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I am looking for Incident Books or excerpts from Incident Books from pubs and bars across the UK.

I want to read them out as a performance: a litany of drunkenness and violence.

All names & locations will be changed to protect those involved. All submissions will be treated in confidence.

If you have access to an Incident Book but cannot send it to me you can email photos of interesting pages, just get in touch here.

You can also post Incident Books directly to Residence:

11 St Nicholas Street,
Bristol
BS1 1UE

Thank you in advance for your contribution.

When i was 19 i got a job at a factory in Guildford which made steam wallpaper strippers.

My role consisted of taking short aluminium rods from a box on my right, pressing a foot peddle that started a spinning band of sandpaper, then milling a slight bevel on to each end of the rod.

I would then place the rod in another box to my left. I had to complete a certain number of boxes each hour. Despite the presence of a charming, german girl with whom i chatted at lunch, i lasted just 3 days at the job.

RITUAL!

Suddenly it all makes more sense. I was thinking between shows about how uncomfortable i was with my previous analysis. Then this idea came to me: the whole thing with the one-on-one shows makes more sense if viewed as a rediscovery of the power of personal ritual.

In the UK we do not have powerful rites of passage or initiations, our rituals such as they are have become hollow and abstracted. Such as collecting exam results from the headteacher. A cursory handshake which changes nothing.

Rituals create a repeatable set of rules and situations that alters or presents a new reality to the participants, a reality which, thus altered, allows them new experiences. The changes must be adapted to, responded to and in doing so the person makes changes in themselves and faces aspects of life that perhaps they have not encountered before. The participants are encompassed within the ritual, they are both subject to its rules and responsible for its outcomes.

Surely in a society such as ours where most people live in a constant pattern of work, where challenge often amounts to a tight deadline, and out fundamental assumptions go unchanged, we need rituals which truly ask something more from people.

How much can you give?

How much can you take?

What do you really believe?

Given total freedom what would you say?

What does it all mean?

I've been thinking on my day off about the nature of one-on-one or indeed many-on-one theatre.

I think there is some interesting work and the artists i have spoken to have a clear vision of what their individual shows are trying to communicate. Which is great, because sometimes in theatre ideas get a bit woolly, and there just isn't any room for fluff in a 1-1 show.

The basic mechanics of the format allow for some truly amazing and transformative work to be made. You can access your audience emotionally and physically in a way impossible at other scales. You can push them further whilst allowing for everyone to have a totally different reaction. They can be totally present as themselves and yet be completely part of the work. They can even rail against the experience and have that worked with.transformative

As a format how does it arise? What are its origins?

I have an awkward feeling that it is the culturisation of a individualistic, self regarding, self centred mind set, that capitalist ideas of the pre-eminence of the individual have feed through into a theatre that has moved from a mass audience to a singular one.

Perhaps we are so over saturated with clamours for our attention that the only thing which can hold us is a direct and all encompassing experience, unmitigated by the presence of others.

There is a encapsulation, analogous to cinematic escapism that seems present, you are transported into a world where made-up rules have real consequences, the actor dies on screen in a hail of fakery, but within the film it is a tragedy, in the 1-1 the performer is performing - it is a kind of fiction, but there may be tragedy or joy for the audience member depending upon the rules of that performance, and it will be experienced as a real situation because the forth wall is a bubble containing both actor and spect-actor.

Who knows? Inspired by the Korean film 3 Iron I just thought that it would be fun for people to try and see my face and it spiralled from there.

Last of all a dose of negative pragmatism: it is economically unsustainable.

Once you go beyond my extremely minimal set up with one performer and a show that lasts 60 seconds or less, where it would be possible for me to charge perhaps £1 for the experience and thus make up to £60 per hour to be split between the venue, the usher and myself and even then it's pretty tight, to a situation where the show lasts maybe 45 minutes and contains 5 performers where you might need to be paying a hypothetical £225 for your ticket, it becomes obvious that the enterprise requires huge subsidies and a lot of volunteers to make it happen.

