Keep checking
this page for future projects in which you might like to get involved.
Dance
July 2009
Shoe Nail Dance
We are once more taking to the streets! The Shoe Nail Dance was inspired by a story of a cobbler who made shoe nails with Thomas Paine’s initials engraved in them, and will bring together dancers of all ages and abilities in celebration of the physical energy of protest! Choreographed by Virginia Farman, who created the skate park dance in Something to Dance About, it will be performed four times on the High Street, as part of the Thomas Paine Festival. For more information on how you can get dancing, follow the link from the Home Page.
We are very keen on inviting people with disability to participate, so don’t let anything stop you! With live music mixed by Joseph Young, it’s sure to be another un-missable Paddock event.
Opera
The Commute – An Opera for Towns
Developed by the same team who created The Finnish Prisoner, The Commute is the story of one person’s journey from work to home. A journey that should take fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour at most, but on this day, ends up taking much, much, longer. The piece will be specifically created for venues common to most towns, a playing field, a town hall, a leisure centre, a pedestrian shopping street, and performed promenade-style in each of these venues during the length of an entire day. Audiences will be free to follow the whole story in one day, or to see various chapters of our protagonist’s long journey home on different days. As in The Finnish Prisoner, we would once again employ a combination of professional and amateur performers, as well as merging different art forms, with music as the common thread, so we would be looking for all kinds of participants – dancers, actors, singers, musicians – to join the company.
4 X 4
This is an opera project set in four rooms of a disused house. Four composers are commissioned to look at chamber opera in a domestic setting, with each room designed as a completely different atmosphere into which the audience are submerged. The audience will be split into four groups, entering each room in rotation. We are presently in conversation with the Brighton Festival and Glyndebourne Festival Opera as to ways of developing this idea in partnership.
Literature/Film
Picture Books
We want you to help us tell a story. Picture Books hopes to bring together the residents of a town or village as collaborative storytellers. A Moving Picture Book, if you will, captured on film – a communal Jackanory. The process begins with the selection of a book – a novella, children’s book, or short story. Once selected, the story is divided into segments of a few sentences each, and everyone in the town invited to grab a segment and go. People can submit their own film version of the lines, or they can ask us to film speaking their contribution. They can animate the lines, set them to music, sing them, mime them with added subtitles, paint them on a wall…however it’s done, the end result will be a fantastic story told to camera, to be played as often as you like. Final stage: we get the largest hall we can find and present the book to the people who have made it (and all their friends and family). This project is being developed in partnership with Lewes Live Literature. Keep an eye out here, or in local newspapers, as to when and how you might become one of our storytellers.
Theatre
The Reluctant Dragon
The Reluctant Dragon is a story for children by Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in The Willows. It tells the tale of a boy’s friendship with a pacifist dragon – he’s reluctant to fight – and the problems the two encounter when faced with a village gripped by dragon paranoia and set on the beast’s destruction. We are currently adapting the story into a stage play and hope to perform it locally as well as tour it to castles around the UK.
