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SUN presented by National Art Service Theatre imagining in abstract, passionate detail the descent, end and new beginnings of civilized life on earth. St. Leonard’s Church, London 5th Feb – 2nd March 2014

Information pack

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SUN is a collection of scenes imagining in abstract, passionate detail the

descent, end and new beginnings of civilized life on earth. 5th February – 2nd March 2014

“Raw, dangerous and beautiful; conjuring images that resemble a Lynch film combined with a child's drawing.”

National Art Service (NAS) creates new theatre from the writing of Alan Fielden. Theatre that is dark though tempered by a raucous humour, a tenderness of character and a subtle awareness of the absurd in everything.

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Synopsis

Act 1 | the present

A young girl practices her piano, a couple remember, twins boil water, strangers fall in love. And then the world begins to end: fire and ash, dinosaurs, hurricanes, volcanoes, secrets. Jesus and Buddha walk by. A child looks for his mother. Lovers freeze to death. Four friends find a bird’s nest with tiny eggs in it, just hatching…

Act 2 | the future Survivors begin from scratch. Food is scarce, the world is a wasteland. The past is a half-remembered myth. We follow a search party looking for sustenance. Instead they find their frozen Gods and decide to eat them. They search the bodies, they find play scripts. They begin to act out a scene, the dead begin to rise...

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the company

“...Brilliant, broad in philosophical scope and exactly what I would expect from National Art

Service.” - Daniel Somerville,

performance artist & lecturer at University of Wolverhampton

We are defined neither by genre nor by process but by our openness to use whatever theatrical tools are necessary to crack the nut. ‘The nut’ being work that is a truthful, sincere, playful attempt to find a greater understanding of what it is to be human. National Art Service is made up of artistic director Alan Fielden, executive producer Jemima Yong and a fluid collective of international collaborators. SUN stands as NAS’ most ambitious project to date, with a company of 26 - 9 of whom make up the cast. On scenography, we will be working with ENO design associates Ziggy Jacobs (lighting) and Pete Malkins (sound). Our performance ensemble hail from a rich variety of performance practices in opera, butoh, performance art and comedy. The cast is: Anna Martine, Duncan Wilkins, Lydia Orange, Jack McMahon, James Murray-Perton, Oyinka Yusuff, Daniel Somerville, Malachy Orozco and Loukia Pierides. For full profiles of our team, click through to our website: www.nationalartservice.org.uk/whonow

Images below: Rehearsals and performance for the public rehearsed reading of SUN at Calvert 22 Gallery, 01 November 2013.

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show/process

"...Illuminating & enjoyable. I admire your capacity to create something new from scratch, develop it collectively and openly, & the passion & enthusiasm with which you inhabit your

work." – Robin Hatton-Gore, St. Leonard’s Church

SUN is a 90-minute, off west end, site-specific performance in St. Leonard’s Church for an audience of 40. A theatre of environment; SUN isn’t led by text based narrative, but sculpted with an amalgamation of material – darkness, light, distance, height, sound, text and body – painting impressions that draw ‘drama’ from tensions between human and environment. Written for a space of sanctuary and refuge, SUN asks what is sacred in contemporary society - what would the human race keep in the face of extinction? What would we prefer to bury? How will we be remembered by future generations? How much agency could we employ in our current circumstance? Since beginning in May 2013, the project has had input from over 50 individuals from both the local community of Tower Hamlets and Hackney as well as that from within the creative sector. The primary text has been developed in symbiosis with performance, having undergone 6 private readings and 1 public sharing at Calvert 22 Gallery. Along the way, SUN was shortlisted for Theatre Royal Haymarket’s Pitch Your Play scheme. Our pre-show community engagement programme (Jan 2014) takes the form of a series of 15 Living Room Theatre performances, where we bring Act 2 to local residents’ domestic spaces to cultivate discussion on what the future may look like and how we might begin shaping it. Our process is documented on our blog: www.nationalartservicesun.blogspot.co.uk, which has accumulated over 2000 hits in 6 months.

