

Which is exactly what we have done. Below are the results, by 'song (musical artists), theatre artist, show'. These were our rules (because a mixtape is NOTHING without rules).

1) You can only have songs you love

2) from shows you loved

3) The song has to be an integral part of the show, not just background or interval music

4) and when you hear it it must send you skidding back to the show itself

So, this is what we have. These are our selections. If you so wish, all the songs are available on itunes.

What was that song she played in the sad bit? [A Mix Tape]

1) How Fucking Romantic (The Magnetic Fields) - Rosie Dennis, Love Song Dedication
2) Billy 1 (Bob Dylan) - Little Bulb Theatre, Crocosmia
3) The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is out to get us (Sufjan Stevens) - The TEAM, Particularly in the Heartland
4) Gulag Orkestra (Beirut) - Gob Squad, Saving the World
5) Set Yourself on Fire (Stars) - Nic Green and BAC's Young People's Theatre, The Fire in the Woods
6) Sing, Sing, Sing (Benny Goodman and His Orchestra) - Punchdrunk, The Masque of the Red Death
7) Don't be Light (Air) - Action Hero, Watch Me Fall
8) Let's Dance (David Bowie) - Jerome Bel, The Show Must Go On
9) First Breath After Coma (Explosions in the Sky) - Ontroerend Goed, Once and For All We're Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen
10) You Are My Sister (Anthony and the Johnsons) - Chris Goode, Sisters
11) The Power of Love (Frankie Goes to Hollywood) - Uninvited Guests, Love Letters Straight to your Heart

All of which we are very pleased with. Problem is however, as any mixtape lover will tell you, 11 is no kind of number for a mix tape. It has to be 12. So we want your suggestions. What have we missed? What are the songs that have you tingling with remembrance? Leave your favourites in the comments and hopefully we can build ourselves a whole library of music that can make up the soundtrack to Forest Fringe this summer.

[This mix tape was put together with the brilliant Laura McDermott, who has seen more music gigs and more theatre shows than is probably healthy.]

A favour

2009-03-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

The road to Edinburgh is long and winding, an almost unending series of stomach-churning ups and downs.

This is quite literally true, if you’ve ever had the joy of travelling through the minefield of speed cameras, hillocks and sheep that make up the Scottish lowlands. If you can make it through on time, without three points on your licence or a woolly trophy skewered on the front of your car, you’re already three quarters of the way to success.

That road is also, rather less interestingly, long and winding and very uppy downy in the metaphorical sense.

Take for example this last week.

At BAC we skidded to an incredible high with our Forest Fringe weekend. Thanks to the support of Harun Morrison and the team at BAC we were able to put on two incredible nights that genuinely felt as if a small lump of the festival had worked its way loose and landed in South London. A thrilling number of people flitted round the building to see various exciting pieces, old and new. Both nights the generosity and enthusiasm of the audiences in the face of a bombardment of strange encounters and unfamiliar experiences was a joy to behold. I was genuinely warmed.

And yet at the same time as I was practically doing cartwheels across the red tiled roof of BAC, I was also discovering a fresh attack on our already fragile budget.

You see, the hall above the Forest Café (Forest Fringe’s home in Edinburgh) is a beautiful building. A high-ceilinged church hall full of aging wood and ramshackle charm. Nestled somewhere between grand and comfortable, it is just perfect. It is a space that has its own personality, inviting shows to spend time with it, rather than just in it. And that, for me, is wonderful – that brings a sense of presence and event and belonging to the shows at Forest Fringe which I love.

And yet with the old and the fragile there are always costs. Recently Forest discovered quite a monumental one, when it was deemed that the entire building had to be rewired, theatre lights and all. It turns out this costs a lot of money. A LOT.

We weren’t quite expecting that.

Now we’re a hardy operation. The very fact I’m typing this to you demonstrates that we haven’t collapsed in paralysing fear of our imminent demise. I’m saving my all my hyperventilating panic for the news that Batman isn’t real. Forest Fringe is still dead on course to hit Edinburgh in with all its might on the 17th August. So don’t go spreading any rumours.

However, we are going to have to raise a bit more money than we anticipated. Which is where you (hopefully) come in.

Forest Fringe has always relied on the generosity of its friends. We exist in order to demonstrate that incredible, exciting, slightly magical things can still happen in Edinburgh without the crushing financial burden that the festival normally brings with it. We survive because artists volunteer their time to help organise and run the venue, and because audiences give generously even when they don’t have to. We believe that by sharing out the costs of Edinburgh everyone can benefit.

