Ladies and Gents, Boys and Girls, People, Players and Peasants alike, we present to you: That’s right! You can catch the wily trickster at any of these dates throughout July and August! Feel free to drop us a comment or message for any more details on these show dates. You can also check out what other performances we have in store across the Summer here. Joshua the Fox x
Good afternoon! We’re extremely busy as always; prepping for tour, working with students, doing charity bike rides, but let me break this down for you: New Landscapes So, sadly, the New Landscapes module has come to an end, and it drew to a close with an almighty BANG! The Cautionary Tales for Children Considering Ill Behaviour was a resounding success, with great audiences on both show days. Thank you to all who came to see the show, the students did a magnificent job and we can’t believe our time with them is over, but we couldn’t be prouder of what they have all achieved! There are plenty of pictures and videos to see, just head to our social media pages to check them out (we took a lot of Boomerang videos on our Instagram, check them out! @TheFabularium) Animalia Rehearsals We got back in the rehearsal space this week with a group of Cov Uni theatre students and members of the Fabularium pool to prepare for our return to the Tales of Animalia at Just So Festival this Summer! We’re currently cycling through our repertoire, introducing the students to the animal characters, sheep, peasants, Cyclops and Trees, as well as rehearsing some […]
Evening all! It’s been a busy two weeks since we last posted, we’re all full steam ahead for The Cautionary Tales next week! The students have been working brilliantly to pull the shows together, to sing harmoniously, and to tumble and roll (quite literally) in the acrobatic intro. As you can see below, they’re enjoying it too! Thursday is our last day to dress run the show inside and work out any last creases in the shows. Then, next week, we have an outdoor dress run on Tuesday, and then ITS SHOW DAY!!! We will be performing The Cautionary Tales: for children considering ill behaviour on Wednesday 31st May and Thursday 1st June, 12pm-2pm. To hear more about the event, visit the Facebook Event. We’ve also updated our tour dates page, check them out to see if we’re coming to a park/town/hall/school/theatre near you! Keep your eyes on our social media feeds to see how The Cautionary Tales go. Photos and posts to come! Happy Tuesday folks! Joshua the Fox x
Good morning all! Firstly, a huge apology on the delay of our blog posts, it’s been a manic time for us with a mixture of different things in the pipeline that are coming to fruition, so I’ve been swept up in the whirlwind of it all and thus focusing on the paper trail that the whirlwind has scattered everywhere. But now, WE’RE BACK! So here is the BIG update! Arts Council Funding Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, People, Players and Peasants alike: WE GOT OUR ARTS COUNCIL FUNDING!!! We applied for funding to proceed with Phase 2 of Reynard the Fox; developing the show into an indoor version that is fit for rural touring venues. Alongside running New Landscapes in March, we returned to the rehearsal space ourselves to refresh Reynard and extend the length of the performance, playing with the script and characters and set. This also saw the return of our outside eye, the wonderful Niki McCretton from Stuff and Nonsense Theatre, who spent a few days with us to help explore the intentions of our characters and tighten all the nuts and bolts. Niki McCretton and our friend Maria joining us for our dress rehearsal The end result was a […]
Finally the Winter weather is starting to drift off and the Sunshine is upon us! This week saw us introducing Gareth into the mix, who has been away on other projects. Now, he’ll be leading Group A and I’ll be leading Group B, though we’ll be together during crossover sections and then next term we’ll be cracking on with everyone together…53 people in one room, it’s going to be fun! So we began the week by designating characters for people to begin creating and continue researching. We’ve a good balance of circus performers now: bearded ladies, strong-men, contortionists, electrodes, and so on! I’m excited to see what material they generate with these characters and what costumes they pull together. Following this, we had an hour with all students together in the space where we sang through our La La song and then introduced the oldest English song to ever be scribed: Sumer Is Icumen In. We taught the song and rehearsed the melody and will return to it later. It’s always great playing with songs when there’s a chorus of 53! Then on Tuesday and Thursday’s sessions we returned to Acrobatics! The intention this time was not only to introduce […]
Ladies and Gents, Boys and Girls, People, Players and Peasants alike, we present: So we’ve just had week 3 and everyone has spent the past week researching into circus acts and specialities that you would’ve found at the stereotypical circus/carnival scene, such as stilt-walkers, jugglers, contortionists, escapologists, etc (this list goes on and on!). This is what our wall for ideas looks like so far: In my next post I shall pop up a picture of how it looks when the students have started pasting their ideas and research all over it! And so far some great ideas have already come to light, such as Chloe’s Barberibbit, a circus Barber that also happens to be a human sized frog (this had me laugh out loud in the rehearsal space, brilliant thinking!) So, to back up a little bit, this week began with discussing the characters you would find at a circus/carnival setting, and then everyone researching the characters they would like to embody for the entirety of the performance. This means performing walkabout in their character and then remaining as that character throughout the whole of the performance, and then in the show performing as that character playing another character…do you follow? This comes from […]
