The Lands End to John O’Groats journey is happening!

We are almost bursting from our boots with excitement that with the Making Tracks  bursary from the wonderful TWP and the very kind donations from people on wefund that we have reached our target! This means that in April 2012 we will be packing our bags full of hopes, fears and one or two essentials and setting off on our mega journey.

As you may already know we are trying to do this journey on as many forms of transport as possible and we need help to do this, so if you know anyone with a strange mode of tranport along our route who might be interested in helping out then please get involved. This is the rough route we intend to take…

Help us travel from Lands End to John o’Groats

Although we have the wonderful support from Theatre Writing Partnership’s Making Tracks bursary, we are still need a wee bit more cash to make the journey possible…

It would be fantastic if you could help make this unusual and daring journey possible by pledging a five pound boat, or a ten pound boat or whatever you can afford! Pledge here… We Fund

A little bit more about our journey…

With your help we hope to travel from Lands End (the most southern point of Great Britain) to John O’Groats (the most northern point) using as many different forms of transport as is humanly possibly. We will cover 874 miles on a bike, a scooter, a train, a skateboard, a hot air baloon, a boat, a horse, a tractor, a motorbike, a car, a wheelchair and on foot.

We will limit ourselves to just 18 days to complete the journey. This is the average number of days it has taken world record breakers on ALL different forms of transport to make this journey (according to Wikipedia). We will have a small budget for travel of only £874 (one pound for every mile) between three of us; Ria Ashcroft, Kristy Guest and Hannah Stone.

Why on earth are we dong that?
Using the experiences of our this unique journey we will make a piece of theatre. Whether it will be a story of success or failure, we do not yet know. We want to make a piece of theatre about our experience of travelling to a new place, the people we encounter, the problems we have, the frustrations we suffer and the unexpected stories we will uncover. We also think it will be heaps of fun and we love a good challange.

How the Devil can you help us?
We need to raise £874 to make this journey possible. Also if you have any access to interesting forms of transport (like a hot air balloon or a handglider or a helicopter) we would love to hear from you as we are going to have to call in favours from people of Great Britain to make this challange possible, thus making you a part of what we create.

If you like the sound of our project but can not help finacially please help us by telling people about what we are doing, also, you can subscribe to our blog, follow us on Facebook and twitter.

 

Making Tracks

We are very excited to announce that in 2012 we will be attempting to make a journey from Lands end to John O’Groats in 18 days with £1 per mile for transport. This will be as part of TWP’s Making Tracks project.

We will try to use as many different modes of transport as we can including walking, canal boat, bus, bike, tandem bike, skateboard, train, rowing boat, hot air balloon, steam train, unicycle, wheelchair, motor bike and horse.

More information about our adventure and how to get involved coming soon…

Call out for submissions!

The Gramophones to perform at Ladyfest!

The Gramophones Edinburgh experience

We decided to perform at the Edinburgh festival this year to gain valuable experience. Although we have been working together for 2 years we have never been lucky enough to perform the same show over a series of successive nights. All our projects have been one off performances some of which we have repeated at later times. We wanted the opportunity to really try out our work in a critical scenario, gathering feedback and improving our show each night. This was so beneficial to us as a company and made us more analytical of our work, and our show got better every night.

A big part of Edinburgh of course is the marketing, actually persuading people that they want to come and see you show. This was tricky but armed with 3,000 parcel tags with all our show information printed on them we began ‘tagging’ as many people places, railings, bikes as we could with the Gramophones tag. Definitely the greatest marketing tool though was word of mouth. After the first few nights we found that our audiences were made up of people who had told us that they had been told by a friend to come and see the show. We also had great success at the local pubs, tempting people away from their pints and over to our hidden café venue for comedic delights.

 

Although we were only in a very small venue we were at capacity every night and took excellent donations. We struggled to get reviewers to attend, despite attending the meet the media event and having some great conversations with media types. We wondered if this could be because we were part of the free festival and only doing a short run. We did receive a great review from www.edfringereview.com however which we were more than pleased with. Two rural touring companies approached us, so hopefully the Gramophones will be visiting a village hall near you in the coming year.

 

In terms of artistic development we saw some fantastic inspiring work along the way. One of our favourites was ‘You Once Said Yes’ by Look Left Look Right which is a one on one show where the audience member gets taken round the city and is met by different characters along the way. This fantastic show was really inspiring to us in terms of our audience participation work and how we intend to make the audience players in our work. This is what this company did and they did it with humour, surprise as well as pathos. We also enjoyed 1,000 Paper Cranes by Catherine Wheels Theatre Company, which is the moving story of Sadako Sasaki, a desperately ill girl from Hiroshima who resolves with her friend to fold 1,000 paper cranes so that they can receive a wish to make Sadako well again. It’s really sad but beautiful story and the visuals of the many paper cranes appearing as if from nowhere are so magical. We also really enjoyed Swap Juice by Bunk Puppets, how he involves the audience and his inventive and surprising Shadow Puppets. Getting to see Shadow puppetry in 3D is something we’ll never forget!

The Gramophones in the Nottingham Evening Post

Review of ‘Anything to Declare?’

Here is a review of ‘Anything to Declare?’ from the Nottingham Evening Post. 

Anything to Declare? – Free | Edinburgh Festival Fringe

We’re going to Edinburgh!

Anything to Declare? – Free | Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Where in the world are the Gramophones?

The Gramophones are all over the place at the moment working on different projects. We are all working towards our performance at the Lakeside Children’s Festival on June the 4th. We are re-writing and re-making ‘Wild duck’ so that it’s a fun ride for all the family. We are then going to be re-writing and extending ‘Anything to Declare?’ to take to Edinburgh’s Free Festival in August. So lots of exciting things happening!

As for the whereabouts of The Gramophones… well…

Kristy Guest will shortly be returning to the UK after a four month adventure around America and Canada!

Hannah Stone is working in Malaysia performing in Elmer the Elephant in Kuala lumpur.

Ria Ashcroft is teaching children to be more dramatic whilst getting aerial excitement happening in Nottingham.

Kath is working on many exciting projects including running tiny fingers tiny toes at Lakeside Theatre.

Sian Dudley is working her socks off at the Buxton Opera House and still running her fantastic youth theatre Craft!

So quite busy really!!

lots of love Hannah xx