So for that reason we’re appealing to you to help us raise enough money to rewire our theatre lights and ensure that Forest Fringe this summer is every bit as exciting as it should be with the incredible line-up of artists we already have confirmed.

All you need to do to donate is go to our website and click on the paypal link on the front page. Anything you can afford to give is massively, massively appreciated.

What with the world apparently going to hell in a very big handcart, there have definitely been better times to be asking people for a little bit of their hard earned change, and undoubtedly there are worthier causes than us. But if you can afford to spare even a few pennies, you’ll be helping send a little beam of safely-wired light through Forest Fringe and hopefully out into the festival beyond it.

Forest Fringe at BAC

2009-03-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Forest Fringe is three this summer. Two and a half at the moment.

Two and half is a good age. You´re growing hair and can fit into good baby clothes. Your gurgles have more clarity. You´re truly realising how brilliant nappies are.

Most importantly though, you´re learning how to walk. Giddy with excitement at this newfound mobility you´re disappearing off all over the place, turning up in unexpected corners of the house, massively pleased with yourself.

And so it is that on 27th & 28th March Forest Fringe will find itself at BAC. Totally wrong season. Totally wrong city. But still, there we are. All of a sudden we have legs and BY GOD we want to use them.

We want to give some of the artists who were around last summer a chance to try out their ideas again. To remake and improve them. We also want to give some of those people who´ll be coming up to Edinburgh this year with us a first opportunity to have a think about what they´ll be doing there. And, maybe most importantly of all, we want people who didn´t get a chance to come up to the festival last year to find out about what it is we do.

SO with the spectacular support of BAC, we´re going to filling the building with shows, miniature encounters, installations and live music. A fiver gets you in and then you can see as much or as little as you like. We´ll also have more information about what we´ll be doing up in Edinburgh this year.

There´s more information on BAC´s website or on our preposterously well-friended Facebook group (get involved - ALL the kids are with us. All of them). Hopefully I´ll see you there!

Testing, testing... ummm... hello, is this thing on?

2009-02-27T03:47:00.000-08:00

So, it's been a little while.

What's happened in our absence?

Bits and pieces, you know, like, THE WHOLE WORLD COLLAPSING INTO UTTER FINANCIAL DESPAIR. Probably whilst I'm writing it there's already bankers in the last tattered fragments of unwashed Armani suits forming ad-hoc gangs to scrap for tinned food on the streets of the City of London. Whole offices abandoned lying abandoned, strip lighting flickering on and off as the bulbs slowly die while a half-made pot of coffee congeals in an unwashed kitchenette. High streets of nothing but row upon row of the same closed shops, with the last Starbucks employees forming a sandbagged lookout to guard the remaining three paninis against marauding banker gangs, giddy on hunger and old tubes of Staples super glue.

It's a Brave New World, non?

I feel like I'm caught in that moment in a cartoon when Wylie E. Coyote has run straight of the edge of a cliff, his legs still cartwheeling suspended in midair, unaware still that any second now he's about to drop. People around me constantly reassure themselves that their general state of theatre-enforced pseudo-poverty mean things can't actually get that worse, I mean, surely everyone else will just come down to our level? Ha. I've read about Wiemar Germany - we'll see if things can get any worse or not.

And what of Theatre? Suddenly all that bickering over a more than generous pot of Arts Council money feels faintly flippant as I sit in a pub and watch the ebbing and flowing of amusement, camaraderie, shock and despair of a group of people who's turned up for work only to find the gates locked, with no time even to collect any important files left sitting on their computer desktops.

Of course we can tell people (rightly so) that theatre and the arts generate more money than they take in government funding, and that entertainment and enlightenment are never needed more than during the personal and social soul-searching of a recession. But that's not going to convince people who wander by a dust-collecting multi-million pound white elephant of a regional theatre on their way to try and find where the nearest Lidl is.

If anything this crisis has made me crushingly aware of how much our society is based on theatre. On a kind of glorious Munchausean dream that the performance of prosperity is enough to sustain it indefinitely. And so we instigate regeneration by building designer shops and expensive public monuments and cultural centres in old warehouses, and bankers take on ever larger loans and on top of it all Gordon Brown (as Chancellor, reaping what he would later sow without the charm of his grinning Cheshire Cat of a partner) assures us that the days of boom and bust are gone.

