Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

The Actors Space Comes of Age

The Actors Space is a renowned international centre of theatre and film, located in the Catalan hills, just one hour from Barcelona. In summer 2019, the centre marks 21 years of ‘empowering the actor to be free to play’. Dorothy Max Prior spoke to the founders and co-directors, Marian Masoliver and Simon Edwards, at the end of last season’s Dramatic Writing residency

‘Sometimes I have to pinch myself – can it be 20 years? We didn’t think of The Actors Space as a 20-year or 30-year project – but so far so good!’

So says Marian Masoliver, co-founder and co-director of The Actors Space, which she runs with her partner in life and work, Simon Edwards, speaking in summer 2018 as the centre celebrated 20 years in operation.

The two met at the Lecoq school in Paris. After graduating, they both – separately and together – performed, directed, taught, and toured (with companies such as La Fura del Baus and Kneehigh) before deciding to set up a residential summer school in a beautiful old farmhouse in the hills of Catalunya, in the tiny hamlet, close to the Roman town of Vic, where Marian’s family had lived for many generations.

And so, for every year of the past two decades, they have welcomed students of all ages and experiences, from all corners of the globe, to participate in their unique actor-centred programmes.

‘In a typical workshop of eighteen people, there might be people from across Europe, India, Russia, the USA, Australia the Middle East… It is very interesting as a teacher to see how they all work together – beautiful to see that, and the different ways people approach theatre,’ says Marian.

This internationalist approach is key to both of their beliefs. In life – as in theatre – international collaboration, harmony, resolving difference, and learning to live together are essential, to combat and contradict what Simon calls ‘the strange distorted mirror of modern media’. In a world in which the US presidency has turned itself into a sickening reality TV show; the Spanish government have cast themselves as bullies, taking agency away from the people of Catalunya; and the Brexit obsessed UK parliament has descended into a pantomime, political life today has moved beyond anything we could satirise as they are all doing it so well at it themselves. What on earth, then, can we do?

‘Celebrate the things that unite rather than divide,’ says Simon. ‘The things that divide us change – they aren’t fixed – but the things that unite us are the same. We always gravitate towards peace.’ He talks of ‘sweet banality – the fruits of gratitude, joy, affection’.

View from the roof of The Actors Space – a beautiful setting in the hills of Catalunya

If you visit The Actors Space, the peaceful and communal ethos of the place becomes abundantly clear from the start. Yes, the work in the studio is important – it’s what has brought us here – but there is so much more. There’s the shared meals – home-cooked, using local produce as much as possible – taken around long wooden tables. There are the evenings after dinner, sitting and talking, or watching the bats and owls fly over the tree tops. There are the morning walks, through beautiful countryside, and the opportunity to swim in the pool, or just sit in the sun and read or write. There’s something very special about a residency in such a lovely environment, and the people you are with for the week become everything – family, friends, work colleagues. A tight-knit international community.

But what of the work inside that beautiful barn that serves as the training space? Simon says, ‘our strapline is “celebrating creativity” – and we really mean it!’

How the Actors Space operates, and what the work entails, has, Marian says, ‘developed organically’. It has grown from their training with Jacques Lecoq (who never espoused the notion of a ‘method’ in any case) to developing their own way of teaching, based on the observation of life, influenced by the work they have done around the world, and by their growing interest in film-making, both drama and documentary. Both speak of the need to continuously grow, change and develop as a teacher; to learn from your students and from the world.

‘In Iran, running a clown workshop, I learnt how much people valued coming together to tell stories, making each other laugh, blowing off steam – they influenced me deeply,’ says Simon.

‘As soon as there is a method, you’ve killed it,’ says Marian. ‘Killed the baby. Put it in a box. I teach in other places, and I am always researching.’ Tout bouge, as Monsieur Lecoq might say (and indeed, often did).

