Back from 101 Creation Centre in Newbury. We had an inspiring time there and even with Covid restrictions the place still has its own unique lively and purposeful feel. Less mixing with the other groups but other than that it’s business as usual! 101 is such an asset to Outdoor Artists in the UK. and although our visit was quite short we packed in lots of work. There will be video before too long.
The weeks go by and we keep accumulating more material for our Blueprint project. There are now poems, music – compositions and arrangements, visual tricks and illusions and even a storyboard, but as yet, no face to face meetings. In some ways (many) this is an extreme frustration, it can take a week to resolve a small point that would have taken minutes if we were together as people breathing the same air. But in other ways the process points to how we will all have to consider our working practises in the future. Some of the emerging themes speak of lockdown without ever setting out to. I feel we will end up somewhere new, somewhere the company has never been and thats the point of R&D, isn’t it?
Here is an arrangement I did to help with insomnia! –
“ There’s No Business”. (Like Showbusiness)
We are pleased to announce that we have been selected for the Without Walls Blueprint 2020 Programme alongside 9 other UK artists and companies. This is a great opportunity to begin the R&D process albeit in challenging circumstances. As well as creating material and thinking about ideas and actions, for the first time we are thinking seriously about the carbon impact of what we do. Avanti have always taken shows overseas and not always in a sensible way, we have been guilty of long distance travel for very short tours, but this R&D has been conceived as a piece of action research where we will try out some new ways to collaborate, rehearse and test out material. You can find more info on our Up & Coming page HERE
Below is a clip filmed by Ian Cassidy in 1999 at a Street Ahead day in the centre of Manchester it shows James Macpherson, Mike Lister and Bill Palmer doing an old vaudeville routine known as the Chair Snatch. We learned the routine from Emil Wolk, who directed, Crash Cabaret and he learned it from Johnny Hutch the legendary acrobat. The full show is here. Hard to believe it’s not been speeded up and that we could once actually move this fast.
Whilst moving some archive boxes in the office to investigate a damp patch I came across these photographs. I am guessing they are from the eighties and feature myself, Stuart Mitchell and Julie Ward. We had a street theatre company, the predecessor to Avanti, called Street level and were commissioned by North West Arts to create scenarios advertising their arts newspaper ‘The Artful Reporter’. The shtick was the girl was ‘in the know’ reading the fascinating paper whilst various ‘characters’ peered over her shoulder to get a peek. We hoofed around Manchester for a morning and improvised these shots. Interestingly they were taken by Martin Parr now photography royalty. Julie also did OK and was until 2020 an MEP for the North West.
Crow 2023