Whether this demonstrates that we can, like Claes Oldenburg, transform a landscape and a country with ideas alone, or whether this demonstrates that that is always doomed to failure, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe both.

Either way, it's a different Edinburgh that the festivals will land on this year and it will be interesting to see how we respond to that. Especially considering the official festival's major headline sponsor is currently setting records for the biggest ever corporate loss in UK financial history, with its former chief executive attempting to seemingly attempting to remodel himself in retirement as Scrooge McDuck, diving gleefully into a swimming pool full of gold.

The Fringe, like so much, has been carried in its ever more grotesque expansion on the shoulders of the banks that over-inflated our economy until their lungs collapsed. Like Formula 1 teams and High Street shops and Iceland, they too will suffer. It will be no surprise then if theatre turns round like a scorned lover and looks to slap these uber-banks, all the harder for trying to conceal their complicity in the excesses of the boom years.

Nothing represented the logic of the city like the Edinburgh Festival. Bigger is always better. More can always be sustained. All the while crowing about democracy for all (who can afford it).

Perhaps now that the root of that logic has imploded, sending jobs and savings splattering down glass walled offices from London's Docklands to Lothian Road, the Festival and it's new director will have to do a bit of soul searching.

Perhaps.

As for us, well, everything's early days at the moment. But the most important thing is we're trying to figure out how to do things better, without the now potentially redundant assumption that that necessarily also means bigger. So any thoughts, ideas, glorious daydreams you have do please post them in the comments or email them to us via our website.

Potentially there's no better time to demonstrate how much meaning and importance can be found in small things and cheap things.

Pangolin's Teatime

2008-08-04T02:16:00.000-07:00

So if you've been keeping up you will know that Pangolin's Teatime, a delightful puppet company from Edinburgh, have agreed to be challenged to create a show under a series of conditions set by me. And so after much thinking (well, a little bit of thinking) I have decided that those conditions will be the following:

1) No more than three puppetteers
2) No Speaking
3) At some stage you must animate an inanimate object
4) You must include the song 'Close to Me' by the Cure
5) You must use at least two areas of the auditorium, though not necessarily simultaneously.

So that's that - come along on the 15th or 16th at 5.30pm to see what they come up with.

Festival Olympics

2008-07-30T10:42:00.001-07:00

So a couple of years ago a friend and myself put together a little Fringe Drinking Game for people to work their way through on a quiet night in Edinburgh. It seemed to go down pretty well so I thought it might be time for some kind of sequel...

Of course, this year is an Olympic year - a time when the world comes together to forget about oppression and illegal arms trading and celebrate what dirty money and cheap labour can get built. Go Sports!

So, in honour of this occasion I have started trying to put together a Fringe Festival Olympics - a collection of festival-specific sporting activities for all the family. This is what I have so far:

The Royal Mile Sprint

A straight race between the two giant arches along the central stretch of the Royal Mile. First past the post is the winner, except:

No running, walking only please.
If anyone offers you a flyer you have to turn around, go back to the beginning and start again.

The Fringe Programme Hustle

Open the fringe programme to a random double page. You must collect a flyer or some kind of advertising material for every show on this page of the programme. First back with the full lot is the winner.

The Great B-Movie Hunt

You have half an hour to find the following:

1) A Bride
2) A Zombie
3) A Robot
4) A Queen
5) A Soldier
6) A Cheerleader
7) A Wrestler
8) A Nun
9) A Doctor/Nurse
10) An Alien

The person who can get the most of these figures in a single photograph wins.

The Living Statue Play-Off

Line yourselves up along the street as a series of living statues. The person with the most (or probably any) Money after half an hour wins.

The Self-Promotion Challenge

Create flyers advertising yourself as a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. The title of the show is your name. The image for the show is a photograph of you. You can be creative with blurb and quotes. At the bottom of the flyer you must include the line ‘Text “I Love [Your Name]” to [Your Mobile Number] for 2 free tickets”

The first person to receive this text message wins.

---

So that's a start, but we need more! And that's where you come in. Please feel free to add your submissions in the comments. The final list of games will be printed up and will be available from Forest Fringe throughout the festival.

Forest Fringe Profiles: Pangolin's Teatime

2008-07-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

[Team Pangolin's Teatime hard at work, photo courtesy of Alex Hall]

God bless the change of plan. Few things generally tend to work out for the best with such brilliant regularity.