Teachers Marian Masoliver and Maria Codinachs and their group of Bouffon students take to the streets of Vic

So, having started firmly wedded to the physical theatre work learnt with Lecoq – embracing movement theatre, mime, mask and clown – Simon and Marian have, whilst always honouring those roots and core practices – moved into very many other ways of working. They spend part of their year working on film projects, which have recently included some extraordinary documentary work with child soldiers in Colombia; and they have also worked in Ecuador creating radio pieces built around gang-leaders’ stories. Truth and reconciliation, and the part that theatre could play in those process (akin in some ways to the work of Augusto Boal) is a growing interest – and may at some point find its way into more of their work. ‘Even a small amount of expression of truth has power,’ says Simon – talking of their time in Ecuador and Colombia, but it applies equally to all the work they do. It is vital not to be cowed by oppression and injustice; to resist the tyrants and the bullies; to see that justice wants to be seen to be done, and that this is the natural human order. Collective hope is important, to counter the feelings people (worldwide) have of being isolated or abandoned. Theatre, they believe, is a healing force, bringing people together – be it 8 or 800 people.

Inspired by these sentiments, Simon and Marian have also, in recent years, become involved with a local Carnival organisation in the small Catalonian town of Mollet (near Barcelona) – an opportunity for community celebration, and to laugh together at the ridiculousness of human behaviour.

Whatever media or environment they work in, they feel that they are always true to themselves: ‘This is the terrain: it is always about life, human relationships, how we deal with each other – our perceptions, dreams, realities…’

Wherever, whatever: ‘We need to hear stories,’ says Marian. ‘Who are we? What are the choices?’ These questions are paramount – and universal. The work they both do year-round, outside of The Actors Space, informs what they bring to the residencies there. As does their personal experiences – as a couple, as parents, as members of their local community (the centre is their year-round home).

The Art of Comedy workshop at The Actors Space

Meanwhile, the summer residencies at the school – influenced by all of the couple’s interests and skills – have grown to include acting to camera, directing for film and theatre, and dramatic scriptwriting workshops.

These workshops have joined The Art of Comedy, which takes the student on a fabulous journey from full mask to red nose to creating comic sketches on-camera (written about by Total Theatre here); and The Creative Actor, which brings together Lecoq influenced physicality with a development of the complete actor, voice and all.

‘Why separate the voice from the body?’ says Marian ‘We speak! The voice is part of the body…. Stanislavski played a very big part [in the development of the actor] but Lecoq said, Why just the head? What about the rest of the body? Physical training is very important but that doesn’t mean you can’t use words… Like a musician, you need to learn all your notes! Use the full spectrum to create.’

Simon agrees: ‘I don’t see the division either. Actors need the freedom to bring to the project whatever is required… it is about finding the universality – like the baby, we move from movement, to feelings, to relationship, to the language of sounds, then to words.’

Nevertheless, it is good to note that, as Simon puts it: ’In action, there’s meaning. In words, there can be the opposite of meaning. Look at the times we are in: lies upon lies! You try lying with your body – you can do it, physically you can lie – but not like the lies in the twisted world of fake presidents, fake news, and “alternative facts”.’ Where are the Fools? he wonders. The Fools in the courts of the oligarchs who can bring them down to a human level. He goes on to muse that after the First World War, Dadaism and Surrealism came to the fore. ‘Is there a new surrealism? The work needs to be created – to burst the egos of these maniacs who think they are in control of things.’

Directing Performance students, on location in the countryside near to The Actors Space

Ah, lies and truth… Simon and Marian are both fans of the screenwriting guru Robert McKee, and often quote his strapline, Write the Truth: ‘A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling,’ says McKee, ‘When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.’

It is what’s needed in these difficult times – although both are keen to emphasise that ‘writing’ takes many forms in theatre. For example, in the classic Lecoq exercise on the archetypal cardinal sins, when the mask of Pride meets the mask of Jealousy, what happens? There may be no words involved, but the encounter in the performance space is content – it is writing that is written on the body. And (to stay with the filmmaking Ten Commandments): Content is King.

Marian speaks of ‘the creative triangle – writing, acting, directing’ as part of the same act of creativity. ‘The creative actor is writing when they devise – everything goes together.’

