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!
