SCRATCH
Scratch number 2: Ready for the teams...
Scratch number 4 (We This Way): Audience voting
Scratch number 4 (We This Way): Keeping track of narrative forks...
The Unbuilt Room: Scratch Quartet
Throughout Autumn 2014, I twisted, stretched and (almost) broke The Unbuilt Room.
Battersea Arts Centre hosted four scratch performances, each one a new (and different) experiment based on The Unbuilt Room.
The "normal" Unbuilt Room will carry on! The Scratch Quartet was a laboratory for me to play with some of the ideas and themes in the original, to get feedback from audiences to see if something might emerge and evolve into a new, stand-alone work.
It was a great experience and the process gave rise to TWO new shows!
> I presented We This Way at Summerhall in the Edinburgh Fringe throughout August 2015. Full details on We This Way’s own website wethisway.com
> A House Repeated - a "team" version of The Unbuilt Room - premiered with a sold-out three week run at Battersea Arts Centre 7-24 October 2015 (Wed - Sat). It returns to BAC 18-29 October 2016 and is on tour across England... full info on houserepeated.com
Before beginning the Scratch process, I wrote:
The only thing I can guarantee at this point is that you definitely WILL NOT see a "normal" Unbuilt Room. Rather than six people sitting in a circle, you might find yourself in a crowd wandering around a dark room, or sitting still watching a "play" (uh-oh), or moving through a series of one-on-one performances…
Dates: 5/9 - 21:00 | 26/9 - 19:00 | 21/10 - 19:00 | 28/11 - 21:00
> In Part 1 of the Scratch Quartet (Fri 5th Sept), I was joined by performer / deviser Zoe Bouras (with whom I've performed many two-hander editions of The Unbuilt Room) and theatre-maker / game designer / all-round-good-egg Tassos Stevens. In an Unbuilt Room first, the performers got up out of their chairs and moved around. Shocking!
> For Part 2 of the Scratch Quartet (Fri 26th Sept), I worked with Zoe Bouras to create a version dividing the audience into two teams. Great fun watching them chase each other around! And when they finally met...
> For Part 3 of the Scratch Quartet (Tues 21st Oct), I worked with Zoe Bouras and Dr. Martin Welton (Senior Lecturer in Theatre ad Performance, Queen Mary University of London). Martin is a very experienced performer, with companies including Sound & Fury -- which came in handy, as for Scratch 3 we presented a new edition of The Unbuilt Room in complete blackout...
> For Part 4 - the final part of the Scratch Quartet - (Fri 28th Nov) The Unbuilt Room went into full Choose-Your-Own-Adventure mode! The audience used glowsticks to vote on which story branch to follow in a looping, surreal exploration of Battersea Arts Centre.