With the acknowledgement of the importance of all three elements in this triangle came the development of first the Directing Performance course, and later the Dramatic Writing course which saw its first outing in 2018. In the Directing Performance course, participants learn how to direct actors by giving them freedom within a clear structure, guiding them to create their best work. Participants explore the fundamentals of theatre and film directing, and learn to devise scenes and work up scripts. They also experience what it is like to be directed – the creative triangle can be separated into three distinct roles, but it is good for everyone to have at least some experience of all three!

The Dramatic Writing course (which grew out of the Directing course, just as the Directing course grew out of the Creative Actor) was built on a similar principle of embracing a ‘total’ experience. Yes, there is writing involved – lots of it, with scripts being revised and brought from page to stage daily. But everyone also takes part in the physical theatre warm-ups and workshops, exploring the principles of play, the body in space, and the push/pull essence of dramatic conflict. The acting and devising processes employed inform the writing, and vice versa.

The Creative Actor at The Actors Space

Regardless of which workshop they are enrolled on, the crucial thing for participants is, as Simon puts it, for them ‘to really explore what they are interested in, to trust their life experiences’. He talks of the theatre process as being like a sophisticated extension of child’s play. Explore the conflicts, find the resolutions. ‘Entertainment is important,’ says Simon, ‘Fun is underestimated. But we don’t want to just indulge, or be frivolous. We want to find the poetic depths – our common humanity…’ And later, he says: ‘It is not about making change, it is about sharing truth.’ Speak your truth, write your truth, act your truth.

‘Theatre,’ says Marian, ‘Will not die. There is something about being in the moment, unedited. It is very different to film. It’s immediacy is special’. And, she emphasises, even though the annual courses might bear the same titles, each one is unique – developing its own special character depending on who is there. As they say on their website: ‘Each workshop creates a new culture, one that shares our common humanity. Participants are freed from their own cultural constrictions and opened to fresh possibilities and new ways of working.’

And this is a good moment to note that there are always newcomers, but also very many ‘returners’ – people who have come back repeatedly over the past 20 years to this unique and special centre for theatre-makers and film-makers of all ages, experiences and nationalities. Marian says: ‘There is no Actors Space company, but it feels a bit like a company – there are people who come every year. There is a lot of trust – an environment of trust and safety. We only do this in the summer, which makes it very special.’

Simon talks of the returning experienced artists, and what they gain from the repeat experience, as having something to do with ‘the capacity to be a beginner [again] – allowing themselves to explore and discover’. And, on doing new things, and how successful that can be, he says: ‘Beginner’s luck isn’t luck, it’s a principle to be developed. In the not-knowing, inviting in the discovery.’

To be at the Actors Space is truly a gift – a way to give yourself the time and space for artistic renewal.

‘As long as people want to come here we will continue, it’s a wonderful experience for us and them’ says Marian. ‘Lecoq taught until he died – and we will continue as long as we are enjoying it.’

Long may that be!

Marian Masoliver (second from right), Simon Edwards (third from right) and workshop participants

Images by Janneke Aalbers.

The Actors Space provide high quality training for actors, directors, writers, teachers and students of dramatic art.

Dorothy Max Prior attended the inaugural Dramatic Writing residency at The Actors Space in July 2018 as a guest of the centre. She has previously taken part in The Art of Comedy, Bouffon, and The Nomadic Fool residencies at The Actors Space, all previously written about for Total Theatre Magazine; and has led the Dance Yourself Stupid Eccentric and Comic Dance workshop there.

This summer’s residential workshops are:

Directing Performance

19–27 July 2019 (including arrival and departure dates)

The Creative Actor

1–9 August 2019 (inclusive of arrival and departure dates)

The Art of Comedy

13–21 August 2019 (including arrival and departure dates)

For full details and to book see The Actors Space website.

Xavier de Sousa: Post

So who remembers Houseparty? Daytime TV show from the 1970s, reality TV before reality TV existed, fly-on-the-wall kind of thing, ahead of its time. Featuring a group of friends (‘housewives’) gathered round a table talking about – whatever. Often with cooking. Well, Xavier de Sousa’s Post is a bit like that, except that the people gathered around his table are strangers rather than friends. But isn’t every stranger just a friend you haven’t yet met?

