It has been brought to my attention that something extremely important is going on. Something is stirring in the creative masses and collaboration is being stewed, simmered and ladled out to the hungry folk. They’re armed with paintbrushes, microphones, cameras and material. They’re not stopping till they see big. No stone will lay unturned, no door will be locked and no avenue will be skipped. REMIX is heading your way and you better throw yourself down before them and sign up, this is one revolution you want to be a part of. Yes you, and you, the one moaning about how they’ve got an excess of creative juices but have nowhere to store them. Let loose and big yourself up so you can be heard because this people, this comrades, is exciting.
(In my head you’ve all grabbed the nearest thing you have to face paint and smeared the camouflage stripes across your face and round about now I’m leading you all in an Adam and The Ants strut. You with me? Thought not. It’s a cracking song though, c’mon…. “Don’t you ever, HUH, don’t you ever…”)
Dodgy staccato dance routines and wardrobe expenditures aside I’m here to tell you about REMIX and what the dandy it’s all about. And let me tell you, it’s a bit special. Ahem…
REMIX is fascinated with the idea of adaptation; in how content transfers but also how forms and skills translate. Why do we, as practitioners, choose the mediums we do to tell our stories we tell?
REMIX aims to bring together a creative team of exciting emerging practitioners who have asserted themselves as innovators in their own forms but who have never created a piece of theatre before. It will unite a fashion designer and graphic artist to work in design, a band to sound design, a poet to write the play as well as an emerging photographer and filmmaker. Together with Natalie Ibu as Director and an ensemble of professional recently trained actors, REMIX will create an innovative multi-disciplinary performance for the 21st century.
It will create a live performance but, also, four other versions of the performance – or four adaptations from four point of views. So, for example, the live performance may be accompanied with a fashion editorial spread version of the performance, an mp3 Play for iPods, website installation and an online series. Each outcome will be a bespoke adaptation of the play for the specific medium. These adaptations will be launched at a live event on 29th and 30th April 2010. The event will be a celebration, bringing together audiences and practitioners – old and new and from all practices – to toast the future of art and the next generation of creative practitioners. It will do so by showcasing the fruits of collaboration – the play in its five incarnations.
REMIX hopes that by bringing these first-time theatre-makers together it’ll create something bold, brave and enquiring – a project that brings together the very best creative minds to create a live performance and four form adaptations that alchemize the theatre, visual art, virtual media, fashion, music and literary industries. REMIX will steal all the best bits of all the mediums whilst leaving behind the constraints/rules. If Carlsberg made theatre…. It would be REMIX.
They are completely committed to theatre but recognize the criticism that theatre is slow at letting itself go, of shedding old forms and embracing the possibilities of the future. The project aims to reflect our rich, inter/multi-disciplinary, world – a world where we’re constantly sharing and borrowing from other forms and references. They want to experiment with how we might make theatre more like a magpie in order to mirror the way we live – it’ll be borne of the iPod-listening, blog-writing, Vogue-reading, YouTube-watching generation and therefore speak to those very people.
In our current climate, theatre must assert itself as a place for everyone in order to survive. This project aims to seduce our peers from gigs, cinema, performance poetry, events, clubs, galleries and bring them back into the theatre whilst also allowing the emerging artists to extend their networks, develop their portfolios, begin new working relationships and assert ourselves as gutsy and visionary practitioners of tomorrow.
REMIX is already causing waves across the creative board and has caught the attention of the Innovation Fund over at IdeasTap (which if you’ve not heard or spoken with your own mouth before get the hell over there….. Once again with more emphasis AND feeling http://www.ideastap.com ). What’s more the Innovation Fund were so darn impressed with the motivation and intensity of this project that they’ve thrown money at the thing which is great because this is only the beginning.
Mother of REMIX Revolution
But who are these peoples exactly? I hear your cries and they sound beautiful and eager, tinged with a parched choke like when you swallow apple juice wrongly. It’s a sweet taste and I shall impart on you the relevant nuggets of information. These wonderful, bloody determined folk have done many things. Calling up front to see your creative wares is Field Marshall aka Artistic Director Natalie Ibu (see enchanting photograph above). She’s an established Assistant Director, emerging Director and emerging Producer. She has recently been awarded the IdeasTap Innovation Award and the Lilian Baylis Award for Theatrical Excellence. In July 2009, she completed a year’s residency at the Royal Court as their Trainee Director. In 2008, she completed a Live and Direct residency at Contact in Manchester and in 2004 she won a year’s attachment as Trainee Theatre Director with New Perspectives Theatre Company. Since graduating with a First Class Honours degree in Theatre in 2004, she has been awarded bursaries from ITV Directors Scheme, the Federation of Scottish Theatre, Scottish Arts Council and Arts Council East Midlands. As Director, credits include 24 Hour Plays : This Is Not The End (Old Vic); Dirty Circle, Starlings, 24 Degrees, What’s Lost? (RR – Royal Court); The Red Shoes: Re-heeled (Royal Lyceum Youth Theatre); We Were… Re-Imagining the Mother, We Were… In Development, We Were… In a Café, Say What…? (We Were Here / G12, Citizens’ Theatre, Gramofon, Arches) I Know All The Secrets In My World… (Contact); Women’s Voices (New Writing NewWorlds/G12); Hang Up, Lesson Learned (Citizens’ Young Co.); Holly’s Chariot (RR – Theatre Writing Partnerships); Blooded (Fresh Perspectives); Road (De Montfort University). Assistant Director credits include Jerusalem, Grasses of a Thousand Colours, Tusk Tusk, Seven Jewish Children, Wig Out!, The Girlfriend Experience (Royal Court); Zameen (Kali Theatre, London); Fugee (Lyceum Youth Theatre, Edinburgh); Peter Pan, Desire Under the Elms (Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow); The Shadow of a Pie (Lung Ha’s Theatre Company, Edinburgh); The Ghost Downstairs, The Butterfly Lion (New Perspectives Theatre Company, East Midlands). She is a Script Reader for the Royal Court Studio, Royal Exchange, Soho, Script Online, and is a Studio Support Worker for the Royal Court, Director of the Churchill Young Companies and Workshop Director for Associated Performers’ Studio.
