Street Theatre

I’ve spent the last two days walking around Liverpool city centre with a group of street performers, ostensibly for purposes of crowd control and ‘artist protection’ – basically trying to make sure members of the public don’t start fights with the performers. What I could actually do to prevent this happening I’m not sure, but I had an important looking lanyard and staff t shirt which I think helped. In reality, all I really did was watch the performers do their thing and have a really good time.

There were three pieces of work on show over the weekend, as part of Physical Fest, the physical theatre festival I’ve been interning at.The first was called ‘the Tip’, and the promotional blurb described it as follows:

It’s time to say goodbye… Waste-deep in a rubble heap of nostalgia, a woman sorts through the myriad broken promises of a life turned to trash. A petrified houseplant, a bin bag of dirty knickers, 100 crumpled copies of Great Expectations. A giant tip provides the arena for an existential battle of epic proportions. It’ll be some scrap…

What actually happened was that there was a big yellow skip plonked at the end of Church Street, right in the middle of town. An assortment of battered and broken objects were placed on top of scaffolds within the skip to form the set, from which the performer would emerge to begin the show.

For us, this meant that the gaps between performances were spent trying to maintain the levels of stuff in the skip – i.e. stopping people from putting new things in and others from taking things out. Particularly popular was a radio, which had no less than two people try and steal it in the first half hour of us standing there. Another man waited for us to stop eyeing him suspiciously (he was a suspicious looking man) before running off with our fridge magnets. Cue Fiona, the stage manager, pegging it down the street after him to get them back.

Not helping Friday’s set maintenance was the presence of some Red Bull promotion girls, handing out an endless supply of Red Bull. People seemed to be oblivious to the presence of huge amounts of bins on the street and decided that they wanted to throw all of their empties into the skip.

 

Saturday’s performances had to compete for attention with a petition stand directly opposite – featuring Ricky Tomlinson and a megaphone. I never quite established what he was protesting about, other than that it was about something that happened a very long time ago. Either way, they agreed not to use the megaphone during the performances, which they stuck to, for the most part. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to realise when the end of the performance was and subsequently caused a lot of racket when Izzie (the performer) got down from the skip to talk to the audience. Ah well.

 

 

The Intern

Thanks to the internship programme run by my university, I currently find myself sitting in the office of a local theatre company as an ‘events assistant’. I applied for a number of marketing vacancies as well (being a marketing student), but this one appealed to me because it was a bit different.

I’m still getting to do very useful marketingy things, but this is an environment totally different to anywhere I’ve been before – an arts organisation.

I’m creating events listings, designing programmes and flyers, creating and monitoring content for Facebook and Twitter, editing the website, and later on doing street promotion work. I’m also going to be at some of the performances – doing God knows what.

On Wednesday I was standing with a choir in Lime Street station singing “welcome to Liverpool” to a group of acrobats that had just travelling in from Zambia. Yeah. Not your average internship.

Even better, the office is tiny, everyone is very friendly, I’ve been given lots of responsibility and left alone to get on with things, there’s a biscuit budget and I can wear jeans and converse to work. What’s not to love?

This is experience I won’t get anywhere else – working for the only physical theatre festival in Europe, doing a huge variety of different things – best internship ever!

And of course, I can’t finish this without a plug for the festival… check out http://www.physicalfest.com http://www.facebook.com/physicalfest @physicalfest
We’ve been working very hard on it, and it’s going to be brilliant!