Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
Welcome to week two of my choreographers blog! This weeks blog is a look back at our first performance at the Edingburgh Fringe Festival.
The piece began life back at the beginning of 2013 when it was performed at Emerge 2013. It was a look at the diverse range of arts within Cambridge and a platform for new and established artists a chance to share new work. The first show was a work in progress with only a few rehearsals, so there was a sense of nervous excitement between Laura and myself. The piece was well received so we decided to take the piece further.
We then travelled to Newcastle in March to perform as part of Fresh! Fresh was a great chance for the company to receive more feedback and direction from a different audience. Thats exactly what we got, great feedback and lots of different ideas about the direction of the piece. At this stage we were still awaiting confirmation as to our participation in the Fringe Festival.
Pictures of both of these performances are available on the Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/JackStintonDanceCompany/photos_stream
We received confirmation at the beginning of April, and preparation swung into place very quickly. Planning travel, hotels, fund raising, promo material, booking rehearsal space and deciding on dancers. My biggest decision was to put myself back as the choreographer rather than dancer and choreographer like in the last two performances. This was so I was able to be able to take a step back and see the work better as a whole. I decided to replace myself with Christian Brinklow. Chris and myself trained together and he has performed with the company on almost all our performances. I asked Laura to continue on her role and she was very happy to be involved. Laura and myself have been teaching together for over a year and she regular runs workshops for the company.
So what is Habitudinem? The piece is an exploration of a relationship in its final moments. It's were both in the relationship realise that its no longer working, that manic feeling of trying to resolve the issue, the realisation that it won't happen, finally the acceptance of this fact. The piece takes on my own personal story of this feeling but also takes on Laura and Chris's own personal experience and story. The rehearsal period was a long and challenging process with a lot of emotion and sweat!
Our time then came to travel up to Edinburgh, then to travel back! The time up at the Festival all happened rather fast! The day we arrived in Edinburgh we all took a walk around the city taking in everything, finding our venue, grabbing some food and getting an early nights rest! Our tech was from 8am which meant a rather early start, but the tech flew by, watching four other new choreographers with four new works. The performance went incredibly well. It was an amazing feeling having my work performed on such a big platform as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The second performance was an even bigger success, it was a cleaner, softer more personal performance.
One of the biggest questions we had about the piece was about the light, I don't want to answer the question about the light and what it signifies. Other than it is different for everyone and your interpretation is correct.
Then that was it! We said our goodbyes and had to leave Edinburgh. It was a whirlwind tour but it was an incredible time and too many people to say thank you too. I look forward to going back up to the Fringe Festival again this year, fingers crossed with a new piece of work!
So here is a link for you to view the piece.
http://youtu.be/79eOQkbtkX0
I have decided to use the weekends now for writing the blog so you can expect weekly content every Saturday or Sunday from now on! Keep an eye out for audition notices and more performance work coming up in the next few weeks.