This New Year for example at about half one in the morning I could be found (but fortunately wasn't) drunkenly gasping for breath propped up against the wall of a toilet cubicle in an overcrowded former town hall somewhere in South London. It was hot. I was suffering. My Jacques Cousteau costume was reduced to nothing but a pair of orange swimming goggles. Things were not looking good.

Then, like some kind of over-excited guardian angel poorly disguising their spectacular drunkeness, I bumped into a friend of mine in a hallway, who mumbled something about Finsbury Park - we were off, busses and trains blurred by in a breathless trail of free public transport (they make it free at New Year - this single thing probably made me love London more than anything that had happened in the past year and a half I had lived there) and suddenly I was at a house full of strangers in a part of the city I knew only because spelt backwards it sounded like Crappy Rub-Sniff. It was the best.

A change of plan bless the change of plan. And so it has proved once again.

First of all the bad part though. Unfortunately Nick Young, who's company Crack Theatre, were supposed to be performing Controls at Forest Fringe has had to pull out for personal reasons. It's a real shame as it was one of the shows I was really looking forward to seeing (and one of the companies I had no experience of before they got in touch) but we wish Nick all the best and I'm sure he'll be back next year with something new.

And so with but a couple of weeks left before the festival started we suddenly had a tiny puncture in the programme and it was at that moment that I thought of Pangolin's Teatime.

Pangolin's Teatime are an Edinburgh based puppet company who, like me, came up through the Bedlam Theatre - Edinburgh's student run theatre, which stands all red and churchy and grand looking, directly opposite Forest Fringe.

The company was started by Jeremy Bidgood - an Edinburgh college of art student who I've known for about four years. He actually appeared in one of my first ever shows - an almost (almost) endearingly earnest version of Howard Barker's completely brilliant play Victory. For the show Jeremy created a magnificent severed head, all black and decaying and oozing unpleasant things from every tattered wound. Since then Jeremy has continued to experiment with models and puppets (directing amongst other things a version of Equus for which he created all the horse masks) to the point where he decided to start a company dedicated entirely to the process.

However, one of the delightful things about the company is that far from being a one-man show, every step of their process is wonderfully collaborative - with practical puppet-making workshops bleeding into improvisations and games and collaborative attempts at story telling to create an entirely fluid process of creation in which everyone's skills are shared and a truly charming sense of fun can be felt.

Their first show Haozlka was a big hit at the festival last year and went on to win several awards at the national student drama festival.

The most interesting thing about the show was, for me, undoubtedly the puppets themselves. The company already seemed to be developing a quite personal aesthetic; creating a number of different styles of puppet that all complemented each other beautifully and were irresistably lovely to watch. It was a show with a lot of promise and so I was already looking forward to see what they came up with this year for their new show The Last Yak. Mainly I think I was possibly looking forward to much use of the word Yak. Yak.

And then came the very sad call from Nick one day whilst walking in the rain along Kingsland Road and suddenly our programme had a hole.

After deciding between us that we were happy to invite Pangolin's to come and do something at Forest I got in touch with them and they were delighted to be involved, initially suggesting that maybe they could do a workshop followed the next day by a little show. By this point however the mechanics somewhere in the back of my head had started whirring and another idea had popped into existence.

We came up with the plan of giving the company at the start of August a series of challenges - provocations for a new show, things like 'no talking', 'you're only allowed two puppeteers', 'you must incorporate this story' etc. The idea being that they had to try and make a show within these fairly proscriptive constraints with only the puppets they already had at their disposal from the other two shows.

I liked the idea of this - of using only what you have to try and find some way of telling this new story. I liked this scrappy little challenge. I liked the way I hoped it would make the company think. I remember being at a fascinating seminar on devising where one guy was explaining the use of what he called 'wild cards' in problem solving; the idea being that one of the best ways to actually solve a problem is to throw in more problems (or at least more factors) as it opens up different areas of your brain that you weren't using before and so you start thinking more broadly, more strangely. I liked this. I wanted the company to think strangely.

And brilliantly the Pangolin's team were equally intruiged by the idea, so we'll get a chance to see how it works out. Once I've decided what the rules are I'll post them up here for all to see. Then come along on the 15th and 16th and see what they manage to come up with. Alongside this Jeremy will also be leading a free bonus workshop on how to work with puppets after the performance - so it's all good!

Pangolin's Teatime vs. Forest Fringe is on 15th & 16th August at the slightly later than scheduled time of 5.30pm. The Last Yak is at Pleasance Dome at 3.40pm (almost) every day.

