World Summit on Arts and Culture, Newcastle
13 – 18 June, 2006
Newcastle
This show looked fantastic. It occupied over half of the extensive ground floor of recently completed Trinity Gardens office complex. The space was beautiful, curved, white and light with a low white ceiling and metal floor. Unusually for us the space was also water tight, air conditioned and clean, secure with space to change in and somewhere to lock away valuables, everything needed to allow performers to concentrate fully on making the show as good as it could be responding to its location in the North East and its place alongside the conference.
Stella Hall, a long time supporter of Stan’s Cafe, saw the show in Birmingham and later in Edinburgh, she wanted to stage the largest UK version to date as part of the World Summit’s cultural programme. It was calculated the NewcastleGateshead Initiative could afford 1 Billion grains of rice so this version was born; 15 – 24 refers to the world’s population in this age-band, human’s peak reproductive years.
Highlight of the show was that we represented the vast array of nationalities visiting the summit by separating the delegates as stats. After a running joke about the Nigerians never bringing as many delegates as they say they will one of the Nigerian party pointed out there were only 3 instead of the expected 12 saying “We always do that”.
Lowlight was that while taking the surplus Nigerian rice grains away, Jake was told by another delegate to “stop tampering with the artwork without consulting the artist”.
Credits
Performers: Heather Burton, Charlotte Goodwin, Mike Kirchner, Jake Oldershaw, Craig Stephens, Jack Trow
With: Karen Pictor and Craig Thornton
Get-in Assistance: Andy Watson
Production Manager: Karen Stafford
Image: Karen Stafford
Concept: James Yarker
General Manager: Charlotte Martin
Advisory Producer: Nick Sweeting
Food mountains – weird – enlightening and worrying.
Audience Member
For someone who struggles to comprehend large numbers in statistics – this opened my eyes, my mind and made me aware of many things I try not to think about. Stunning!
Ruth
So simple, yet so effective – some of it made me laugh, some of it took the smile off my face. I’ve learnt something today.
Audience Member
Perhaps some of the statistics should be questioned or even deconstructed: implies there is one ‘truth’ when sometimes it’s about supposition, myth or memory.
Audience Member
Excellent – prised open at least one fairly closed mind today.
Audience Member
Mind-blowing in a word (or 2) – there goes my dream of meeting all the people in the world!
Erica