The Exchange
Penzance, U.K.
30 January – 3 February 2008
The first public gig in the UK with Of All The People since June 2006 and the company’s first visit to Cornwall. We were invited down by Kneehigh Theatre and presented the show in two venues, Penzance and Truro. At the same time Kneehigh were restaging their show Rapunzel at Hall for Cornwall and Improbable hosted an Open Space forum looking at the cultural life of the area. It was exciting to be part of what felt like a very vibrant time and, for us land locked Midlanders, lovely to be near the sea.
The Exchange gallery is the new sister gallery of The Newlyn and, as the name suggests, was previously a telephone exchange. The exhibition space gave us a clean canvas on which to let the rice do the talking. It was good to return to a small version of the show having recently toured with much larger scale ones – choices have to be very carefully made with a smaller quantity of rice and it encourages a more rapid turnover of statistics, which is great for people who come back for a second look.
Cornwall through up some interesting areas for exploration; including the decline of industry and the growth of tourism, notions of local and national identity and maritime history. We also ran two workshops here – both oh which were very enjoyable. In the second one of the students wrote a comment describing how, from my description of it in the workshop, he thought it would be awful until he got in and saw it and was blown away. Either my description of the show is terrible or you really do have to see it. Possibly both.
Credits
Performers: Chris Dugrenier, Jake Oldershaw, Karen Stafford, Craig Stephens.
Images: Steve Tanner
Concept: James Yarker
General Manager: Charlotte Martin
Advisory Producer: Nick Sweeting
Provocative, witty and starkly beautiful in lots of different ways.
Audience Member
Never knew that England had so many Jedis.
Audience Member
Makes you realise how far we have got to go….!
Audience Member
You forgot me in the ‘schoolchildren in Cornwall’ part so I put myself in.
Audience Member
I’m not good with numbers. This helped a lot.
Audience Member
It makes sense to see it this way – a sad, confused sense of us humans.
Audience Member
C(rice)is, what c(rice)is?
Audience Member