The food is a star player in this show – and smell, touch, and taste are as much a part of the dramaturgy as the usual elements of sight and sound. There is the sizzle, the smoke, then the smell of charred chorizo; the invitation to nibble on sweet bread and tiny olives; and a tray full of throat-burning cachaça shots passed through the audience, who stand for a toast – ‘up, down, to the left, to the right, to the crotch, to the sky – SAUDE!’.

But best of all – the crowning glory – is the caldo verde. This, we learn, is Portugal’s national dish, a delicious soup of green vegetables, garlic and onion. It would normally have the chorizo in it too, but this is kept separate, in a spirit of inclusion, so that everyone in the room – carnivores and vegetarians alike – can get at least a taste of this magnificent brew. Xavi has added a dash of paprika to mimic the smokey chorizo taste… So right here in the onstage making and eating of this soup are three of the central themes of Post: cultural identity, inclusion and hospitality.

But let’s backtrack a bit. We arrive in the space – a regular theatre set-up, end-on, with tiered seating – to see our host already in action, dressed in black trousers and overskirt, a red cumberband and a white shirt, sporting a handsome moustache and a rakish black felt hat. A folkloric 3/4 tune plays repeatedly as he spins across the performance space, gracefully avoiding the big wooden table centre-stage. Once we are all in our seats, he stops the dance, and welcomes us in with a personal introduction. We are told that he is from the Coimbra region in Portugal, moving to London thirteen years ago to experience the freedom of a queer-friendly city, working (as immigrants often do) as a waiter, then establishing himself as an artist and producer, and moving to Brighton. We are invited to learn how to pronounce his name. This moves into some gentle one-on-one questioning: Where do you live? Where are you from? What does ‘home’ mean to you? Are you a good host? He shifts into a less prosaic, more poetic performance mode, sitting at the table with a book, reflecting on family heritage, Portugal’s seafaring history, colonialism, and the burden of being a descendant of people who were complicit in the slavery of other human beings.

Back to the direct address to individual audience members: the man sitting next to me is called João, and he comes from Porto – like Xavi, he left Portugal around thirteen years ago. Further back in the auditorium is a British-born man of Indian heritage called Ash. A woman called Silvia moved to the UK from Italy, and she has now – just in the past few weeks – acquired a British passport. Marty is from Essex, with a complicated working class family background.

These four end up around the onstage table – and prove to be a gift to any artist co-creating a show with their audience. Xavi serves them food, and discretely passes them brown envelopes containing questions to keep the dinner party conversation buzzing, whilst also keeping us included in the action by ferrying out bowls of soup, forkfuls of chorizo, and refills of cachaça.

The dinner guests at the table hardly need the envelopes: the conversation flows along with the vinho verde. But the prompts keep the talk focused around the themes of the show: migration, integration, and what it means to be British; living in the limbo of non-conformity as ‘other’; and what it is that makes us a nation.

Ash talks about the pressures of being part of a higher-caste Hindu family, delights us with saucy stories about gay clubs in the 1980s (‘I’m younger than I look’), and tells us that Freddie Mercury’s mum – Jer Bulsara – is a family friend, although it took him years to realise that her son Farrokh was the lead singer of Queen, as most in his community are rather dismissive of the Bulsara boy’s choice to become a rock singer. João is the epitome of reasonableness – diffusing a choleric argument about the pressures of ‘fitting in’ to the host country, and working hard to understand and articulate the conflicting needs of different groups in society. Silvia doesn’t often push herself forward – I wonder if the men at the table notice that she hasn’t spoken for a while? – and when she does join in, she often plays the role of the ‘good immigrant’ who has done all she can to dutifully fit in to British society. Marty is the only one at the table who is neither an immigrant nor the child of immigrants – but he realises that his experiences of ostracisation, of the ‘otherness’ of being a gay man brought up in a working class outer-London community, was analogous to the others’ experiences in ‘failing to adhere to border and identity-defining norms’.

And all the while, the wine flows, the soup cauldron empties, and our generous host looks out for all our needs whilst merging more and more into the background (often leaving the stage completely, or sitting quietly at the back).

