Midnight Matinee Round Up

Now this is long over due.

Just the day after I performed my first full work in progress presentation of The Middle Bit at the Arnolfini i was off to London to put on a 15 minute version at the Tristan Bates Theatre's Midnight Matinees.

As the name suggests this happens from midnight onwards and it comprises work in progress and development performances. That night there was a script reading by, ah right, this is the problem i have forgotten the details and lost the info sheet i had so maybe i will update this once i've tidied my room.

Anyway the bit i'm sure of is how much better my show went. I had spent a frantic few hours the previous night recording ideas into my phone as i verged on the edge of sleep. I really clarified what i wanted to talk about in the show and it was a wonderful experience as the fog lifted. Whilst i had focused on apathy as the central point of the show at the Arnolfini i realsied that this was simply a response to the much more central existential terror of the failure to find a meaningful praxis in life.

This is subtle and pretentious sounding, which i why i make performance rather than just write it all down. But anyway this change really made a whole bunch of micro changes to how i went about putting the material together.

The result was that i felt much more in control of the show, the audience and myself, and it went really well. So well that they asked me back to perform in a second Midnight Matinee on the 11th of July and to prepare a 15 minute version of The Middle Bit for the Latitude festival. So i will be performing at latitude at 12:40am on the 17th and 18th of July (That's very late night Thursday and Friday).