Step up General aka Producer Lisa Macfarlane. Lisa started off her a career as an actress performing at several venues such as the Hampstead Theatre and National Theatre Studio whilst still undertaking her degree at Central School of Speech and Drama. However after landing the role of Executive Producer of the Accidental Festival at the ICA at just 19 ,she decided this was the path for her. She went on to assist Sue Scott Davison, Erica Fee and James Seabright working on shows such as Liberty starring Belinda Lang and John Bett ((Shakespeare’s Globe and National Tour), Potted Potter (UK tour and Trafalgar Studios), Totally Looped starring Phil Jupitus, Sanjeev Baskhar and Marcus Brigstocke (UK number 1 tour). She has also made her presence felt at the Edinburgh Festival assistant producing Clarkson and Crouch and Learn to play the Ukulele in Under an hour (Gilded Balloon). Lisa also worked forJames Seabright on his 19 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe 2009, alongside judging that year’s Total Theatre Awards. Lisa was also a Panelist at The Entrepreneurial Artist, Theatre Materials Conference and a Guest Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Aim Higher education conferences . She is currently producing Biding Time in association with Pippa Bailey and is now Creative Producer of Offstage Theatre with her first production The Swimmer at the Bridewell Theatre in January 2010. She believes in crossing over art forms to inform her practice and has consequently worked on several commercial projects including publicity for Sony BMG.
Salute the Lieutenant aka Marketing Manager Ruth Hawkins. Ruth is an emerging Arts Marketer. She graduated from Central School of Speech and Drama in 2009 and attended the Brits School for Performance Arts and Technology. She has trained with Punchdrunk, Kinetika and in radio production and film editing. Whilst completing her degree in Performance Arts, she was Marketing Manager of the 2008 Accidental Festival at the ICA, Marketing Intern at the Royal Court and coordinated discussions and writing workshops with writers Tarell Alvin McCraney (Wig Out!, In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz – the first female playwright to have a production on the Olivier Stage at the National Theatre. In 2009 she wrote, directed and produced a reading of her play The Blunt Potato Peeler . She is a founding member of arts marketing company Yo Theatre, which gained interest from GQ’s magazine editor. She has worked for the Royal Court and Nabokov Theatre Company in a variety of roles, mainly focused within Arts Marketing, Audience Development and PR. She was Production Assistant and Marketing and Press Coordinator for October’s Nabokov Arts Club – working alongside Paines Plough’s new Artistic Directors George Perrin and James Grieve. Ruth is currently working for the fashion and advertising photographer Rankin, and is also on the Invitation Group of the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme. And even more spectacular news comes in the shiny wrapper that she’s just been appointed Communications Assistant at the Royal Court. Ruth is an advocate of audience participation and believes a key element to the progression of theatre is driving it out to a wider audience demographic which she endeavors to accomplish within REMIX.
We should break for a bit. Join in, you so know you want to.
Musical interludes ensues…
Now this is where you come along and stick you hand up. In January, the REMIX team will be out on the streets looking for creatives. They’re looking for the very best creative minds. They’ll be trawling events across London to watch you spit your lyrics, graffiti up some underground warehouses and use your scissors to make their creative teams heads turn! If you’re a fashion designer, graphic artist, photographer, filmmaker, band, actor, singer-songwriter and want to invite us along, email: Natalie Ibu (clicky her name and a magical email window will appear which means you have to email her or else something sticky will happen.)
In your email, detail who you are and what you do, what you’ve done and what you want to do and what and who you like. Please also attach an up to date CV and portfolio and details of where and when they can see you doing your thing – whatever it may be. Shout out about yourself and be heard because they’ll be listening!
A certain Mister James Hopkirk had this to say about the idea and he certainly knows what he’s talking about:
“We were struck by the confidence and ambition of the REMIX project, and are convinced that Natalie is well placed to make it a success. The panel liked the innovative way that the project works across a variety of art forms which is exactly the kind of project we aim to support through the Ideas Fund.”
James Hopkirk : IdeasTap Editor
They’re openly asking people to stalk them and there’s nothing I love more than people inviting this kind of behaviour because heaven knows I’m running out of places to put my restraining orders. Someone mentioned I should throw them away but I’m more inclined to make origami swans out of them and make a day of it at the park.
STALK AWAY
Here: twitter
And here: facebook
And what about here? : ideastap
Have you thought about here? : myspace
And have I not mentioned here? : blog
My oh my aren’t they a greedy bunch! But with very good reason. I think that’s plenty of stuff to be getting on with people. Go, shoo, that way my Lovelies. They’re waiting. And remember… “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of…”
Katie Mccullough Talks and Writes 