Post is a beautifully structured and lovingly enacted performance piece – the combination of shared food and drink, reflection on cultural heritage, and the respectful agency given to the carefully chosen co-creators, is a winning recipe. Autobiography and identity are the base ingredients, but teased out to become something far more universal and far-reaching than one person’s story – it’s about all of us. Seeing the show as part of BAC’s Homegrown:Occupy season, it seems to perfectly epitomise the building’s motto: Non Mihi, Non Tibi, Sed Nobis. Not for me, not for you, but for us.

A veritable feast of a show that leaves you with a warm glow (and not just from all the cachaça).

Featured image (top): Xavier de Sousa: Post. Photo by David Pickens Photography.

Homegrown Festival is BAC’s annual building takeover, amplifying young and underrepresented voices. Homegrown: Occupy runs 18 March–12 April 2019 and is curated by Saad-Edine Said.

Other work in the programme includes: Inua Ellams’ The R.A.P. Party, Elise Heaven’s She’s a Good Boy, Dylema’s Four Women, Exit Productions’ The Mission: Occupy Mars, The Sui Ensemble’s La Silhouette, and fanSHEN’s Looking for Love. Full details: bac.org.uk

FK Alexander: Violence

The End of the World. A state of mind, a song by – come on, who, who? Name that tune! It’s Skeeter Davis, a country-pop classic from 1962. You’d know it if you heard it. You’d know it even if the version you were hearing was slowed-down, then slowed-down again, and slowed-down thrice so it becomes a painful deconstruction, a dirge delivered by a murderous minx.

FK Alexander is dressed in a flouncy white organza frock. Her arms and legs are bare. She has intense eyes that look out to us with monstrous intent. She has yellow hair that she tosses away from her face as she bends over the guillotine. Yes, a guillotine. The first chop-chops, delivered in perfect percussive rhythm, jolt us out of our seats with a collective intake of breath. Why does the sun keep on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? Cos you don’t love me anymore. Chop, chop, chop. Her victims – bouquets of beautiful blooms, pink and yellow roses and more – fall aside, beheaded. The heads bounce, or are pushed, off the table. Chop, chop, chop.

She stands, walks over to the centre of the stage, puts on a pair of red patent stilettos with clippity-clop steel tips, and stands again, looking out, puppet-esque in a corridor of light. Behind her, a screen flashes up words. Love, Loveless. Lovelessness. God. Godless. Godlessness. Sister, Brother, Father, Mother. There’s a smoke machine – mic’d up so that the sound of the machine’s fan becomes a drone. As she stomps her way backwards, upstage, the floor mics pick up the staccato beat of her steps, the sound augmented by varying degrees of echo effect. Her movement creates an in-the-moment musique concrete soundscape.

FK Alexander is one of a roster of contemporary performance makers for whom music, and musicality, is core to their practice. The music, the sound design, the enacting of the music, is intrinsic to the dramaturgy of the piece, not a decorative add-on.

Repetition is a key element to much of FK Alexander’s work. Take the Total Theatre Award winning (I Could Go On Singing) Somewhere Over the Rainbow, in which she sings Judy Garland’s iconic song over and over again– aided and abetted by Glasgow noise band Okishima Island Tourist Association – to one audience member at a time, whilst others witness, and yearn for her attention. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for six hours.

But it’s not just repetition for the sake of it: the repetition in her work reminds us that nothing can actually ever be repeated. Once the moment is gone, it’s gone, replaced by another one – different in small or great ways, it doesn’t matter. It’s different.

In this new piece, Violence, we have a repetition that mirrors the structure of a pop song: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight etc. There are key changes. We return to the table and the guillotined flowers, then back to the walkway. The words reverse out their order. Lovelessness. Loveless. Love. Change is possible, they say. Things can be re-arranged. Life goes on. There are firecrackers, and a live drummer accompanying the walk, creating a crescendo of percussive and ambient sound. In the final rendition of the song, slowed down to within an inch of its life, FK Alexander’s beautiful voice synchs perfectly with Skeeter Davis’s on the recording. She has this chameleon ability to be other singers: then, Judy; now, Skeeter. But whoever she’s being, she is also – always – her own inimitable and magnificent self.

A vitally important artist, with another great show under her belt.

