Pigeon Theatre: The Rehearsal (A Trilogy)
Audience and performers collaborate over a few beers on the rehearsal of a play, which becomes an attempt to deal with the inevitability of death.
Pigeon Theatre present The Rehearsal (A Trilogy) - Performed live in the bar!
The Rehearsal (A Trilogy) by Pigeon Theatre at PANDA-monium 2007. Photo by Stacey Potter.
This is a unique show offering a contemplation on creativity and the inevitability of mortality through three versions of the same performance, performed by differently aged and gendered couples on different nights.
In a bar at the end of a long night's drinking two performers collaborate with their audience in the planning and rehearsal of a theatrical performance event. This is a rehearsal of a ‘new’ show but also a rehearsal of, and attempt to come to terms with, the inevitability of the death of ourselves and our loved ones.
The Rehearsal (A Trilogy) by Pigeon Theatre at PANDA-monium 2007. Photo by Stacey Potter.
“There’s something about imagining it that makes the reality of it not so bad, that means I’ll be able to cope with it when it happens, but there’s also the fear that if I think hard and strong enough about it, I could bring about the potential deaths of my loved ones, and I don’t quite know what to do with that, it’s a strange one actually…”
This is a unique performance, with three versions of the show standing as a trilogy, each performed by a different couple, two twenty-something women, two fifty-something men, and a seventy-something year old couple. Each show is related to the others around a common theme and structure, but each show comprises a radically different reflection on, and rehearsal of, the processes and potentialities of dying.
Pigeon Theatre are a Manchester based physical performance company. Using their unique, distinctive and bizarre physical performance style, this is contemporary site-specific theatre that lays bare the methods and strategies of creativity and provides an insightful interrogation of time, death, memory and imagination. Fuelled by alcohol this is an erotic, exhilarating, exhausting and excessively intimate show in a real bar.
"a pocket masterpiece" The Stage
“this is brilliantly done: the show both sticks closely to the script and tears it apart. The movement is fast, skilled and slightly mad…This show takes audience involvement to a new level with a powerful cabaret, a breathless reminder of mortality” ThreeWeeks
About the Company
Pigeon Theatre is an all-women, experimental physical performance company, which has toured nationally and internationally, making site-specific performance work of unconventional and unfamiliar spatial/social arrangements, and of performer/spectator intimacy and interactivity. Pigeon Theatre are currently Associate Artists at greenroom Manchester, and were PANDA Incubated Company in 2006/7.
Pigeon Theatre was a runner-up in the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Awards 2003. Pigeon Theatre’s central research concern is in the formal structures of space, environment and architecture and the affect of these on the physical spectating experience.
Established in 2001, the company has made small and medium scale performance work and has performed at a number of venues including: the Green Room, Manchester; the International Theatre Festival, Amsterdam; Alsager Arts Centre; National Review of Live Art; the Xtrax Festival, Manchester; the Frontiers International Theatre Festival, MMU; Street Level Arts Festival, Whitstable; the Commonwealth Games Arts Festival, Manchester; eXpo, Nottingham; Bristol Victoria Rooms; Wellington Mill, Ancoats, Manchester; Art 05, Liverpool; the Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards Workcentre, Pontadera, Italy; the Edinburgh Fringe Festivals 2003 and 2005; Wickham Theatre, Bristol; Charter and Guildhall, Preston; and Art 06, Preston.
Biographies
Anna Fenemore - Artistic Director
Anna is also lecturer in Theatre and Performance (Physical Theatre) at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University, specialising in performer bodywork training, site-specific theatre and the politics of performance. Her research interests are spectating embodiment, performer bodywork training, multi-sensory immersive performance, performance and phenomenology and theories of performance space/place. Anna trains in Kalarippayattu and also performs with the Chameleons Group, Fast and Dirty Theatre Collective, the anateresa project and SharpTheatre. As a performer, Anna has also collaborated on telematic performances with Paul Sermon and Steve Dixon. Anna trained at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, then at CSSD and finally completed her PhD (The Pigeon Project: A Study of the Potential for Embodied Praxis in Performance Spectating - A practical theatrical and philosophical investigation into modes of spectating embodiment through reference to theories of space and vision/visuality) in 2001 at MMU Cheshire (Department of Contemporary Arts), where she remained for 5 years as a Research Fellow.
Louise Bennett - Performer
Trained at Manchester Metropolitan University Cheshire in Contemporary Arts and with Teatr Piesn Kozla. Performs with SharpTheatre, Pickleherring Theatre and Albatross Environmental Theatre Unlimited (Avanti Display).
Gillian Knox – Performer
Trained at Manchester Metropolitan University Cheshire in Contemporary Arts. Performs with Pickleherring Theatre and Space Cadets, and is currently undertaking her MA in Performance Studies at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University.