Category: Asides

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Anyone for La Boite Indie next year?

La Boite Roundhouse
Image by Dramagirl via Flickr

La Boite Theatre Company opened submissions this week for its 2011 indie season.

With two productions thus far into the 2010 season (Blackbird and The Bitterling) and two to follow later this year, La Boite’s inaugural indie project has provided a catalyst for the many independent groups and individual artists in the city. La Boite Indie’s stated aims – to nurture a more sustainable independent theatre culture in Brisbane, to build audiences in Brisbane generally, to enable closer ties between independent practice and La Boite, and to help create outstanding, contemporary works for theatre seems to be on track so far.

La Boite Indie was hands-down one of the best theatrical experiences of my professional life. We had the opportunity, freedom and support to create passionately and make bold, uncompromising choices.Sven Swenson

La Boite Indie is a curated season of four independent theatre productions, each lasting three weeks. La Boite welcomes applications from across the independent sector – and will again transform its theatre into an intimate 95-seat black box for Indie 2011. La Boite will also commit to providing financial, technical, marketing and artistic support to the selected companies.

David Berthold, La Boite’s artistic director is passionate himself about the idea: “The independent sector is made up mostly of emerging artists coming together to create work in small spaces with few resources. Cultivating this talent and finding ways of increasing reasources is fundamental to theatre’s ecology.

This area of work is a crucible for new ideas and helps keep the artform authentic to the times. David Berthold

Companies and artists wishing to submit a work for indie 2011 can find full details and conditions for entry on la Boite’s website. The closing date for submissions is Tuesday 17 august 2010 at 5pm – that’s a little over 17 days from today! Mark your calendars and get going.

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iPhones in the Theatre

Apart from the obvious – TURN THEM OFF – subtle, humorous and not so subtle prompts as the house-lights dim, and notwithstanding the current debate on whether or not audience members or reviewers should ‘live-tweet’ a show from #tweetseats, there are lots of opportunities to capture images as aides memoires to a particular theatre experience … and not just on the iPhone of course, but other pocket-friendly phones as well.

I snapped this one as I left the Roundhouse in Brisbane on the opening night of I Love You Bro’ from La Boite Theatre. It’s a terrific poster corridor not dissimilar to the one in the Bille Brown Studio for Queensland Theatre Company and the loooong walk down to Wharf 1 and 2 theatres at Sydney Theatre Co.

By the way, who else loves theatre posters?

You might be interested in some shots I’ve taken of theatres round the world.

And the other side of the business of iPhones in the theatre – some earlier posts on apps for iPhone toting actors (from Groundling)

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Wake Up Call: Australian Theatre Forum – Brisbane 19-21 September 2011

Guest post by Zane Trow

The second Australian Theatre Forum will be held from Monday 19th to Wednesday 21st September 2011 at Brisbane Powerhouse during the Brisbane Festival. A steering committee has been formed, and will be “announced soon.”

The powerhouse is located in a converted power...
Image via Wikipedia

This little snippet appears on the Theatre Network Victoria E-News site for June and there is also this elsewhere on the same site.

This’ll give you, dear reader, some background on the Theatre Forum itself and a recent “workshop” held towards planning for the 2011 event.

The first thing to emerge on the list of goals for 2011 is:

  • At the next forum in 2011 we want: Better representation of Independent theatre makers (at the Forum and in general)

So my first question is, “Who, from the Independent sector, is going to be on the steering committee”?
And my second question is, “Who from Brisbane is going to be on the steering committee”?

Who from the Independent sector is going to be on the steering committee and who from Brisbane is going to be on the steering committee?

Both seem to me to be reasonable questions, as certainly the planning “workshop” (Towards an Australian Theatre Forum 2011, Tuesday 23 February 2010, Adelaide Festival Centre) seems to me to have been run by the usual suspects, with certainly no Brisbane representation that I can see. I may have missed the Brisbane people in attendance; I may also have missed those same Brisbane people calling for a wide input into the event by seeking opinions from us all so that when they sit on a national, Australia Council-funded forum they can speak about Brisbane theatre from a position of strength and support. Continue reading “Wake Up Call: Australian Theatre Forum – Brisbane 19-21 September 2011”

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This Week in Queensland Theatre: July 26-Aug 1

Check further details on company websites

Opening:

The Seven Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman. An education production Dir Rosalba Clemente for Queensland Theatre Company. Bille Brown Studio (from Tuesday)

Shadowlands by William Nicholson Crossbow Productions at Brisbane Powerhouse Visy Theatre (from Thursday)


Continuing:

The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl Dir Kate Cherry for Queensland Theatre Company, Cremorne Theatre, QPAC

I Love You Bro’ by Adam J Cass Dir David Berthold for La Boite Theatre at the Roundhouse

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A fifth letter: Thoughts while sitting in a waiting room

Hello Greenroomers

I had another audition the other day for a TVC. It was one of those dispiriting ones when they want to see what faces you can pull. I hate them. Oh well, it’s just TVC casting laid bare really.

Auditioning is of course the curse of our profession, a necessary curse. But at its best, it can be very enjoyable. No, really.

Do you know the story of  The Long-Jumping Jeweler of Lavender Bay? It was a short story by Hugh Atkinson, which then became a movie (1971), a Little River Band song and a novel, also by Hugh Atkinson (1992). It tells the story of a little man, living his humdrum life, who works as a jeweler in the Sydney CBD. To get to work he takes the ferry from – you guessed it – Lavender Bay. One day, lost in thought, he almost misses his ferry. On an impulse he runs and jumps the gap to land on the deck, to the acclaim of his fellow passengers.

Pleased by their reaction but more by the feeling he got while jumping, he makes this a regular thing, and lets the ferry get a little further away from the wharf before he does his leap every day. And every day the passengers wonder and bet on if this will be the day he does not make it.

Then he starts to notice something. As he jumps, while he is in the air, he glimpses a paradise and a beautiful woman, somewhere above the ferry’s roof. And as he jumps longer and higher, he sees more of the paradise and the woman, who is beckoning him. And soon he is jumping for the woman, not for the ferry. The jump gets longer and longer, he gets higher and higher and one day, inexplicably for his fellow passengers, he disappears: no thud on the deck, no splash in the water. The Long-Jumping Jeweler of Lavender Bay is never seen again.

This story popped to mind the other day while I waited for an audition. The leaping, the glimpse of paradise, the thump of the wooden floor as we land again – auditioning can be a bit like that. You may accuse me of romanticizing the process. But why shouldn’t we?

Love and mercy.

This post is part of a series by guest blogger Nick Backstrom, a Brisbane actor and writer who is now based in Melbourne.