Rachel Parish, the Maker behind All Change: An International Fun Palace, fills us in on the process of creating a Fun Palace simultaneously in five locations across the globe.
It’s 8:57pm EST, I’m on a plane to NYC from New Orleans right now and Arlo, my 8 month old, is finally sound asleep. I just finished draft six of a press release for All Change, hoping that this 2.5 page version may find the right balance of crediting and communication to work for the seven core organisations and 100+ artists who are collaborating to make this three day festival happen in five different global locations. So, that done for now at least, I turn my attention to this blog post.
In New Orleans, I met up with Joanna Russo, coordinator of the local All Change Festival, at her warehouse on St. Ferdinand Street. Sweltering hot and with three hours of sleep, I very ungracefully trundled myself and my baby buggy through the doors of the building to see a dream of a space—handbuilt offices lofted above a kitchenette overlooking a sprung floor rehearsal space, populated this afternoon by the grounded and resonate voices of co-inhabitant company Art Spot, deep into work on their newest production. After a short tour and talk we mosy up the street to a café where Arlo is immediately, and just in the knick of time, swept up into the arms of the various and sundry people at the café to play piano and serve up iced coffee to customers. I had a call to take, to another Joanna, but this one, a charming freelance reporter in the UK who wanted to know, simply, Tell me about All Change!
Easier asked than answered. My response, in slightly mosaic form, went something like the following.
Perhaps a useful place to start is that All Change is a Firehouse Project. This is taken from the aforementioned press release:
FIREHOUSE CREATIVE PRODUCTIONS. Our motto is Stories, Collaboration, Innovation: making global local through live and digital performance. We create interactive performance events internationally, with each project inspired by distinct communities. Our work is characterised by multi-layered projects that create inviting spaces for artists and audiences to meet and play in the dreaming, making, and experiencing stages of performance making.
So, last year in January I was restageing a production of Superjohn–the play component of a Firehouse project a team of artists and I co-created over several years. As I was working on recasting I got word that Theatre503 had a week’s slot free and was interested in having us put on a production of another play we had been developing with playwright Shireen Mula, entitled Soon Until Forever. This play was really delicate, and formally innovative. We’d taken several unusual approaches to developing this play and the resulting script was a tender, beautiful, delicate, show that, for a number of reasons, didn’t feel like it had an appropriate context to present it in the UK. It wasn’t radical however. And it wasn’t flashy. It was just different. And it didn’t have a ready home in London.
I’ve never been able to get energised around the idea of just putting on a show because you want to or because you’ve got the opportunity. There’s got to be the right context. The lack of context for this show was a bit of a bug bear for me however, and I was reaching the end of my patience: why isn’t there a ready home for a delicate piece of deeply formal innovation? Was there something limited or problematic about how we were, as a theatre community, dealing with the presentation of new work?
I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling this, and that in fact, there was an emerging groundswell within the performance making community voicing concern about these limitations. So, as I was getting on the bus to go meet with 503 to talk about putting on Soon Until Forever there in seven weeks, I made a phone call to one of my most dangerous co-conspirators, Cristina Catalina.
Me: hey
Cris: hey
Me: what do you think about putting on a festival at Theatre503 that’s all about all the ways we all make new work that isn’t somehow highlighted in the mainstream royal courty way?
Cris: Hell yeah! And about how artists in other countries make work and how those practices exist here as well.
Me: Absolutely. So, it’d be in 7 weeks at 503.
Cris: Great. Shit. No, great.
Me: Awesome. I’m going to meet them now, so I’ll pitch that and call you after.
Cris: Okay, I’m done with rehearsals at 6
Me: we’ll meet after that then. I’m meeting Eve Leigh at Euston at 8.
Cris: we’ll meet there at 7 then.
Me: Alrighty—talk to you later.
So, partner in crime confirmed, I went to 503 and said I’d put on Soon Until Forever, but that I’d want to do it within a context. We would create that context by putting on a festival and opening up four additional performance slots per day to the artistic community at large who had interest in wrestling with the same questions that inspired the festival. We got a ‘yes, please’ from them on that, and I went to meet Cristina that evening to start planning. With one meeting running into the next, we told Eve what we were up to. Before she even sat down with us, we’d roped her in as an exuberantly willing partner, and the planning and creation of All Change as a festival took one more leap forward.
Over the next seven weeks, we produced a festival that included performances, installations, staged readings, works in progress, talks and conversations that included people who had 40+ years of experience under their belt to young 18 year olds newly arrived in London for a drama school course. One really special aspect of the festival was that it felt extremely lateral: everyone who took part seemed to engage with each other as people and participants interested in their shared humanity.
Although we all had to take a serious recuperation period after the festival, we decided we had to do it again.