Most imaginative... that's us that is.

2008-07-27T10:30:00.001-07:00

Am chuffed to pieces with a delightful mention in Scotland on Sunday's guide to August Attractions:

THE MOST IMAGINATIVE PROGRAMME

Forest Fringe

As ticket prices for the Fringe continue to rise, it's great to find a venue that has a 'doing-it-for-the-love-of-the-game' feel to it. The Forest Café on Bristo Place operates on a pay-what-you-can basis, and has a programme packed with experimental performances. Shows to watch out for include The Night Flyer by Paper Cinema and Kora, which has visited Glastonbury and uses a mix of drawing, puppetry, cinema and music, and the One O'Clock Scratch, in which artists try out different ideas and encourage audience feedback.

www.forestfringe.co.uk

Not long to wait now...

Forest Fringe Profiles: Rabbit

2008-07-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things we know about Rabbit.

1) Rabbit makes things happen.

2) Rabbit likes adventures.

3) Rabbit has many friends.

4) Rabbit has been sighted (or maybe spoken of (or maybe dreamt of)) in many places.

5) Rabbit has been missing for some time.

6) Rabbit likes people email - why not try rabbit2965@gmail.com.

This is (for now) almost all we know.

Music OMH

2008-07-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

Critic, blogger and all round nice person Natasha Tripney gives us a bit of a plug in Music OMH's preview of the Edinburgh Festival:

Away from the main venues there are countless unexpected pleasures to be found, truly vital work. Take the Forest Fringe, curated by the passionate Andy Field and Deborah Pearson. They aim to provide an alternative space, where experimentation thrives, artists aren’t crippled by the costs of staging a three week run and genuine risks can be taken. Their staging of Paper Cinema’s The Night Flyer looks hugely appealing.

Delightful.

More Nice Things...

2008-07-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

Couple more lovely mentions from les journaux. First up in the print edition of the Guardian we (or rather the delightful Paper Cinema) featured in their theatre recommendations for the festival:

Theatre
The Night Flyer
A disarming mix of puppetry, animation and live music, this show is by Paper Cinema, resident company at Forest Fringe - a venue that allows artists to take risks, and audiences to pay what they can. Should revolutionise the Fringe.

And then we also got a mention in Dominic Cavendish's invaluable guide to Edinburgh on a budget:

There's also a fabulously altruistic project called Forest Fringe (3 Bristo Place) which invites audiences to sample a range of experimental theatre on a pay-what-you-can basis from Aug 5-18.

Thank you kindly to those people. I'm quite taken by the idea of fabulous altruism, conjuring the frankly perfect image of a rabbit in Gucci sashes and tiny Prada sunglasses thumping on the roof of a rapidly collapsing warren to warn its comrades of the impending danger. It's been a long weekend...

Company Profiles: Charlotte Jarvis and Clemency Cooke

2008-07-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

[The Mantilla Foundation, Image by Jamie Archer]

Undoubtedly one of the most frustrating things about the Official Edinburgh Fringe Festival and its biblically long Festival programme are the absurdly over-simplified categories shows are required to pigeonhole themselves with in order to get into it. Early on in the process companies are forced to decide whether they want to be considered Comedy, Theatre, work for children, or 'Dance and Physical Theatre', the festival's tentative catch-all for anything that has a lot of moving around in it.

Now I'm sure from a marketing perspective its great to be able to split everyone up, give them a category and a colour-coding tell them to be on their way. Yet surely this is kind of the opposite of everything the festival once stood for? The Fringe was, after all, a fringe once. It was an edgeland, somewhere wide open, unpredictable and risky and new. It was a land of outcasts and misfits, a place where work that defied conventional categorization could find a home.

You tell audiences something is Comedy and they will go expecting Comedy, you tell a company that people are coming expecting Comedy and they will feel like they should deliver Comedy. And frankly I don't think that's all that healthy a way to make something.

We want to give artists and audiences that space of unpredictability back. We want to make mongrel theatre; work that is funny without being Comedy, that is theatrical without Theatre, that is artistic without being Art, physical without being Dance (or indeed Physical Theatre).

Charlotte Jarvis and Clemency Cooke are the perfect example of this. CJ and Clemency are graduates of Edinburgh College of Art, where they studed Fine Art and since graduating they had a number of succesful gallery shows in both England and Scotland.

