Armed & Fabulous!
Hello from Paris! Well, not from our Paris, but the actual city of Paris. It gets confusing sometimes because there's also a Vienna, and but I'm definitely not there and she's definitely in London. I'm here, firstly to take my first break away from Frottage III for the first time in what seems like months, - but also to work on our project for next year (more of that to follow). I may also be eating copious amounts of pastry - but let's not talk about that too much...
We're up to our Glitter Boots in rehearsals for Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens now, and its proving to be a fantastic, if somewhat interesting experience so far. Having lost one leading lady to an unfortunate accident with her achilles heel and some difficult casting for some of the other roles we now have a full cast, which is AWESOME as life is now not spent emailing people asking if they fancy being a stripping pole dancing barman with a plastic fetish! (Believe me, it's not the easiest of conversations to have with an actor!) We're massively pleased to welcome Sara Lynam to the cast, but also to welcome Huw Cook as our elusive Mitch Maypole. Huw also holds some sort of weird SJSV record for playing the most characters now, which is awesome; he may just have to forgive us in advance if we carry him through Theatre N16 like some sort of conquering hero when he arrives at rehearsals next week!
From a planning perspective, our resident gameshow superstar producer Cat is doing an amazing job with the costume realisation for the show. Did you see Cat on ITV's "Cashtrapped"? - What a superstar! (although the less we say the name "Jenny" the better...) One of the costumes in particular caused much hilarity this week (and wait till you see it, it's brilliant!) Our Choreographer and my amazing right hand woman Harriet is also doing a brilliant job with the Choreo for the show - I have never before had to sit through quite so many "contemporary dance" videos on YouTube yet she manages to make it very easy to realise a vision and is a fantastic asset to our team. What makes the whole thing brilliant is that neither Cat nor Harriet do these things for a day job, but they really are tapping into some sort of hidden secret talents they've been tucking away somewhere. One of the things we set out to achieve when we set up Proforca Creative was to give people the opportunity to push themselves a little bit, and Cat and Harriet are both brilliant examples of people being generally awesome and adding real value to this little team we're trying to build in funny and surprising ways when you least expect them. I cannot contain their awesomeness!
Speaking of talent, I was so happy to get to see the real life, human Paris in Dramatize's production of "Lend an Ear" at Camden Fringe last week. It was a fantastic production of a short but very sweet play about communication, teamwork and working hard to make yourself understood. From not knowing what to expect when I arrived, I spent a really enjoyable hour watching these really talented performers give of their best in a very intimidating environment. They acquitted themselves so well, and I found the whole production really honest and heartfelt. Everyone should be rightly proud of that hour's work. Speaking of honest, special acknowledgement to Mr Bailey for generally believing in every piece of work he does, never giving anything less than his all to every performance and truly being a bit of a dream for a director to work with. He's one to watch!
We're full steam ahead for November now, and I'll check in with some more updates as we go through the production process. If you haven't bought your ticket yet (and if not, why not?) You can do so now from our website. (and do soon, because I'm hoping we'll sell out!). We're also working on writing our new production for next year. We'll release some more information over the next few months, but it's likely to be very different to both "If I Go" and "SJSV". We're going to be working on telling a much smaller and more intimate story, and hopefully one which might tug at your heartstrings a little. (And we're hoping this one might even take us beyond London, if we're lucky!)
I can't wait for you to see Saucy Jack, it's going to be a blast. We're meeting so many amazing people on this little journey we're taking - so if you're lurking out there, and reading our tweets or the website, or you've been really brave and sent us a message or said hello to us somewhere - its been really great to say hi and meet some amazing people. If you haven't said hello to us yet, there is no time like the present and we'd love to meet you.
So as they say in Paris - "à bientôt!" (So many slightly freaked out French people correcting my pigeon language skills today, I can tell you...)
David is the Artistic Director of Proforca Creative and you can follow him on Twitter @proforcadavid