Mike Lister

Mike Lister and I made our first show as a duo in 1987 and proudly declared that ‘having pulled ourselves out of the gutter our future lay on the pavement’. We had worked together for the previous five years touring outdoor shows to play schemes and had even made it to Glastonbury. But it was in ‘87 that Avanti Display became just the two of us. We worked as The Crayfish Twins, The Shedmen and Percy and Stubbsy in the Rickshaw, in the nineties we had a flirtation with stand up comedy and even opened a comedy club. The Steamy was in Manchester in the damp cellar of The Old Steam Brewery pub just off Oxford Road and there we hosted many acts from the burgeoning stand up comedy circuit with us as comperes filling in the gaps between performers with surreal routines. It was always quite a last minute struggle to write new material each week, I will never forget the humane killer when we performed an unrehearsed ‘swords-through-the-box’ routine with Mike dressed as a pantomime cow!

In 1993 we began touring internationally when we made our first trip to Spain with The Fountain Machine, but it took off spectacularly from 1995 after success in France at Challon dans la Rue with The Spurting Man. I had designed this show to fly on the personnel baggage allowance for two people and so we were really on the road, the one to Manchester airport. It was exciting to be so in demand, I suppose like a band that has a hit single, we were off. In 2000 we made the first of several versions of Hydromania at The National Theatre it was a logical development of The Spurting Man and this led Mike into creating his own large scale works, Albatross and Stormbringer. My ambitions led me in a different direction and we made separate work from then on, coming together whenever there was a Hydromania project.

 

This year Mike made the decision to leave Avanti Display and the outdoor arts world behind and open a café, it may seem an unusual move but its one Mike has talked about for years, once being outbid by Mick Hucknall, the well known ginger pop star, when one of the railway arches in the Castlefield Basin came up for sale. It subsequently became a swanky bar rather than the rustic tavern, offering earthenware jugs of Spanish wine, which Mike had envisaged. So now there is The Cherry Orchard in Chorlton where Mike can be found, generous as ever, dispensing coffee, specialty teas and if you are in luck his Borscht soup. Just at the moment there is a photographic exhibition of early Avanti shows black and white images of us learning the trade. I wish him the best of luck. At least he’s made it off the pavement after 27 years.

Autumn dates – 6 Impossible Things

6 Impossible Things our Rural Arts touring show will play three dates in November.

Here they are.

Saturday 14th November
The Theatre at Beachborough School
Westbury
NN13 5LB
Saturday 21 November
Fownhope New Memorial Hall
Fownhope
HR1 4PW
Sunday 22 November
Quatt Village Hall
Quatt
WV15 6QW

More dates next year.

 

Reliquary audience Vox Pop Stockton Riverside Festival

Follow this LINK to a vox pop of Reliquary in Stockton Riverside this year. The Audience Experience is a project from www.commissioner.org.uk

They state
‘We were aiming for a useful public point of view documentary to capture qualitative experience, we wanted to get more of a sense of how audiences experience a festival and understand or interpret the shows they see’

 

Henley Festival – Hydro-Pyro-Mania

Here we are at the Henley Festival creating the finale show with Pa-Boom. The performers are Marc Parry and members of the Acorn music theatre company The piece was choreographed by Ruth Jones and Clare Fildes and commissioned by Stuart Collins.

Thanks to all who took part and particularly Gail and Lucie for washing the 24 sets of soggy Lycra every night! We have played this kind of piece many times now from Singapore to Barking with different combinations of performers both professional and volunteer but with the acorn group we had the best of both worlds. They were professional, enthusiastic and took the whole thing seriously (as all comedy should be) but didn’t forget to have fun. Thanks to everyone. Final shout out to Pete and Adam without whom the whole thing would literally not have happened.

Final Dates For Reliquary

The final dates where you can see The Reliquary this year are

Riverside Festival – Stockton-On-Tees 31July -1 August
Dewsbury (Dewsbury-On Sea) 29th August
Hull Freedom Festival 5-6 September