Afternoon all! It’s been a fun second week with Coventry University 2nd year theatre students. We’ve been getting stuck into the physical side of outdoor performance, visiting basic and intermediate acrobatics and acro-balance, then looking at developing archetypes and stereotypes. The acro sessions, as always, were good fun with many people wanting to experiment and push boundaries. Already plenty of good rolls, cartwheels and handstands to show for it and I’m looking forward to see what comes together for the big acro piece at the start of the show! In the following session with each group they presented their scratch pieces that was assigned to them last week. The outcome was very exciting: 8 great short pieces of theatre with so much potential for an outdoor spectacle. Now that their parameters have been extended and they know these will be their pieces to present in the show I’m curious to see how they utilise the playing space and the audience. Then after a singing refresher we moved on to a technique that has had many names and the practitioner who taught it to me called it ‘The Ministry of Silly Walks’, reminiscent of the Monty Python sketches. I used this technique to develop […]
How’s it going all! So this week marked the first week of The Fabularium’s project with Coventry University Theatre and Professional Practice second year students in their outdoor performance module ‘New Landscapes’. For the first three weeks it’ll be just myself with course leader (and Fabularium Associate Director) Glenn Noble while Gareth is away working on another production, but then he’ll join in the mix and we can see how things take shape! We’re currently running skills sessions with 53 students and providing them with the styles, techniques and exercises to help develop and create a piece fit for high primary school age that is suitable for outdoor performance (in this context the specifics are no tech support). In smaller groups they’ve been given a story to adapt into a 5-minute scratch piece ready for next week, which is the beginning of development for the main piece that will be presented at the end of May/start of June. The show will be titled: Cautionary Tales…for children considering ill-behavior! If you’re unfamiliar with them then give it a Google, some very entertaining stories. (Such as Hoffman, Belloc, Grimm and Busch). I’ve really enjoyed my first week, they’re a good bunch and willing to work, […]
How goes it fellow Peasants and Players? I’ve been off on my own today attending seminars in Birmingham through NatWest and Get Set For Growth with various technological outputs in mind: LinkedIn and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Ladies and Gentlemen, it doesn’t get much more exciting than this! (There was a free lunch buffet too! Gotta love a free sandwich!) Sarcasm aside, I found these talks really interesting. LinkedIn is a funny social media platform, very useful to a lot of friends and acquaintances of mine, but I don’t use it nearly as much as I should, and we haven’t setup a page for The Fabularium yet as, well, most interest and public access comes through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. YouTube, Pintrest and Snapchat (especially Snapchat) are also other popular social platforms, we have YouTube but the other two didn’t cross my mind, and Snapchat is definitely one way to be “down with the kids.” And for these reasons I’ve felt it to be very corporate, but maybe that’s what we need to do: flood the corporate social media with our outlandish antics and animalia mayhem! Maybe even send our Naughty Flock of Sheep into a business firm to stir […]
Hey all! Apologies myself and Gareth haven’t been publishing much at the moment (we’re gradually getting better at blogging, honest!), we’re currently in the middle of a lot of administration tasks that need to be done to help pan out our year. It’s already looking like a very exciting Spring/Summer for us, with plenty of dates on the horizon for Reynard the Fox, plus various outings for the Animals, Sheep and Peasants. Although we’re in opposing parts of the country, the team are all getting stuck into the admin: Gareth is currently tackling applications and researching more opportunities, Lou is chasing up on bookings, Glenn is making plans for the Tales of Animalia at Just So Festival this year, and I’m currently writing up a bunch of risk assessments to be sent out to all our Reynard dates across the country. For more information on our upcoming performances this year visit the Tour Dates page. Now, let’s face it, admin is not the funnest thing in the world, but it’s worth going through all this e-paper work in the Winter to have an extravagant Spring/Summer, and hopefully an exciting Autumn/Winter at the end of this year! And the admin is a lot sweeter […]
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