An Edible Performance

Eat Your Heart Out – Teaser from Kindle Theatre on Vimeo.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT performed at A..E Harris Building 29th October – 8th November 2009

In the last remaining corner of the human world, three cooks are summoned to create a celebratory meal using only the carcass of their once great kitchen. Inspired by the Baroque era, Flemish paintings and the contemporary obsession with Armageddon, Eat Your Heart Out mixes the leftovers of disaster with the ceremony of the dining room in a performance that invites the audience to literally eat the story.

A studio version will be available for touring soon

Combining live music, immersive staging and a highly original menu, Eat Your Heart Out is an edible performance conceived, devised and performed by Kindle in collaboration with artists and experts from a host of different creative fields. Set in the vast expanse of Stan’s Café’s new warehouse space in the Jewellery Quarter, the set was an apocalyptic junkyard made from Birmingham’s own rubbish and installed by designers Tony Appleby and Claire Wearn. Multimedia design company filmcafe installed a pepper’s ghost affect  Queen, illuminated the set with actor controlled lighting that included: paint pot spot lights, swinging blubs and an exploding bicycle wheel/car windscreen chandelier. Regional composer-musician Phill Ward worked with Kindle performer-musicians to create a score that reinvented the decadence of the Baroque era and the unforgettable menu was conceived and delivered food designers Blanch & Shock.

“Recalling the orgiastic ritual of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen, and taking its stylistic cues from the vivid carnality of a Caravaggio, Kindle Theatre’s work in progress is a brilliant, interactively staged slab of grotesque…” Read more of Latest 7 review here

“One of the most fantastic stage sets I’ve ever seen” Brighton Argus on EAT YOUR HEART OUT

Extracts of EAT YOUR HEART OUT have been performed at:

Birmingham, PILOT nights @ A.E Harris Building,  Thursday 2nd July 2009, 7.30pm (www.pilotnights.co.uk)

Brighton, COACHWERKS, Friday 4th and Saturday 5th September 2009, 7.30pm & 8.30pm

EAT YOUR HEART OUT Birmingham was supported by Arts Council England and the Sir Barry Jackson Trust. Development has been supported by PILOT, China plate theatre and COACHWERKS.

A ll images by Steven Davies filmcafe.co.uk

Coachwerks, Hollingdean,

4th and 5th September 2009

Click on the thumnails to see images of the R&D in December 2008. We worked for two weeks in a warehouse space in Digbeth and then invited guests to a sharing. We roasted six pheasants in metal fire bins, boiled red cabbage in buckets, and fried devilled kidneys on hot coals. We served the feast in a yurt (a delight after the freezing cold warehouse) with music and song.

In May 2009, Kindle Theatre collaborated with filmcafe, Tony Appleby and the digital planetarium at Birmingham’s Thinktank, Millenium Point to showcase the first scene from The Balham Ladies Amateur Astronomy Club, a neo-traditional play set between 1835 and 2009, in which three women struggle for Enlightenment and emancipation in the man-made world of the sciences. Using innovative fulldome content shot by Steve Davies of filmcafe, and Kindle’s playful, intimate style of audience interaction, the invited guests were hushed into the planetarium to attend the inaugural meeting of the Balham Ladies Amateur Astronomy Club. With the night sky opening up on the dome above them, they witness a demonstration of meteor showers disintegrating into confusion, exasperation and sublime terror.  What is truth?

“I thoroughly enjoyed, as ever with Kindle performances, the sense of event, of occasion and of a complete experience; the show began the moment we all began accumulating at the bottom of the elevator, long before we arrived in the Planetarium. What I took away with me from the event was certainly a sense of the potential that space offers and the potential impact the interplay of those two media – film and theatre – might offer an audience in that space.” Audience Member

We aim to develop the project through 2009 with a view to fully realising the performance in 2010. Keep an eye out for the next stage when the Balham Ladies host a Winter Solstice Festival, 21st December 2009, complete with constellation lectures and flamenco at sunrise.

Visit www.filmcafe.co.uk to watch a showreel of the event, and let us know if you’d like Balham to come to you!

Visit Tony Appleby at www.coachwerks.org.uk/search/label/TonyAppleby

The Ride Home was commissioned by South Birmingham PCT

Our third project was In My Father’s House, which we made in four Church of England churches in the West Midlands before touring to Edinburgh (August 2007), Warwick Arts Centre (May 2008) and Battersea Arts Centre (July 2008). We very much saw the rituals of the church and the habits of its inhabitants as a form of theatre, and so we took our theatre and merged it with theirs. We were fascinated by churches, as buildings with a very specific function that were more accessible to us than official rehearsal spaces.

Exploring “four women’s relationship to the spiritual Father, biological father, lover and son”, In My Father’s House was our take on the Eucharistic service, in which the women worshipped the plum, a metaphor for the body, with its skin (skin), flesh (body) and pit (soul), and also symbolised faithfulness and independence. The audience were welcomed into the ladies daily service: celebrating life and preparing for death.

“Like a dream state…the magic of absolute ritual” Audience member, BAC

“There is a totality to Kindle Theatre’s performance. They have created a piece of theatre in which they immerse their audience” Stage MUST SEE

“David Lynch meets the Wickerman meets the Women’s Institute” The Birmingham Post

‘Underland’ was a site specific performance specially comissioned by World Heritage Site Clearwell Caves, Forest of Dean and made in collaboration with Pentabus Theatre. An adaptation of the myth of Persephone, the performance featured original musical compositions and incorporated folklore from the Forest of Dean area. We met poachers and miners and a man who believed that the world will end in 2012 due to the Mayan calendar, and who showed us the laylines through the forest. Each performance took over a hundred audience members through the caves as the story of this fateful marriage unfolded.

“The atmospheric thrills were visceral and unexpected at every turn as we descended further underground – a lesson in pomegranate-winemaking from an alcove here, a maiden zinging a harp on a rock in a blue-lit water-filled cavern there…” – Owen Adams, guardian.co.uk

In 2006, Kindle collaborated with eight Midlands-based artists on a combined-art project that celebrated the history of Chance Bro’s Glassworks, Smethwick, Birmingham. The installation/performance was built on the sixth floor of the disused glass factory and was our adaptation of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Great Exhibition had been held in the original Crystal Palace which Chance Bro’s had glazed, and in it were housed Britain’s proudest inventions in a showcase of the Industrial Revolution. In our version, the characters themselves were the exhibits, alongside the artists’ commissioned works, in a bittersweet salute to the industrial powerhouse that was Birmingham, from the graveyard of one of its forgotten buildings.

“The glasshouse is not conventional theatre” Ciaran Ryan, BBC

Collaborating artists:

Iris Bertz – Willow Sculpture

Geoff Broadway – Light Installation

Steve Davies – Film

Keir Williams – TV/Film/Sound

Annie Mahtani – Electro-acoustic composition

Lynette Clee – Photography

Kimberly Trusty – Poetry

Jerome Harrington – Glass Book Display