I’ve just come back from a week in Birmingham working with George to re-develop the script for Travellers’ Tales. We first performed Travellers’ Tales last year at Brixfest before taking it to some schools in Exeter, Devon. The piece is a light-hearted comedy for children aged 3-7 and their families, taking the audience on a journey with John and Sally, two hopeless explorers, as they search for a flute, a feather and a piece of treasure. Having worked without dialogue during our development of Portrait for the Rooted Moon International Theatre festival in 2015, we wanted to simplify the script for Travellers’ Tales and apply some of the techniques we had developed. The piece is aimed at children and throughout our process, we work with our audience in mind. Over the week, we experimented with sound and music, developing sound for each of the new locations John and Sally visit. This was inspired by a fabulous workshop with Verity Standen that I took part in at the Bike Shed Theatre last weekend, working with voice and music. As John and Sally travel the world, I thought that we could use sound to our advantage and certainly our explorations were fruitful. We also played with the use of rhyme in the script, when to use it and when to not. I’m really looking forward to getting the script back on it’s feet in early April and seeing how sound works practically in the performance.
Travellers’ Tales will be performed at Fringe TheatreFest in Barnstaple this Summer, as well as at other fringe festivals in the South West. We are currently taking bookings for KS1 schools performances, so please do get in touch if you’d like us to visit your school in the Summer Term and I can send through the production information.
I am also still planning for our development of ‘The Ugly Duckling & Other Tales’ and am currently in the process of sending off applications for our development later in the year.