IN TRANSIT Theatre

The story follows two unlikely characters on a train journey together. Both travelling souls who have grown isolated in transit between their past and their future destination but collide with each other in the present. One is driven by a strong urge to discover new places, akin to the German word fernweh, translating closest in English to the opposite of homesick. She carries with her a suitcase, and an obsession with Buster Keaton pictures; fuelling her desire to view moments in time through frames, stringing along together, reeling and purring on loop. The other has been forced to leave her home after her house was destroyed in a storm.  As a heartfelt and proud Spanish speaker, she attempts to make sense of the words and worlds around her; there is indeed no term for homesick in Spanish, nor is there a distinction between a house and a home. Unknowingly, their relationship with each other soon offers significance to their personal journey with the road.

Both performers have a strong background in clowning and possess a delightful physical interaction and engagement together. This is paired against old-worldly Buster Keaton films that are interwoven across the story and manifested through both projections and the physical, stone-faced comedy. These tones are silently illuminated in Keaton’s hapless character of the indomitable man against the world, who steps in and out of dangerous environments and effortlessly undercuts a humorous situation with melancholy. Our production borrows Keaton’s frequent referencing and dramatic employment of the steam train with its inevitable track trajectory. Armed with a toy train set The Misadventures of Me equally examines a shifting of perspectives. There is also a live ukulele soundtrack provided by singer/ songwriter Jess Maynard that completes this recipe for nostalgia.

However it is the romantic notions associated with travel and our journey across time that also provide the danger of becoming trapped within nostalgia itself.  The relationship between romance and reality, when pulled apart reveals an intense vulnerability that is utterly human. Travel provides the ultimate example of a romantic illusion that holds as much potential to soar as it does to shatter; where moments of utter isolation, miscommunication, misunderstanding, and misadventures are inescapable although so often overshadowed by the romantic ideals of discovery and adventure. The Misadventures of Me explores this with great detail and subtlety, and is ultimately our attempt to make sense of the world around us, our place within it, and the people we meet along the way.

Photos from today’s performance at St. Pancras International Station. 

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and for those of you who came to the station! 

Claire is back this week in London to start rehearsing for our performance at The Branching Out Festival on 29th November. 

We will be performing a short snapshot from ‘The Misadventures of Me’ at St. Pancras International station around 3:20pm. 

We will be next to the Eurostar departures. COME FIND US!

THIS SUNDAY we will be performing a short snapshot from our work ‘The Misadventures of Me’ at St Pancras International Train Station from 3pm- 4pm, as part of the Producers Platform for Camden Theatres and ScenePool. Come find us.

More details coming soon! 

http://stpancras.com/events/the-producers-platform

http://www.intransittheatre.com

Text written by Akram Khan about BAHOK. A show he directed at the SADLER’S WELLS. 

We are all travellers. We are all voyagers. Born into this world, embodied, we can only move forward. But we are also all carriers. We are all bahok. We carry with us our genetic and cultural inheritance, our experiences, our dreams and aspirations.

All stories are about the journey of our body through life; its birth and origin, the search and quest for its identity, its transformation, its death. All stories are both unique and universal. Regardless of our cultural background our stories resemble each other culture and reveal the same underlying themes.

Asked about our memories of home, almost all of us return to the original home, our childhood home, its smell, its tissues, its ornaments, our parents’ clothes, its courtyards, its trees, its rains, its rivers…For some of us these memories of the original home got lost. For others they are violent. The childhood home being demolished. Childhood being demolished.

For nomads, home is not an address; home is what they carry with them. John Berger, Hold everything dear. 

Schengen by Raphael. 

*Claire brought this song today to our rehearsal. 

Actherland by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. 

We watched this video today. We all like the use of the floor in this sequence. 

Back in rehearsals for the Branching Out Festival on 29th, November. Let’s fly! 

Details of the festival: 

http://www.branchingoutfestival.com/

Further details coming soon.

Clip from the dress rehearsal at the Crypt Fest, July 2011.

Edited by Nell Ranney. 

The Misadventures of Me at the Crypt Fest. (Second part)

Pictures from our show The Misadventures of Me at the Crypt Fest on Saturday 30th July. 

“Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous. It is an unbroken thread – we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived.  It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives us the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods, or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”

“I have come to realise that the most important place where my work exists is not in the museum gallery, or in the screening room, or on television, and not even on the video screen itself, but in the mind of the viewer who has seen it. In fact, it is only there it can exist.  Freeze a video in time and you are left with a single static frame, isolated from context, an abandoned image, like a butterfly under glass with a pin through it.  Yet, during its normal presentation, viewers can only physically experience video one frame at a time.  One can never witness the whole at once; by necessity it exists only as a function of individual memory.  This paradox gives video its living dynamic nature as part of the stream of human consciousness”.

BILL VIOLA. 

Picture taken after the first showing yesterday at Central School of Speech and Drama.

From left to right:

Claire, Valeria, Nell (The three members of In-Transit) 

Pictures from the technical rehearsal at Central School of Speech and Drama. July, 2011.

Photos by Claire Thill. 

Rehearsal Pictures. June 2011.

First pictures of The Misadventures of Me by Martin Surzyn