Blue Elephant Theatre - Winter 2016
Season preview
THE Blue Elephant Theatre has launched its new Winter Season and the venue’s commitment to supporting emerging artists continues with a second Elefeet Dance Festival, thereby providing an important platform for upcoming choreographers to showcase their work in London.
Elefeet will include the final Blue Cloud Scratch of 2016, a collaboration with Cloud Dance Festival, which has already fed into the main programme at the Blue Elephant.
SIGNS by MonixArts, the first performance of Elefeet, was originally presented as a very short, work-in-progress at the first Blue Cloud Scratch in March and has since gone on to receive funding for further development.
The Blue Elephant continues to present quality children’s productions, with Let’s All Dance bringing their ballet The Owl and the Pussycat to the theatre on October 16 and Moon on a Stick returning to Camberwell in December with their magical Christmas show Jack Frost.
This season also sees the launch of Mad about the Elephant, the Blue Elephant’s new Friends’ Scheme. For as little as £25 a year, Friends of the theatre can support its important work with emerging artists and local young people and help secure its future.
LISTINGS
ELEFEET DANCE FESTIVAL – October 13 to November 19.
SIGNS – October 13 at 8pm. Tickets: £7, £6 concessions, £5 Southwark residents.
SIGNS is a 30-minute dance piece, fusing contemporary dance with British Sign Language. Performed by two female dancers, this exciting and intricate duet takes inspiration from Colin Thompson’s poem If I told you I was deaf would you turn away.
Accompanied by an originally composed music score, it is a highly physical performance that explores the importance of body language in British Sign Language, and the barriers of a deaf person trying to communicate in a hearing world.
SIGNS is presented as a work-in-progress performance and will be followed by a post-show discussion where audience feedback is welcomed.
The Owl and the Pussycat – October 16 at 1pm and 3pm. Tickets: £5, £3 Southwark residents. Recommended for ages 2-9, families and children with special needs. Running Time: 35 minutes.
They danced by the light of the moon, the moon….
This gorgeous new ballet takes a fresh and humorous look at the famous Lear poem. Once again, Let’s All Dance combines fantastic dancing, beautiful costumes and crystal clear storytelling to engage and delight young audiences.
SpeedDating – October 19 and 20 at 8pm. Tickets: £9, £8 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
SpeedDating explores the concept of organised social activity and interaction between people in a series of short conversations. Informed by social observation this live composition work incorporates movement and sound, exposing the choreographer’s choice in real-time.
Choreographer Shelley Owen is a dance artist who has predominantly worked in The Netherlands. Researching instant composition and task-based choreography, Owen explores performer choice and works with original sound scores, often performed live. Recently completed projects include site-specific dance/sound work Hare Hill Project: Resolution supported by The National Trust (Cheshire UK) and Some Kind of Hell, by body painting artist Vilija Vitkute (Amsterdam NL).
Blue Cloud Scratch – October 21 at 8pm. Tickets: £5, £3.50 concessions and Southwark residents.
Blue Cloud Scratch is an exciting new dance scratch night, showcasing works in progress from a diverse range of choreographers, and is curated by Blue Elephant Theatre and Cloud Dance Festival.
October’s Blue Cloud Scratch will feature works-in-progress by Allegiant Dance Theatre, Ana Sosa, Natalie Sloth Richter, Incendium Dance Company and Ajos Dance.
Inter Pares Project, a duet between international dance artists Agnese Lanza and Julie Havelund-Willett – October 25 at 8pm. Tickets: £9, £8 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
This piece forms part of an on-going choreographic research project, which was launched in 2013 as part of a residency at S P A C E @ Clarence Mews. The research is embedded in the performances, and the performances feed directly back into the research, focusing on presence and the act of attending to detail. This performance weaves in and out of set and spontaneous movement, drawing direct inspiration from the architecture and audience of Blue Elephant Theatre.
Mirrored, me? – November 4 and 5 at 8pm. Tickets: £9, £8 concessions, £7 Southwark residents. Post-show Discussion: Friday, November 4.
Inspired by Edgar Alan Poe’s William Wilson, Mirrored, me? is a game in which different parts of human personality affect and direct the protagonists in the struggle of the self to recognise its diverse sides. During the act, two individuals play with their reflections, bridging the gap between the face and its reflection, between light and shade, between the one who is watching and the one who is being watched.
The immersive installation designed by V.I.P.A is used as an architectural metaphor, highlighting the very elements of space, suggesting that the boundaries and lines we draw within ourselves about who we are and what we can do are a perception of the mind and a result of a reflection.
Mirrored, me? is choreographed by Anastasia Papaeleftheriadou and performed by Inês Zinho Pinheiro and Bianca Ranieri, with music by Adrian Corker.
Morir Soñando – November 7 and 8 at 8pm. Tickets: £9, £8 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
Morir Soñando is an exploration of Dominican identity, choreographed by Stephanie Peña, which deconstructs the national dance Merengue and experiments with how this form of dance translates to the bodies of non-Caribbean dancers.