Yet much of their work has always played in the space between the gallery and the theatre. One of their first projects was the creation of the Mantilla Foundation, a bespoke cremation service for regretted pieces of art. In the guise of this mysterious entity they appeared at a number of major art events across Europe and North America, decked out in sinister umbrellas and veils, encouraging artists of all kinds to submit any work they are ready to see the back of.

Live Feed, another later project, was a performance dinner party in Madder 139 Gallery in London, exploring the bizarre rituals and power structures that dictate the way we eat. The evening involved amongst other things eating Sushi of a naked man who then stood up, was brushed down, dressed and sat down to eat with the rest of the guests, later the guests were tied up and fed by an anonymous hand poking through the table and at the end the excesses of the meal were recorded in a series of theme park style action photos displayed in a special commemorative cardboard frame. The whole thing was as fascinating as it was disturbing, a gloriously grotesque (and highly theatrical) parody; a dinner party aware of its own absurdity that set about deconstructing itself one course at a time.

At Forest Fringe things are hopefully only going to get more gloriously confusing as they present a performance lecture on their new creation Thought Art. Thought Art is the lovechild of conceptual art and theoretical physics in which the actual physical art work is once and for all annihilated and replaced with a delicate, intimate art that exists only as a thought shared between people. Like all Clemency and CJs work together the idea is brilliantly balanced between absolute earnestness and gentle self-mockery; it is fun, but serious fun. Yet beyond this play there is something quite personal at stake as well; an attempt to reunite two people divided by the very physical barrier of the Atlantic Ocean. This is maybe the thing I love most about the idea, that something so knowingly conceptual becomes equally something quite localised and intimate and, well, emotional.

And like Paper Cinema and their hand-made live-action Cinema, like Action Hero and their performance come recreation of a daredevil stunt, like any number of the beguilingly strange things happening at Forest Fringe, its joyously unclassifiable. And I love that. I love its defiant wierdness.

Hopefully Forest Fringe, lingering suspiciously as it does on the fringes of the official fringe, is the perfect home for the this kind of work. A space for the unclassifiable and the wierd.

Thought Art: A Lecture by Charlotte Jarvis and Clemency Cooke will be at Forest Fringe on Thur 14 August at 1pm.

William Shatner Karaoke

2008-07-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

Actor, thinker, dreamer, man. William Shatner is a lot of things. Primarily though we at Forest Fringe like to think of him as a re-imagineer.

Shatner has, to a degree, created his own artform. He takes mere songs and makes them into theatre; into sad-eyed, weary-voiced, heartbreaking theatre. With just a puff of a cigarette and a achingly long gaze into the camera, Shatner has the power to transform any popular song into the tragic story of a Canadian everyman beaten down by love, loneliness and the crushing excesses of contemporary urban society.

Take for example Elton John's Rocket Man. A good song initially, if a little, you know, Elton John-y. There's also a perfectly decent version by Kate Bush. However there is no doubt in my mind that the following Shatner take on this tale of space travel and broken families is undoubtedly the definitive version, all crumpled tuxedo and suspicious smelling cigarettes:

All you need do is take a brief glimpse into the eyes of Bernie Taupin to know that truly he is seeing his words truly honoured for the very first time.

And then there is Harry Chapin's seminal tale of failed dreams and lost loves Taxi, here again given the inimitable Shatner treatment:

Just look. Look at that half-glimmer of a smile playing gently on his lips, that constellation of twinkles glittering in his eyes. This. Is. Monologuing. When you need five minutes of top drawer Acting, Shatner has to be your man anytime. As you watch him cantering comfortably into his stride one can't help but shake one's head and think 'good lord, this man could Act anything...'

Of course the Shat wasn't the first to transform the narrative pop song into monologue - here for example is Frank Converse performing Paul McCartney's She's Leaving Home way back in 1967.

Shatner however has undoubtedly made the form his own.

What's that? Oh... I believe that's the sound of Jarvis Cocker being PWNED... (and yes, that was Ben Folds on the keyboards)

So in honour of Canada's finest ever export my fellow Director Debbie Pearson has wonderfully created William Shatner Karaoke. The premise is simple:

1) Each person who wants to play must choose a popular narrative pop song.
2) They will then perform this pop song to Camera and in front of an audience as a dramatic monologue, either in the style of Shatner himself or in one of their own choosing (potentially a whimsically northern Alan Bennett style talking head...)
3) This monologue will be both recorded for the Shatner vaults and projected live for everyone else to see in all its glory.
4) The longer you can go without someone realising what the song is, the better.
5) The moment you corpse, your turn is over. Shatner never corpses.

