The innocuous-looking
black door that leads to the Southside Studios may be in Glasgow, but
the oasis of creation behind it has more of the feel of an
alternative arts lab in Berlin, Prague or New York. Since last
summer, Southside Studios have also been the base for Team Effort, an
initiative driven by producer Gilly Roche to bring together six
artists from different disciplines to work collectively and
organically, without any specific end in sight.
The artists involved in
Team Effort include writer of hit play, Roadkill, Stef Smith,
co-founder of the Fish and Game company, Eilidh MacAskill, and writer
and performer Martin O'Connor. Also on board is musician, composer
and former member of the group, Zoey Van Goey, Kim Moore, while from
the visual art world comes painter Fergus Dunnet, and Rose Ruane, who
works with sculpture, video and live performance.
With this group having
worked closely over the last few months, the Team Effort event that
takes place at Tramway in Glasgow this coming Saturday night as part
of the venue's Rip It Up season won't be a full production. Nor will
it be a work in progress. Rather, the Team Effort collective will
present something that has been shaped over a week's residency in
Tramway, and is likely to exist for just one night only.
“I was really keen to
retain the spirit of spontaneity and adventurousness everyone's been
working with,” says Roche, “but to create a safety net in which
the audience can trust us to create a new piece of work that's still
powerful. Everyone will be going into Tramway with different sets of
ideas taken from everywhere. There'll be bits of text and sound and
other things, and we'll start to craft all these different elements
over the week. Everyone works in wildly different forms, but we want
to ramp up the theatricality of things and unify the audience and the
artists. We'll be walking this brilliant tightrope between it being
terrifying and thrilling.”
The roots of Team
Effort go back to a chance meeting Roche had several years ago with
Ben Walker, who had just opened Southside Studios as a going
concern. Walker asked Roche if she might be interested in putting on
a play there. As an emerging producer, Roche leapt at the opportunity
to put on work outwith regular theatre spaces, and produced a piece
by Rob Drummond. Another show followed, and “it became apparent
that there was a desire for this sort of work, where there were no
expectations, and where the audience and performers could become
one.”
With support from the
National Theatre Studio in London, the National Theatre of Scotland,
Playwrights Studio Scotland and others, Roche began to look at the
potential for developing work in Southside Studios in a more holistic
way than is possible in many venues.
“I wanted to find a
project and create a space where artists could explore their work and
take risks in a way that you can't in other buildings,” Roche says.
“The artists who we approached were people who I felt were at an
important point in their careers, and who I felt were bold in terms
of exploring ideas. The dynamic of the space here is very important
as well. It's dusty and dirty, and is always constantly changing.
It's very unassuming from the outside, but once you come in there's
this beautiful eclectic mix of artists working in a space where ideas
are constantly evolving.”
The first fruits of
Team Effort's multi-faceted activity was a series of seven events
held at the Southside Studios last summer under the name, IF. These
were effectively a set of show-and-tells by what had effectively
become a community, presented in a safe and trusting environment.
Roche stresses the
support she and Team Effort have had from the likes of Caroline
Newall, the director of artistic development at the National Theatre
of Scotland, from Ben Harman, the Curator of Contemporary art at
GoMa, and from Johnny Lynch, aka The Pictish Trail, one of the
driving forces behind Fence Records before founding his own Lost Map
imprint. Digital artist Kim Beveridge and trainee curator Allan
Madden have also made substantial contributions to Team Effort, as
has director Debbie Hannan.
Now Team Effort is
venturing out of its comfort zone for the Tramway event, it will be
interesting to see how audiences respond such collective approach.
“Audiences should
expect to be surprised,” says Roche. “One of the things we said
at the IF events was that the work is still in development, and we
ask audiences to watch with a certain amount of generosity. It will
be very raw.”
Team Effort, Tramway,
February 15.
The Herald, February 11th 2014
ends
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