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Productions and Projects
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The Just Price of Flowers
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2012 - 2013
The Just Price of Flowers is a play about the 2008 financial collapse, set in 17th Century Netherlands.
Tulips were imported into Europe in the early 17th Century at a time when merchants were generating wealth through trade. Collecting exotic items was a fashion. A passion developed for tulips, their price rose rapidly and created the possibility of making profit through speculative buying. For a brief time certain tulip bulbs were sold for prices equivalent to those of a house, or three years of a craftsman's wage. In 1637 this financial bubble burst.
Using Tulipmania as its inspiration, The Just Price of Flowers finds the Van Leasings buying a tulip from Van Eek, using money borrowed from Van Hire. It follows them as they chase their dream of wealth through the growing complexities of futures trading, credit ratings, sub-primes, credit default swaps, and the horror of short selling.
This is a simple, austerity production, based on real events, explains the complexities of high finance with humour, in a straightforward way. There is also heartbreak, two songs and an origami peacock. photo: Graeme Braidwood, courtesy Stan's Cafe
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The Just Price of Flowers
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Home of the Wriggler
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2006
Home of The Wriggler is a lo-fi sci-fi docu-drama.
Lo-fi because the lights and sound are all powered by the cast, giving the show a strange intensity and immediacy.
Sci-fi because the show is set at some indeterminate future time when the Rover brand, the Longbridge plant and cars in general have become the subject of myth and speculation.
Docu-drama because the show is founded on interviews, anecdotes, personal experiences and documents about living, working, growing-up, falling in love, making/buying/selling/driving/sitting in cars in Birmingham.
Home Of The Wriggler is based on a host of entangled and fractured stories told in the pulsing beams of car headlights. Four actors, dressed down in workwear and parka coats, drive the show on. An exercise bike and twelve speed racer have been customised with dynamos and switches to run seven lights, a kettle and a home-made turntable. Stories leap back and forth through time and across the globe. A hand-cranked flywheel powers four more lights. Shake-to-shine torches help navigate. Scenes are emotive, detailed and boiled down, full of local colour and global import. An eco-legend is told.
The show is written out of love and fury. photo: courtesy Stan's Cafe
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Home of the Wriggler
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Of All The People In All The World
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2003 and ongoing
Of All The People In All The World uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life.
Each grain of rice equals one person. Over a period of days, a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics such as
the populations of towns and cities
the number of doctors, the number of soldiers
the number of people born each day, the number who die
all the people who have left the earth's orbit.
The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever changing landscape of rice. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking.
The show adapts to its setting: the country, city and building it is in. The amount of rice used varies according to which version is performed. Of All The People In All The World: UK is a standard small version using 1,000Kg of rice to represent 60,000,000 people.
Of All The People In All The World: Europe at 12,000Kg is an example of a medium size version.
Of All The People In All The World in which the whole world's population was represented by 104 tons of rice, has been performed once in Stuttgart.
Other cities in which Of All the People in All the World has been performed include Coventry, Birmingham, Dudley, Leeds, Worcester, Nottingham, Newcastle, Norwich, Manchester, Edinburgh, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Madrid, Valencia, Milan, Budapest, Leipzig, Cork, Groningen, Portland, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Melbourne. photo: courtesy Stan's Cafe
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Of All the People in All the World
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