Is this a problem? The way I see it West-End Musicals and Stand-Up Comics are the only kinds of theatre/performance that stand a chance of making money, and often they don't. So it isn't at all essential that art should pay for itself, otherwise you just get Ben Elton (depending on the stage of his career).

But funds and goodwill are finite resources so there are opportunity costs involved - a single place at a 1-1 show might mean sacrificing ten audience members at another show. So does the 1-1 have to be 10 times as good?

Whatever the answers I will be getting chased around a room by strangers, saying the first thing that comes into my head and letting people say whatever they want, until Sunday night.

Get involved.

Doing these performances has made me remeber something written by Harun Morrison about them i am quoting it in full here but you can read the original - here.

SATURDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER 2008

The Face Game & The First Time / Edward Rapley / 8th - 10th August 2008 / (Forest Fringe) Edinburgh Festival 2008

I do these two games, in one (The First Thing) i open my eyes and say the first thing that comes into my head about the person sat in front of me, in the other (Your Turn) they have a minute to say whatever they want to me.

It really struck me that the very first thing that comes into my head is often banal, or even offensive, and that somehow they are a simplification or a reduction of the person.

This was re-enforced by people saying amazing things to me in the second game, who if they had come to The First Thing would have probably met with a fairly bland response.

You can get involved with The Forest Fringe HERE!

Look Club is to shows as Book Club is to books: You all watch the same show and at some point meet up and discuss it.

Any Residence member can suggest a show to see and a time to discuss it, they are then responsible for telling people about it, turning up, and providing tea & biscuits.

If you want to attend the only thing you need to do is to see the show in question.

*The next Look Club is at 7pm Friday 11th June at The Milk Bar, 11 St Nicholas Street, Bristol. We will be discussing Far Away which is running at the Bristol Old Vic for 3 more nights.*

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I am in the happy position of having many ideas for how to develop my latest show, and final part of the Self Trilogy: Who Knows Where.

Except me to wobble, be enveloped in the blackness, wash my own skin, converse with a dead rat and more!

I am happy with the response to the show. Which have included two positive reviews and my very first bad review! Got to keep things balanced.

I would like to point out that it was a work in progress showing. A fact missing from the intentionally vague and poetic copy in the programme. Whoops. Sorry to those who came expecting to see something finished.

Nothing that you saw will necessarily be in the final show. No one has seen all the transitions this show has been through but here is a little history -

1. Pilot Jan 09 - tape Miller crash
2. Prototype Nov 09 - Bubble wrap dance
3. Ferment Jan 10 - scatter shot joy
4. Mayfest may 10 - Death chance show
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I had an awful time working on this show after version 2. I pulled a manic show together for Frement. After that I just didn't have any inspiration. I made a show that i thought was interesting, about searching for inspiration and reclaiming English-ness from a host of swine, but i didn't care a jot for it. There was no passion in its creation, i didn't *have* to perform it. A total disaster was just around the corner. I would have put uninspired work on stage and that would have been a betrayal. I only do these shows because i have to. So right at the last moment, the Monday night before the show on Thursday, inspiration struck. I sat down after watching the amazing Peggy Shaw's Must and wrote down the new show that i would be performing in 3 days time. About 80% was totally new and the rest was finding places for ideas that have been floating untethered in my head since i started this show in January 2009. So the result was even fresher than ever, so fresh it was raw. Making it hard to digest and perhaps not to everyone's taste.

This raises some interesting issues for me. Where does my responsibility lie? With the audience or with myself as an artist? So to resolve them here is my personal manifesto, this applies to any show that goes out under my name.

1. I will only show work that I care about.
2. I will always work from inspiration.
3. I will never put myself in danger of breaking rules 1 and 2.

Here is a brief summary of all the things i saw at B.L.O.P.

If you aren't on the list it means I didn't see you. Sorry about that. Please invite me to your next show and I'll blog about that.

GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN an outstanding commitment and feat of endurance, a pain to watch and listen to. Excellent work.

Edi Rogers literally out standing in the cold holding a sign. A sweet and simple idea, it made me smile a number of times.

Tom Marshman offered beguiling memories of lesbian and gay history and ephemeral gestures.

Flash gave us a misplaced, psuedo-Radio 4, word portrait.