So that's its. We'll be playing an almost unnecessary amount of William Shatner Karaoke at our Goodbye Event on the 19th August (a day of sharings, music and other as-yet-unplanned and uncreated events that will be formed during the festival) so do come along with a monologue prepared. Don't do it for us. By God, do it for Shatner.

Residence

2008-07-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

[Here's something from James of Action Hero about Residence, an artist-led collective of companies and individuals based in Bristol who make theatre, performance and live art. Members include both Action Hero themselves and Ed Rapley, who will also be at Forest Fringe with some of his solo work.]

A few weeks ago Residence were forced to move. The council had decided they needed the old police station we were in and so we found a new space (coincidentally another police station) and moved in. The day we moved was an uncharacteristically hot day in May and at the end of the day as we all stood in our new space overwhelmed by the work that needed doing and bickering about where things should go someone suggested we needed to go for a swim to cool off. So we jumped in our hired van and drove to a river near Bath picking up a bottle of champagne on the way and jumped in. As I swam on my back I listened to the others who only a year ago I had never met and started to realise the essential brilliance of what, as a group, we had achieved.

As artists when you’re all sitting on your own in your bedrooms competing for the same limited pots of arts council money and the same limited opportunities its easy to see other companies as a threat. Its easy to be overly judgemental of other peoples work or jealous of those who are getting attention. In the short time we’d all been part of one organisation that competitive edge has gone, we can see more clearly how collectively we are stronger and the support we give each other is more important than anything else because it is what drives us to continue making work and its what pushes the quality of the work higher. Instead of moaning over a pint in the pub or sulking at home we were swimming in a river drinking Bollinger.

Now before you shoot me for my disgusting smugness let me defend myself. Setting up Residence has not been easy and as an organisation we are far from perfect. There have been many obstacles on the way and there have been conflicts and tears and we’re still facing new issues everyday that often seem insurmountable. But I guess its these challenges that stop most people beginning such a venture and I wanted to paint the (sickeningly) idyllic picture above because I really want to encourage those who are maybe tentatively putting their toes in the water at the moment to jump right in. What I didn’t tell you about that day was that we got lost trying to find the river and spent 2 hours walking through fields treading in cow shit and grumbling before we got there but that’s the thing about idyllic rivers. You have to walk through cow poo to get there.

Residence came about because a few like minded artists wanted somewhere to rehearse, office space and to feel more connected with each other. We’d all been making work at home in our bedrooms, and felt isolated doing that. So Residence was really a response to the problems we all faced making performance work as young companies in Bristol: can we support each other, can a dialogue between artists help us all make better work, can we pool our resources for the collective good?

We had no plan, and we still have no mission statement. We’re a loosely bound group who are united by similar needs. We have just tried not to limit ourselves by using what has gone before as a model, we’re trying to focus on the specific opportunities that exist in today’s environment and how we can benefit from that. Once a few of us started, more people joined us, more opportunities arose and soon we had something resembling an organisation. I’m really excited to be part of the Forest Fringe this year because its been set up in a really similar way and is showing how artist led initiatives can make all the difference. To be able to create a like-minded supportive, creative community in the middle of the pot noodle musical meat market that is Edinburgh is no mean feat and I can’t wait to see what fun it brings. See you there!

You can find out more about Residence on their website or simply by finding James and Gemma of Action Hero or Ed while they're at Forest Fringe.

Action Hero will be showing a work in progress of their new show Watch Me Fall from Tue 5 - Thu 7 at 5pm

Ed Rapley will be creating a series of one-on-one experiences from Fri 8 - Sun 10 at 7pm and then showing his solo show 10 Ways to Die on Stage on Mon 11 at 5pm

"An artist-led initiative that might dramatically change the face of the fringe"

2008-07-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Some lovely words about us from Lyn Gardner on the Guardian Blog today:

Forest Fringe - a pay-what-you-can venue programmed with artists and companies who don't have to pay for their slots - could be the most important development in the Fringe for years. In taxing times when even big operations such as Assembly are facing difficulties, it offers a model of an artist-led initiative that might dramatically change the face of the fringe. BAC will be there with its Scratch performances, Paper Cinema is the company in residence, Unlimited and Rabbit will be trying out new work alongside the UK premiere of Dislocation of the Heart from the St Petersburg-based Derevo protégées, The Rain People. It is operating outside of the main fringe programme, so look at the website.

