Still House's 'Of Riders and Running Horses'

When we’re asked to write things about Mayfest, it’s always hard not to make it sound like marketing blurb. How do you package up an entire 11-day contemporary theatre festival into a digestible form without it feeling pithy and reductive? 10 Ways That Mayfest Will Take You By Surprise in 2016? This Festival Just programmed Bryony Kimmings and You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next?

Perhaps I’ll go through our to-do list and maybe that’ll give us all a way in… (a nod here to writer and performer Deborah Pearson, who once read out her to-do list at an event about what the role of a producer is, and who is presenting History History History with us at Bristol’s legendary Cube Cinema this year).

We’re currently three weeks out from the festival. I think this is what people call Crunch Time. Outside of Mayfest, we’re also opening a new show at Bristol Old Vic this week (Sleepdogs’ incredible sci-fi horror Dark Land Light House) and touring Still House’s Of Riders and Running Horses. So our heads are pretty full.

For example, our annual co-commission with Theatre Bristol is planned two years in advance and this year we needed to work harder to put more work by diverse artists at the heart of our programme. Salt. By Selina Thompson is the result of that call-out for ideas and we’re really excited to be sharing it with audiences as an international premier at the Arnolfini.

'History History History'

So where are we this week? 

Our Project Manager Julie is trying to find boys aged 9-13 to take part in Fashion Machine, the participatory work by Canada’s Theatre SKAM. During the show, audience members are invited to wear an ‘I’m In!’ sticker, which means they could be chosen to volunteer clothes on their back (bathrobe provided), to a bunch of kids to re-style, re-work and re-present. At the end there’s a fashion show where the lucky audience members get to show off their newly styled duds. We have plenty of girls signed up to transform some lucky audience members’ clothes, but we’re struggling to find boys.

There’s a conversation happening between Dead Centre, Bristol Old Vic and our Production Manager about the seating plan for the UK Premiere of Chekhov’s First Play. This is the biggest show in the festival, and a coup for Bristol. It’s ‘Chekhov before he was Chekhov’, a warped version of Chekhov’s famously ‘unstageable’ Platonov. The audience wears wired headphones throughout but the Georgian quirks of Bristol Old Vic’s beautiful horseshoe auditorium make the laying of metres and metres of cable a little tricky. 

Dead Centre's 'Chekhov's First Play'

We think we’ve found the old woman required to ‘press a button’ in Spymonkey and Tim Crouch’s The Complete Deaths. This new work attempts to stage all 74 deaths in Shakespeare’s plays and when we asked the company what happens when she presses the , they just said “someone dies”. Sure.

We’re finalising the line-up for The Blind Tiger, our late-night cabaret/open mic bar that this year is at the Old Market Assembly, in one of Bristol’s most vibrant up-and-coming areas. At the back of the Assembly is the new Wardrobe Theatre, a genuine grass-roots success story. At this venue we’re presenting Stuart Bowden’s Wilting in Reverse, Jamie Wood’s O No!, Trygve Wakenshaw’s Nautilus and Sleepdogs’ hypnotic sound piece Circadial.

We’re fast becoming experts in the fascinating world of multi-story car parks, as we bring back last year’s smash hit Of Riders and Running Horses by Still House. Turns out there’s an awful lot to think about when staging a show in an NCP car park, not least the effect of Resident Parking Zones on busy they are. Yawn. If you haven’t seen this show, however, you simply must book a ticket. It’s 50 minutes of pure joy.

A 19-strong local choir is currently mastering the beautiful songs that form part of brokentalkers /Junk Ensemble’s poignant and funny It Folds, which comes to us from Dublin for its UK Premiere. Four members of the choir are also joining the company for movement and speaking roles in the piece.

Spymonkey and Tim Crouch's 'The Complete Deaths'

We’re in the middle of a series of workshops with Andy Field at Sefton Park Primary School where a group of children are imagining future cities for Andy’s one-to-one performance Lookout that will take place overlooking the city on Brandon Hill. That’s not to mention figuring out how many people can fit in the studio to see Greg Wohead’s Comeback Special or who the ‘man making something’ is at the back of Vic Llewellyn & Kid Carpet’s The Castle Builder which loos at outsider artists in isolation. 

We also have Mayfest Radio to look after, a bespoke pop-up radio station that can be listened to online, or via our iPhone / Android apps throughout the festival.  

Oh, and what colour are the volunteer t-shirts? And how do make sure people sign up for the amazing workshops with Spymonkey and Still House? And what kind of banners and A-boards do we want at each festival venue? It’s a glamorous life.

If you want to come to Bristol and experience the fruits of all this labour, we recommend making a weekend of it. You can buy 4-for-3 tickets on most shows, or plump for the full festival pass, which is a bargain at £150. Full details are on our website: www.mayfestbristol.co.uk.

Greg Wohead's 'Comeback Special'