the sketch house
Hall For Cornwall presents..
The Sketch House
9th June 2015
A scratch night of work in progress with audience feedback.
PERFORMANCE:
Scratch 1#
Blabbermouth Theatre katerbarden@gmail.com
'Sweetness and Light' by Stephen Santer
Stephen Santer got out of bed one sleepless night 15 years ago, sat at a typewriter in his Bristol bedsit and wrote this story of two paranoid hitmen. Using the many dramatic styles he has witnessed as a theatrical director, video maker and radio playwright, he has woven elements of rhyming couplets, cockney thuggery and more than one pythonesque conversation into a 2 act play set at the scene of an imminent contract killing.
For many years these unstable 'Community Sanitisers' have been shovelling undesirables into the void, until an admin error lands them in a hole too deep to climb out of. Here the play seeks illumination in their dark behaviour. Brotherhood binds them close - fear and suspicion closer.
Scratch 2#
Bram Thomas Arnold www.bramthomasarnold.com
I Am For An Art bramthomasarnold@gmail.com
A performance about doubt and uncertainty, about the challenge of finding something to believe in amongst the post-modern detritus of the 21st century. It is a cut-up spoken word piece with singing, painting and writing in the face of futility, faced with hope. It is both my voice and the voice of others, it is a homage to Bill Hicks, Aneurin Bevan, Ace of Base and John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. It is a manifesto for hope in the face of futility, and it is ongoing.
Bram Thomas Arnold is an artist who started with walking and kept going: into performance, drawing, installation, bookbinding and writing.
As an artist he has built a piece of road in a forest, carried 60 English novels to New York to run a library, learned to translate Lithuanian and set out to walk from his home in London to the place of his birth in St. Gallen, Switzerland. His ecologically minded practice has been exhibited broadly in the UK as well as abroad in exhibitions from New York to St. Petersburg. He is currently studying for a practice-based PhD at Falmouth University where his interests in performance, installation, autoethnography and trans-disciplinary practice are being developed through a research project entitled ‘Walking Home: The path as transect in an 800 kilometre autoethnographic enquiry’.
Scratch 3#
CAKE Productions white_wonders@btinternet.com
'IKEA and the whale'
Comedy drama and physical theatre
A ten minute extract of a show for all ages, expect music, mime and mayhem galore as our silent hero Johan does battle with his nemesis, Cylla the Storyteller. Johan goes on to discover how, if you aren't very very careful, shopping really can swallow you up!
IKEA THE WHALE is CAKE's third production and first family show. They are currently at pre-rehearsal stage, with the premiers on Friday 26th June at the Queen's Theatre, Barnstaple as part of the North Devon Fringe Festival.
The show is a fun look at a serious subject: the perils of consumerism and the internal struggles it can cause us.
Scratch 4#
Will Salter
'Munch's Scream'
We all know the painting but what of the painter?
Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' (Die Schrei Der Natur) is one of the most recognisable works of expressionistic art ever created. It has found its way deep into the popular culture and can be spotted anywhere from souvenir mugs to The Simpsons. We all know the painting, but what of the painter?
Despite his picture's great success, Munch remains an enigma. Drunk, mad, sick, this mysterious man seems to have been eclipsed by his very own Scream. They have somehow become uniquely synonymous; intertwined so that it is as if he himself, to the collective consciousness, has actually transformed into the striking,innominate protagonist.
Will Salter's monodrama explores this idea of transformation. Using extracts from Munch's journals, and the fabricated realities he presents there, Will has composed a partially imagined sequence of circumstances which lead to the genesis of 'The Scream', putting the painter to the fore. Through sickness, madness, death and anxiety, we see man become monster, the artist make his transformation into the artefact.
Scratch 5#
Olive Haigh oliviahaigh@blueyonder.co.uk
Music & visual art portraits
'A narrative singer songwriter who creates imagery within her songs, performing on her autoharp. Whether she’s standing alone or with her band; Olive creates a dramatic atmosphere on stage which is hauntingly mesmerizing.'
ARTWORK:
Jack Stiling
Automata installation www.stilingsworksop.com
It has long been said that every object tells a story. Whether taken abstractly or literally, it is this perspective that forms the heart of creations invented not only to set scenes, but to make them. Stiling’s Workshop operates as a one stop shop for nourishing narrative, curious creation and irrepressible invention. Making the impossible believable, or at least giving it a damn good go.
What better place to search for inspiration than from other’s dreams. This was the origin of ‘The Craftsman’. The robot with a tragic tale to tell, the tin man who lost the heart he was given. But don’t worry, there’s an optimistic end.
Rebecca Hughes
Photography www.rebeccajoyhughes.com
'I have searched for examples of light in the everyday, that I find distinctive and alluring, recording it and building an archive of light footage. I wish to draw this light together and bring it into the darkness.'