This time next year, Rodney, we'll be millionaires...

Forest Fringe 2007 - Survivors

2008-07-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

So for Forest Fringe 2007, Debbie went out and brought three small pot plants from somewhere nearby. She placed them on a windowsill on the stairs in an effort to make the place look half presentable. And there, remarkably, they stayed. They had to put up with two weeks of mad theatre, drunk crowds attending music nights and shocking care - I have to admit I didn't water them once. Personally, I was convinced some drunk visitor at 2am would think they looked good and take them. Sometimes its nice to be wrong.

At the end of two weeks, we carefully took them home. Debbie took one and I took two, and I combined them into one pot and looked after them carefully. I do water them now, I should say. As you can see, its doing well. It will be back for Forest Fringe 2008. Please treat it well.

James, Venue Manager

Forest Fringe Profiles: The Paper Cinema and Kora

2008-07-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

Somewhere hidden within the vast, Gothic labyrinth of rooms that made up Punchdrunk and BAC's The Masque of the Red Death was a secret. Sandwiched between a sinister puppet-makers and yet another crepuscular corridor was a small door with a little Victorian poster on it advertising a side-show of diversions and amusements. Step inside and you stepped into a different world.

This little space was the home to numerous miniature shows, buried like treasure inside The Masque of the Red Death. Artists were given a weekend to fix something up based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe and week to perform a piece of about 15 minutes length for audience members who would stumble upon it as they wandered curiously through Punchdrunk's mammoth installation.

As I was working at BAC at the time I was lucky enough to see almost all these little shows (by companies including Kneehigh, Uninvited Guests and Blind Summit) but none was quite as charming and quietly beautiful as that made by the Paper Cinema. Huddled in the dimly lit room we watched a screen in front of us while to one side the company themselves sat, arrayed around a tiny black box and a video camera. As they delicately moved dozens and dozens of paper cutouts back and forth in front of the camera on the screen in front of us a world was conjured; a world of pirates and plague, of mysterious figures and rowdy bars, of magical journeys and impossible twists of fate. To the gentle and perfectly pitched sound of a single live guitar these sinisterly beautiful illustrations danced across the screen. The whole experience was just completely lovely.

The Paper Cinema were born of the Bournemouth music scene, initially providing charming illustrations to flit across the background for a number of musicians at bars and gigs and festivals. As illustrator Nic Rawling has grown more confident in the skill with which he crafts his tiny worlds the relationship with music has slowly started to change. Now it is more frequently the music that is supporting the storytelling, subtly underscoring the action and contributing hugely to the woozy, late-night feel of this unique company. And without doubt the music is still absolutely integral, the musician in the case of the Night Flyer (their show at Forest) being the brilliant Kora.

There's something hugely alluring about the whole unusual process through which the Paper Cinema make their shows. For a start the brilliant juxtaposition of Nic's laboriously hand-crafted drawings and a live-video feed from a digital camera projected onto a screen. And truly for the magic comes in the decision to tell these stories live, rather than in stop motion or other traditional forms of cartoon-making. There a beauty, in an age of Pixar and their CGI brilliance, in seeing the wobbly movements and unchanging expressions of these characters drawn on pieces of paper. But more than that in the relationship between the figures in front of you, playing guitar or waving tiny scraps of card in front of the video camera, and the action on the screen something quite wonderful occurs. We are suspended between two worlds, seeing two halves of the same action; lost in the cinematic world of the story and yet still in the room with these musicians and puppeteers. For once we are being trusted with knowledge of how its all done. The magician is quietly performing her tricks without the smoke and mirrors, and in watching her careful workings there is more meaning and beauty than when all that is concealed.

After seeing King Pest, the name of the show they created for The Masque of the Red Death, I was desperate to get them to come to Forest Fringe. It was only later that I actually discovered that they had already played downstairs at the Forest previously, filling the space to the rafters for a cafe gig. Considering this prior relationship we thought they would be the perfect resident company for Forest Fringe, a regular evening slot that closed the day and sent everyone swooning into the night. Their soft, gentle style felt like the perfect antidote to the flashy bustle of the festival; a strange, alluring quietness that, like their show in The Masque of the Red Death, would provide a bubble of calm away from the loud, spectacular goings-on around them.

The Paper Cinema and Kora will be performing The Night Flyer from 5-15th August at Forest Fringe at 9pm, all tickets are Pay What You Can.