The Customer Is Always Wrong

This is the event at which The Customer will pop up on Monday:

Lumenis Theatre Company presents
Celebrating London and Multiculturalism.
A night of drama, dance and live performance plus networking with a panel of experts (Yellow Earth and Tara Arts).

This is a free event but advanced booking is essential.

Contact [email protected] to book.

For more information e-mail: [email protected]
www.lumenistheatre.co.uk

How does London perceive and represent other cultures?
What is London relationship with its multicultural community?
What are the challenges to tour a London show abroad?

Coming out of the London – Beijing Connection double-bill in September 2011, supported by Arts Council England and CTC British Council, this is the first of a series of events celebrating and discussing multicultural theatre and the relationship that England and particularly London has with the international community. With the approaching of London Olympics a debate on multiculturalism cannot be more relevant.

The focus of this first event is on how London perceives itself and other cultures in terms of confrontation and dialogue; the event will be loosely connected to Lumenis experience of bringing a show to the September 2011Beijing International Fringe Festival. This event will present new work by emerging and established practitioners including drama, dance and live performance and will be followed by a panel of experts and artists. Details below.

Opportunity
There will be also the opportunity to talk to David Ahlbrecht ACE Orange UK and US Representative on bringing a show to China.
ACE Orange is one of the biggest Chinese promoter and is seeking theatrical productions that can be easily translated to a Chinese audience (in particular but not limited to musical theatre, dance, opera). www.juooo.com
If you have a show or a production running or that you have recently produced, come and talk to David.

The Customer Is Always Wrong (extract) by Bill Aitchison

Bitter Translation by Alexandre Ross – a stage reading
www.alexandreross.co.uk

FOR HOW MUCH? (extracts)
Choreography: Annarita Mazzilli Music: Andy Higgs

After quite an interval, performances of The Customer are starting up again. This brings to the fore that question of how much should I attempt to recreate what I previously did and to what extent should it be remade according to where I am now. I am not doctrinaire on this issue and can see benefits to both impulses. It was a performance that was carefully constructed so that all the parts resonate off one another and changing one part can mess up a whole lot else so I have to be careful before savaging it. At the same time, things have changed and I don’t like to think of a performance as a museum piece. One of the qualities that has always attracted me to performance the most is the possibility to be reactive to the moment.

I’ve settled for a compromise keeping most of what I have but reworking what needs changing within the time frame I have available to do so. The biggest challenge in fact is relearning the Chinese text. I was going through both it and the Chinglish translation and saw how some changes were needed and how I could be more precise about the mechanics of translation. This let me back to the translation websites and I now have a nice new version of it. Next week I will have it performed live by Vera Chok in London and in March we will present it in Chinese German in Cologne as projcetd surtitles. I’m still very interested in how to destabilise the power relationships between languages and their speakers in this piece so this looks like it will offer some more opportunities to experiment.