Featured image (top) FK Alexander: Violence. Photo by Nial Walker

Sleepwalk Collective: Kourtney Kardashian

Sleepwalk Collective’s latest work, Kourtney Kardashian, is the third part of what the company describe as an ‘accidental trilogy’ which is inspired, in part, by Chekov’s Three Sisters. I haven’t seen the other two parts, a ballet called Kim Kardashian (2016), and a ‘stage play’ called Khloe Kardashian (2017). I am also a bit vague about who the Kardashians are and what they do – but (and this is the point) even though I don’t watch TV or read Hello! magazine, I do know that the Kardashians are immensely famous for being famous, and they pervade all of our lives, staring out from YouTube, uninvited, or pouting from the pages of the Evening Standard left on the train that’s glanced through. The Kardashians in this third show in the trilogy are an oblique presence – a leitmotif, a metaphor, a trope. They represent opulence, luxury, privilege. The allure of fame and celebrity that unsettles us, dragging us further away from the shore.

Kourtney Kardashian is an opera, of sorts. ’Written by the dead, for the dying.’ Is ’the dying’ a reference to the fact that most opera-goers are over 60 and therefore closer to death than birth? Or a philosophical musing on the fact that all of us – 64-year-old me, and my twenty-something companion, and those thirty-somethings behind us, and the performers on stage – are all of us dying, in every moment? Probably both.

The music in Kourtney Kardashian is not just a crucial element of the work – it is also its subject matter. At the start, as is good and right, the conductor (Sammy Metcalfe, behind the upfront sound desk) takes a bow, and prepares. But there is, we are told, no orchestra, and no singers. ‘There won’t be any singing here tonight’ says the diva standing statuesque, centre-stage, in her gold-slash dress. But she’s wrong, there is.

We are given not a version of, but a skirting around, The Marriage of Figaro. There is an Overture and a Prelude and an Interlude; a Cavatina, a Concertato and a Coloratura. There are Arias and Recitatives. The intensely beautiful soundscape includes epic, systems-music symphonic reworkings of Mozart’s ‘opera buffa’; live singing from co-performers iara Solano Arana and Nhung Dang; and crackly recordings featuring Sammy Metcalfe’s parents, Stephen and Lucy Metcalfe, singing the roles of Figaro and his bride-to-be Susanna – all cleverly mulched together. There is a Melodrama, and there is melodrama. There is even a Claque – an ‘organised body of professional applauders’. They are behind us, at the back of the auditorium: two large speakers decorated with gold bows, offering enthusiastic clapping and cheering on command from the maestro at the desk.

The show features many familiar tropes and tricks from the Sleepwalk Collective repertoire. There is text, lots of text, often delivered in the second person, the accusing ‘you’ fired straight out in poetic provocation to the audience, seducing us siren-like on a rolling sea of allusion and alliteration. There are lots of words in this piece, words that work on a semiotic level, above and beyond semantic meaning. I find myself musing on one line that really catches me by the throat, and a whole load more wash over me, in a musical medley of sound. Often with Sleepwalk Collective shows, I love the words, but struggle to remember them afterwards, although I remember the feelings that the words evoke – they bypass my brain and go straight to my heart, little daggers of emotion and soulful meaning. There is a sculptural placing of bodies on stage: statues moving on turntables, duets of gestural choreography.

But most of all there is the voice, the voice – iara’s haunting voice drawing us ever closer to the rocks, taunting us. Opera, theatre, fame, celebrity: all these things here, we are told, but we know anyway – are an illusion. All that glitters is not gold. That ingot of gold, in its velvet box – it’s pretend, right? They are just pretending that they bought an actual ingot of gold for the show, right? She rustles her gold-slash dress, which shimmers alluringly under the lights. It is, we learn, fashioned from a rescue blanket. Nothing is what we really think it is.

Total Theatre Magazine Print Archive Now Online

The Total Theatre Magazine Print Archive is now online

Dip in to totaltheatre.org.uk/archive

For over 30 years, Total Theatre Magazine has celebrated and supported alternative theatre and performance practice. Every issue of the magazine in print (1989–2012) is now online, free to view
Launch event at Camden People’s Theatre during the Sprint Festival, on Sunday 17 March 2019, 4.15 till 5.00pm

We are delighted to announce that the Total Theatre Magazine Print Archive is now online – a valuable resource for artists, students, scholars, journalists, and anybody interested in Britain’s alternative theatre and performance history. This has been made possible by a substantial grant through the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Our Heritage programme.

