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.
A report in Chinese about the Shanghai performance recently came to my attention. Here it is:
The Customer Is Always Wrong in Shanghai
Some more press has emerged, this time an article on the performance in Berlin that was part of Extension Series. Posted below.
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=566960695…
And another piece written about the show in Brighton:
http://louisehalvardsson.blogspot.com/2011/05/chin…
What a relief it is to have some writing about the work that comes from a position of wanting to be engaged and writing about the experience of viewing it. This makes a perfect antidote to the national press who are quite simply nowhere.
I was in Amsterdam a few days ago performing another piece of mine and whilst there had a get together with Irina and Gerrit Jan, two of my fellow artists at CEAC and Bram a researcher I also met in Xiamen doing an exchange at the University. It was quite funny at first seeing this little group I know from the other side of the world, assembled in front of me in The Melkweg for my show. Very quickly however, once we got talking outside, it seemed perfectly natural that we should be together as a group.
I think the bonds that I made as an artist in residence in China are rather deep and go beyond being merely a professional acquaintance of the other artists. Over the course of time we got to see one another in many situations and states, some quite unusual like having our feet pummelled in a ‘massage’, for example. This diversity gave us a chance to see how the artist and person connect in each of us. I think that in general we are usually more selective in the presentation of self when at home and divide different aspects of our lives to different people and places. That, combined with knowing what we are doing at home on a whole other level, gives a more polished finish.
I have to say I miss the collective dinners I was a part of in Xiamen. Having something of a Groucho Marx feel about groups, this is an unusual sentiment from me. Still, I rarely experienced those dinners to be exclusive groups but rather regular exchanges that were fluid in the group composition and changeable in location but almost always marked by tasty new surprises and one crazy story after another of everyday life in China.
Yesterday I performed The Customer in a windswept park in South London. To add to the atmosphere there was a brief but heavy shower 30 minutes before I was due to start. And when I saw windswept I really mean it, the forecast said that it was 20mph standard with gusts up to 42mph. Unsurprisingly the public was not great in numbers. The park-wide arts event, organised by Wandsworth Council, could potentially have been a very pleasant afternoon but as it was, it was a case of putting a brave face on it and soldiering through. Why is it that I have this sort of luck when performing outdoors? First Xiamen was unseasonably cold and gray, Portsmouth was damp and cool and now London inclement.
The one very positive thing to emerge from yesterday’s performance however was working with a new person (Jeremy) in the translator role and now having a second very competent person to call upon. He corrected my Chinese mistakes in a nice way which added something to the event. This inclines me believe that I should try to work with a live translator when performing in a theatre type space sometime. The subtitles are effective and they work as a strategy albeit a rather ‘cool’ one but there is also a good quality to the live voice. Hopefully I will find the opportunity.
I recently restarted language exchanges as I realise that if I do not continue with these I will slowly forget how to pronounce the script and it will become empty sounds. Besides, having got my foot in the door of the language, I want to now go further. That said, I will start work on a new project in mid-June so I will have to go easy on it.