We went through several different iterations of what the next All Change would be. While staying committed to celebrating boundary busting live performance, we also focused in on one area that we were passionate about: audience and access. Because of the incredibly quick turnaround from concept to production of the first All Change, while we did have audience from all walks of life, it was predominantly an industry focused event in one way or another. However, much of what unites the work that falls under this ‘boundary busting’ banner is work that engages with, at some point in the process or production, a more sensitive relationship to the public than traditional theatrical production models make way for.
So, we decided to face that full on. I was aware of the Fun Palaces conversation that happened at the 2013 D and D—I had in fact read the report (I was out of the country for that year’s gathering) and was very inspired by the passion, clarity, and ambition of the project. As we narrowed down our focus toward the 2014 All Change, and committed to working with the Lyric as a presenting partner, it felt really appropriate to face our challenge by making this year’s All Change a Fun Palace.
The Fun Palaces’ principles provided provocation and inspiration for our new iteration of All Change. Free, Local, Innovative, Transformative and Engaging—how do we mash that up with a festival that celebrates boundary busting live performance with an emphasis on internationalism that comes through the fact of us living in a globalised world? Well…that’s how we came up with this year’s festival!
All Change 2014 is taking place simultaneously in five locations globally. In order to make that happen, I approached ensembles and artists in four locations internationally whom I already knew shared the same sense of adventure and passion, combined with a remarkable professionalism, at the same time as we were building our London-based activities with the Lyric. My proposal to the artists in each location was to create an All Change as a Fun Palace of their own, for and with their own local community, over the same weekend. They would engage with their own concepts of boundary busting theatre, and they would abide by the Fun Palaces principles. In addition, we would collaborate to create a single piece of work for each location. In addition to the Lyric Hammersmith in London, we have partnered with Bluespots Productions in Augsburg, Germany; Vinnslan in Reykjavik, Iceland; NEW NOISE in New Orleans, USA; and with Lucy Jackson and Lisa Szolovits in New York.
Before I talk about our London based activities, I’ll just briefly talk about the international projects.
Inspired by the idea of a simultaneous action in multiple locations, I proposed the basic concept of our collaborative piece, You Are Here, to the international teams. What if we stop three people in each of our cities on the street and ask them to close their eyes, and to let us record them as they describe what it is they sense—what they can smell, hear, feel, taste, and then to open their eyes and describe what it is they see. We then take these audio recordings and edit them down, and share them between us. We’ll end up with 15 recordings from five different locations that we can install with a headset in each of our cities’ All Change Fun Palace events. Individuals can sit down, put on a blindfold and the headset, and “teleport” themselves into the sensations at a particular point in time of someone across the world.
They’re creating this now, and while I’m sure some of the details will change as it’s developed, this is the basic concept, and it will be installed in the Lyric’s café, at an overstuffed arm chair to settle into for your travelling pleasure!
In addition to this collaborative piece, each location is having their own event, as is appropriate to their local needs, with the Reykjavik event happening over three days and across the entire city, the New Orleans event happening over one evening, the Augsburg event centering around Bluespots’ bakery home, and the New York event happening in two locations over two weekends.
The London-based activities, all taking place at the Lyric Hammersmith from 10am-10pm over Friday, Saturday and Sunday the 3, 4, 5 of October, are truly staggering to us. We’re blown over by the artists who want to work with us to present this festival mash up! To try to sum it up, we have a couple sorts of programming: Daytime events that are family-focused and evening events that are geared toward the adult audience. We have Theatre Absolute presenting a one-to-one performance in a bed and Hofesh Shechter coming to do a conversation with Andrew Haydon. We’ve got Parisian DJ MiM with visual artist Patrick Simkins presenting a live drawing and electronic music collaboration, Phillip Oberlohr presenting a master illusionist show, we’ve got outdoor events including a bouncy castle and the Institute of Crazy Dancing’s Lifeboat. The truly honouring and humbling list just goes on! See allchangefest.com for full line ups.
All Change 2014 is also taking another big risk: it has a team of resident artists who will collaborate to create presentations of work in progress and other bespoke festival content in the week leading up to the festival. They will present their hot-off-the-press work on Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evenings. We wanted our programming itself to model the risk we want to support in the artists in our own community. We don’t want people to play by the rules, and we don’t want to be sure of what we’re going to get. Artists Joanna Turner, Mikey Harding, Kate Hargreaves, Simon Merrifield, Sonja Doubleday, and Donal Coonan make up this truly exciting cohort!
So, its three days after I started this blog post and I’m sitting in a Boston Market in Flushing. Cristina is in Wales, I believe, and I think Eve may be in London. We’ve put together this year’s festival following Firehouse’s motto of stories, collaboration, and innovation, making this festival both global and local through live and digital performance. It’s a challenging process, and utterly contemporary to how we live our lives. We are deeply honoured to have such a calibre of collaborators to work with us on this festival. We hope to see you there!
Rachel Parish, All Change: An International Fun Palace