VIOLENT BLOOM

Hi friends! If you are reading this you have probably already seen our work and have a sense of what we are about, if not, perhaps you are a budding philanthropist with a heart of gold. Read on, esquire!

We are super grateful to have received some funding from The Wallace Foundation and Auckland Council, which covers our basic costs - but we are still slightly short.

The team is really excited to bring this play to Basement Theatre; it's very different to the work we have produced in the past. Andrew has slowed down to simplify, to make a more meditative and poetic work with a big heart. Always the perpetual language nerd, he is geeking out about performing part of the play in Gaelic. Scots Gaelic is a language you may not have heard before, and may not hear again after this show, unless you are on a trip to the Hebrides or Skye any time soon. There are only 53, 000 native speakers worldwide.

The marvels of modern technology have allowed us to collaborate with artists on the other side of the globe. We have been fortunate enough to be supported by award-winning poet and playwright Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, a foremost writer in Gaelic, based in Scotland. Marcas is translating historical passages of the script into Gaelic, and helping co-write the lyrics of several original Gaelic songs.

We are continuing our working relationship with nothing-short-of-visionary performance designer Christine Urquhart from her current base in Toronto.

Back on home turf, we are working with talented folk musicians Leith Towers and Laszlo Reynolds, and longtime collaborator and bassist Tom Dennison on original songs and music.

The charismatic Tawanda Manyimo is bringing his vitality to the piece as director.

We'd appreciate any support you wished to give for the project. If you're not in a position to donate, you can also share our posts and whip your friends into an excited frenzy for the season to help us build the buzz!

...

Love. Bloodlines. The Highland Clearances.

VIOLENT BLOOM is a solo play and song cycle that thrashes between the intensely personal and the cosmic in a genealogical freefall.

Andrew begins a scramble through ancient Scotland, Western Australia and Grey Lynn as he attempts to escape uneasy truths about himself.

...

Driven through a series of original songs, VIOLENT BLOOM is a meditation on love and our relationship to our ancestry, performed in English and Scots Gaelic.

VIOLENT BLOOM
Basement Theatre, Auckland
30 Oct - 3 Nov 2018

Responses to past work:

"a seductive and magnetic experience...unexpected possibility and surreal beauty." - Pantograph Punch (on POTATO STAMP)

"It's smart, funny and delightfully inventive, and best of all it ends on a note of such unexpected, preposterous and yet soul-stirring grace, you'll walk away feeling enlarged, grateful. Rewarded." - Simon Wilson, Metro (on POTATO STAMP)