Mayfest 2010 Participation:
A side-order of discussion-based events with a sprinkling of skills-based workshops. Feast your eyes on this little lot...
Curious: Artist Talk
Friday 14th May, 6pm at Arnolfini
£6/£4.50 concs tickets available from Arnolfini
Formed in 1996 by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, Curious have developed a reputation for edgy, humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics. Their work as Curious has embraced performance, installation, publication and film. Leslie Hill will talk about their work and projects including those undertaken in Bristol.
Residence Coffee Morning
Saturday 15th May, 11am – 1pm at The Milk Bar, St Nicholas St
Free – Just turn up
Residence artists have got the kettle on, come and join us for some informal discussions around the work presented in the first week of Mayfest. On the agenda is Forest Fringe, The Festival, Internal, Trilogy, Bodies in Flight, Tinned Fingers, Jasmine Loveys, Heap and Pebble and much, much more. Tea, coffee and biscuits provided.
So tell me about your work…. How to Articulate Your Practice
Tuesday 18th May, 11am – 1pm **Now being held at the Bristol Old Vic**
Free – Just turn up
From marketing copy to website text, this peer-to-peer mentoring session attempts to weed out the buzz-words and clichés that send programmers’ eyes rolling. We'll look at ways to describe your practice for different contexts and uncover whether your work is what you say it is.
Let's get out of here
Thursday 20th May, 2pm – 4pm at Electric Hotel
Free – Just turn up
Do you make performances for outside spaces? Do you want to? From within the temporary walls of the Electric Hotel, Theatre Bristol creative producer Mike Martins and Jon Beedel from Desperate Men discuss the broad spectrum of outdoor work from busking to firework spectaculars to public interventions, outdoor contemporary dance and pervasive games, asking how the sector has evolved, it’s influences and how many artists from different forms are finding their feet being led outdoors.
Electric Hotel Dance Workshops
Friday 21st May at Arnolfini - 1pm – 2.30pm
Saturday 22nd May at Bristol Old Vic
1pm – 2.30pm
£5 per person (20 people max) tickets available from host venue
Join the dancers from Mayfest’s flagship performance Electric Hotel as they take you through some of the choreography and technique behind this exhilarating and ambitious project. This energetic workshop is open to dancers of all abilities who want to be challenged. Come dressed appropriately.
Killing Time (a workshop led by Stacy Makishi)
Saturday 22nd May, 2pm – 5pm
Bristol Old Vic (12 people max)
£10 per person (spaces are very limited – to apply for a place email a short description of yourself and your practice to pete@mayfestbristol.co.uk Pete will contact you to confirm your place.)
Some people call it ‘flow’, ‘the zone’, or ‘source’, this workshop will help participants ride the wave of the creative process and opens up new strategies to making performance.
This workshop that galvanizes participants to
• Move faster than think
• Write quicker than edit
• Create faster than critique
Killing Time is offered to anyone interested in tapping into their own creative juices. One must have a willingness to try out new ideas and an adventurous spirit to walk out into the unknown.
Residence Coffee Morning
Saturday 22nd May, 11am – 1pm at The Milk Bar
Free
As Mayfest draws to a close, Residence opens its doors to host more informal discussions about the work presented in the second week of the festival. On the agenda is Electric Hotel, Must, The Human Computer, Ed Rapley, SS Arcadia, Stay!, Cutting the Cord and much, much more. Tea, coffee and biscuits provided.
Generator
Thurs May 13 9.30 – 11am Brewery Theatre
Fri May 14 9.30 – 11am Brewery Theatre
Thurs May 20 9.30 – 11am Brewery Studio
Fri May 21 9.30 – 11am Brewery Studio
Venue: Tobacco Factory
Booking: Tickets £3 per session or £10 for all 4 sessions
FREE for artists taking part in Mayfest
Book by calling the Tobacco Factory Theatre Box Office: 0117 902 0344
Booking essential. Participants can attend any number of sessions.
Copy: Along with Prototype, Script Space and our SITE residency programme, Generator is part of Tobacco Factory Theatre’s expanding portfolio of ways we support the development of artists and their work.
Generator sessions bridge the gap between workshops on a particular craft or performance style and courses on professional development. Participants can expect to have their own creative process affirmed and developed (and maybe shaken up a bit…) and to refresh and augment their tool-kit for affirming, maintaining and growing their own craft. Generator is facilitated by Amy Rose of Bocadalupa. www.bocadalupa.com
Generator at Mayfest
Over Mayfest Generator will be running a series of short, practical early morning wake-up sessions that will focus on techniques for revitalising tired creativity.
Whilst the sessions are primarily designed to support artists whose practice involves a large amount of improvising and devising, their content is necessarily highly transferable and artists from other disciplines and with other practices are very welcome.
Volunteers!
It would be great to get some more volunteers on board for this year's festival. Here's a list of some of the roles we still need to fill and what you can expect in return...
FOREST FRINGE: 8th & 9th - Bristol Old Vic
5 x Stewards per night
The Forest Fringe Microfestival is a whole festival in the space of a single evening, including audio and video installations, one-on-one encounters, performances, interventions and hidden experiences. The event is on for two nights, Saturday and Sunday from 7pm till late.
What we're looking for are people to assist the artists personally with the projects they'll be presenting. Each volunteer will be assigned to a specific event. The artist will explain what they're doing and how it works and it'll be the volunteer's responsibility to help them set things up a bit and basically usher the audience into the event. Depending on which artist you're working with this might involve getting people to wait and explaining how the piece works, or introducing people to the installation, or guiding them through the Old Vic to where the piece is hidden.
It should be an interesting chance to work with one of our artists and to get a sense of the atmosphere of the whole evening.
Volunteers will be needed from 6pm onwards to generally help set up and for a briefing sesh with your artists. In this position you will essentially get to seeing the show so we won't be offering any comps for other shows.
BODIES IN FLIGHT: 11th - 14th, offsite
Shows running 3 times in the morning and 3 times in the evening, so shifts for that will be divided up as follows: Morning (7.30am - 10.30) Evening (3.30 - 6.30). We need 2 per shift, (so a total of 4 ppl per day) - one to walk with the audience and guide them as they will be wearing headphones, and one to be at Temple Meads to meet and gather headsets at the end of the walk. Please note this show will take place outdoors.
In return for this we can offer a comp ticket to any show *EXCEPT Internal.*
INTERNAL: 9th - 11th, Bridewell
Stewards will be responsible for guiding audiences from the front box office area to the performances space (performances take place every half an hour). Shifts will be divided into 1.30-4.30, 4-7, 6.30-9.30 slots. We will require at least one steward for each shift. In return we can offer a comp for any other show.
PUB ROCK: 11th, 12th, 13th.
The Venue for this is TBC, but we need 3 people per night. You need to be available from about 8pm. It looks likely that we will need 2 people to walk with the audience from the BOV to the pub, and one to wait at the pub in case anyone arrives there without having been to get tickets torn at the BOV. If you steward for this then you will be seeing the show, so no comps are on offer for anything else with this one.
If you are interested in volunteering at any of these please email Dion at assistant@mayfestbristol.co.uk
ELECTRIC HOTEL: 19th - 22nd - Harbourside
Each night we need:
5 x extras to take part in the show
3 x stewards
Stewards will be needed from 8pm onwards
In return for your work on this show you can see it another night for free or indeed any other Mayfest show (again, excluding Internal).