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timeline December 2013 – March 2014

20 Dec --- Tickets go on sale

06 – 12 Jan --- Workshop week with performers

13 – 04 Jan --- Main block of creation with

designers and rehearsals in St. Leonard’s Church

Various (15) dates --- in Jan & Feb

Living Room Theatre Series

28 – 31 Jan --- Technical get-in

02 – 03 Jan --- Previews

04 Feb --- Marketing outside church goes up

05 Feb --- SUN opening night

05 – 09 Feb --- SUN performance run week 1

09 Feb --- Post show Q & A 1

12 – 16 Feb --- SUN performance run week 2

16 Feb --- Post show Q & A 2

19 – 23 Feb --- SUN performance run week 3

23 Feb --- Post show Q & A 3

24 Feb – 02 March --- SUN performance run week 4

02 March --- Post show Q & A 4 & Closing night

03 – 05 March --- Technical get-out

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St Leonard’s Church SUN was first written in a flat on the Boundary Estate, a residential community neighbouring St Leonard’s church. In his breaks, Alan would walk through the church grounds, finding solace in its gardens. The possibility of the performance happening inside was always at the back of his mind. Now two years on, staging SUN in this gem, hidden in plain sight, is a dream come true. Dedicated to St Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners and the mentally ill, the church stands as the oldest building in Shoreditch. Its first recorded vicar was in 1185 and is currently run by Rev Paul Turp. It prides itself on being the actors' church. The first English theatre was close by and was the site of several of Shakespeare’s play premieres. The actors who were first to play Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello and Romeo are all buried in the crypt of St Leonard's; so are the Burbage family who built The Globe. St Leonard's Church, locally known as Shoreditch Church, has always been committed to its community. Its overwhelming acoustics and beautiful architecture have made it a home to a variety of contemporary music and performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra to Kate Tempest.

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long-term vision / audience development First and foremost, we would like to become self-sustainable. This means

a) Earning a livable income from making theatre b) Always paying our collaborators what they are worth (or industry standard rates at

minimum) c) Having in place a system that facilitates an evolving community of artists, patrons

and audiences. Artistically, NAS would like to create at ambitious scales; growing alongside the range of audiences accessing our work. The underlying goal here is to redefine the function of theatre in society. We envision a permanent aspect of our production dedicated to audience development. It is vital that we make theatre more accessible; its content is relevant to far more than the privileged. In SUN we do this through our Living Room series where we host local performance events in residents’ domestic spaces followed by an evening of conversation on the themes of Agency and The Future. There will also be a regular free public Q&A sessions after selected shows, significant concession rate tickets (£8 to the regular £14) throughout the run and a signed (BSL) performance. The far future holds a physical NAS hub; a space not just for company headquarters but a home to transitory artists where art is exchanged for shelter. Also in the building: a commercial, personally curated bookshop/library and a pub called The Womb.

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previous work NAS have been creating independent theatre since 2010. Our open approach has so far led us to experiment with various kinds of theatre; post-dramatic, collaborative & devised, improvised, absurdist, essentialist, hyper-real, total theatre, site specific. We are not interested in spoon-feeding audiences or in emotional manipulation. We believe in respecting our audiences and their ability to think for themselves.

In The Dark | performed at Tristan Bates Theatre & Battersea Arts Centre in 2010 | AXA Hotel, Prague in 2011 “I was intrigued by how my other senses got engaged once deprived of sight. I have a much more vivid memory of what In The Dark was like, then for most other shows that I have witnessed.”

– Anne Friedlander, curator

The Winning Crowd | performed at LOST Theatre’s One Act Festival in 2011 – Winner of Best Cast Award “There’s nothing quite like a black farce to really get one stoked. I gave this the award for best cast but also I would have liked to have given it to the writer and director... for being one of the best writers directors... wonderfully detailed performances of mad optimistic

behaviour. Great stuff!" - Jeremy Kingston, critic with The Times

ROOM | made in collaboration with Doppelgangers, commissioned by Theatre Delicatessen and performed at Bush Theatre in 2012 “That piece blew my mind, it messed me up, I had to see a psychiatrist after that.”

- David Gothard, Artistic director of Riverside Studios (1977)

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contact Jemima Yong Executive Producer +44 (0) 7532187326 jemima@nationalartservice.org.uk Alan Fielden Artistic Director +44 (0) 7540064159 alan@nationalartservice.org.uk "