The Total Theatre Magazine Print Archive website features every print issue of Total Theatre Magazine (1989–2012), available as a PDF, with the original design preserved; together with all of the magazine’s feature articles and reviews reformatted into a fully searchable archive that can be explored via issue number, writer, artist or company, artform or topic.

Over the coming weeks we will be publishing new material created in response to the archive: interviews with established artists and arts industry giants whose paths have run in tandem to Total Theatre Magazine’s print history; commissioned articles by the magazine’s regular contributors; and new writings that have emerged from the work we have done with our Heritage Volunteers and with the members of the Artists as Writers group mentored as part of the programme.

To celebrate the launch of the website, friends, colleagues and supporters of Total Theatre Magazine are invited to join the editorial team at Camden People’s Theatre on Sunday 17 March, 4.15 to 5pm. There will be cake! RSVP to editorial@totaltheatre.org.uk

The launch event will precede two fabulous ‘total theatre’ work-in-progress shows being presented as part of SPRINT festival: The First Time as Tragedy, by Venice as a Dolphin in association with Coney and HighTide is at 5.30pm; and Drawing the Line by Hidden Track Theatre is at 7.15pm. The Total Theatre Magazine editorial team will be around before and between the shows to chat about the archive.

SPRINT programme details and tickets at www.cptheatre.co.uk

For the new archive, see totaltheatre.org.uk/archive

Website: www.totaltheatre.org.uk

Facebook: Total Theatre Magazine

Twitter/Insta @TotalTheatreMag

Press enquiries: Dorothy Max Prior

max@totaltheatre.org.uk

+44 7752 142526

Editor’s Notes:

About Total Theatre Magazine:

For over 30 years Total Theatre has been at the forefront of the advocacy, celebration and documentation of contemporary theatre and performance – including the support of forms and practices which have often been ignored, or not treated with the seriousness they merit, by other publications.

Total Theatre Magazine was in print 1989–2012, close to 100 issues. Thanks to National Lottery players, this archive will be preserved for everyone to engage with, all content provided free to view. The new Total Theatre Print Archive website is launched in March 2019 after a year-long process that has engaged a team of professional editors, writers and archivists; working with a group of volunteers who have diligently scanned, entered data, and learnt about writing, editing and archiving processes.

Total Theatre Magazine is unique as an artist-led, practice-based publication and resource that celebrates, supports and documents innovative work by artists and companies creating ‘total theatre’ – a term we resist defining too tightly, but which includes: physical, visual and ensemble devised theatre; dance-theatre; mime and clown; contemporary circus; cabaret and new variety; puppetry and mask; street arts, outdoor performance, and site-specific theatre; live art performance and new hybrid artforms.

Total Theatre Magazine is managed and published by Aurelius Productions CIC. The core editorial team is Dorothy Max Prior (editor), John Ellingsworth (web editor), Beccy Smith (associate editor) and Thomas Wilson (contributing editor). www.totaltheatre.org.uk

About Total Theatre Network:

Total Theatre Magazine operates in collaboration with, but financially independent of, the Total Theatre Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which are produced by the organisation Total Theatre Network. See www.totaltheatrenetwork.org

About the Heritage Lottery Fund:

Thanks to National Lottery players, Heritage Lottery Fund invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about – from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love; from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. See www.hlf.org.uk

Our Partners and Supporters:

Total Theatre Magazine has received financial support from Heritage Lottery Fund’s Our Heritage, and a number of leading institutions and organisations, including: Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance, Royal Conservatoire Scotland, and The Attenborough Centre of Creative Arts at University of Sussex. The project has been supported by The Keep National Archive Centre, Sussex. We have also received support in kind from a diverse range of arts organisations and individuals.

This news release as a PDF available to download here: Total Theatre Magazine Print Archive Goes Live News Release March 2019