The work navigates the performers’ understanding of the culture through the use of Merengue music, language and hip movements. Through this exploration, a story starts to unravel revealing betrayal, agony, and power.
Morir Soñando is a roller coaster that will pull the audience along, even those not ready for the ride…
SINK and Fish Tank: Double Bill – November 10 at 8pm. Tickets: £9, £8 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
(we)SINK is a dance performance exploring climate change and human psychology. Inspired by psychological mechanisms that make humans disengage from climate change challenges, this new work, choreographed by Josh Hawkins, explores feelings of distance, doom, dissonance, denial and identity in response to our changing climate.
Performed by Emmie Coxey and Freya Thomas, this captivating duet questions whether these defence barriers can be broken and if we will ever truly connect to this topical issue.
Fish Tank, a conversation between live spoken word, text, music and dance, draws similarities and compares the life of a goldfish in its tank to the denials we face when dealing with change. It explores different feelings linked to change, and imagines every human has their own ‘fish tank’ full of questions, responsibilities and problems.
This Really Is Too Much – November 11 and 12 at 8pm. Tickets: £10, £9 concessions, £7 Southwark residents. Post-show Discussion: Saturday, November 12.
Described as outlandish, bold and highly entertaining, This Really Is Too Much delves into a world of farcical stereotypes and preposterous power struggles. With irreverent physicality, four characters wrestle with restriction, gender and performance of identity, trying desperately to work out which box they fit into.
Raucous and thought provoking in equal measure, Gracefool’s genre-busting performance reveals the downright absurd realities of what it means to be a 3-dimensional, high definition, water-drinking, salad-eating, moisturizing WO-man in modern society. Dripping with virtuosic charm and anarchic wit, this is feminist comedy dance at its very best.
The Very Important Child – November 16 at 8pm. Tickets: £10, £8.50 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
The Very Important Child is a piece of physical theatre about the development of the ego, psychological warfare and throwing one’s toys out of the pram. Bold and comic, it blends movement, text and music.
The audience sees the complicated politics of two adult egos, two grown-ups who are convinced it is the other person’s fault. The show takes you into the developing mind of a human – the fragile baby living from minute to minute, the god-like toddler, the adult who believes herself ‘fully grown’.
The Very Important Child is a series of connected dances; it is also just a story about people. There are frenzied folk dances, wordless lyrical duets, comic observations of adult conversation and uplifting music.
Mad Meg – November 18 and 19 at 8pm. Tickets: £10, £8.50 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
Mad Meg is a collision of traditional folk and contemporary dance theatre. Threading moving bodies, spoken word, live folk music and driven by the wild rhythms of Appalachia, MAZPOD tell the demise of Mad Meg, an unruly woman whose spirit is at odds with the traditional society she lives in.
MAZPOD invite you to spend a night of storytelling with them in the local pub. As the tragedy unfolds, pass between narrators and characters in the tale and bounce from poignancy to bawdiness, uncovering Mad Meg’s story.
THEATRE
Parvati’s Dark Children: Rehearsed Reading – November 22 at 8pm. Free.
Set against the backdrop of the Maoist insurrection in the jungles of Bastar, and drawing on mythology attributed to the Gond tribals, Parvati’s Dark Children is a play about betrayal, resistance, and expropriation – of land, mythology and worldview.
Calibrating themselves on the spectrum of political resistance, a human rights lawyer, his daughter in love with a Maoist rebel, a tribal woman in solitary confinement and a tribal jail guard, renegotiate their positions, creating a vital argument between liberalism and anarchism, pragmatism and idealism, violence and non-violence, cynical and reactionary positions, and above all, between settler cultures and the indigenous way of life.
Trunkated Scratch Night including A Taste of Heaven – November 29 at 8pm. Free.
The night will include a rehearsed reading of short play, A Taste of Heaven by Chris Holbrook, one of the winning entries to the Blue Elephant’s 2015 playwriting competition, plus extracts of other new works-in-progress.
Jack Frost – December 7 to December 10. Times vary. Tickets: £5, £3 Southwark residents. Running Time: 50 minutes. Recommended for ages 3+.
A magical, wintery production brings Jack Frost to life through puppetry, live music and enchanting storytelling. Meet our mischievous sprite as he takes us on a snowy adventure and spreads winter wherever he goes. But wrap up warm or you’ll catch him nipping at your fingers and toes!
CANDID – December 14 at 8pm. Tickets: £9, £8 concessions, £7 Southwark residents.
CANDID is an enigmatic ‘performance-ritual’ about the complexities of female friendships. Two women play a raw and dangerous game of Truth or Dare, setting each other a series of provocative tasks using words, intense physicality and video.
CANDID opens the space for the audience to experience, contemplate and celebrate long-lasting bonds, as a radical alternative to a modern day culture of ‘Temp’, ‘Insta-friends’ and ‘frenemies’ and tendencies of bullying and isolation. It exposes but also tries to subvert the stereotypical female competitiveness.
For more information or to book tickets, visit www.blueelephanttheatre.co.uk/.