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Cast announced for ‘A Secret Life’

We are delighted to announce the cast for our upcoming production of ‘A Secret Life‘ at Theatre 503, 10th – 15th May 2016.

Phoebe McIntosh

Phoebe McIntosh

Phoebe McIntosh

Phoebe McIntosh is a London-based actress. Since graduating from the MA Acting course at London’s Arts Educational, Phoebe has gained many diverse and exciting credits.
Her first short, Still Born, was nominated for Best Film at the Black Filmmakers International Festival 2009 when it was screened at the BFI. She has gone on to star in the debut music video for acclaimed artist Emeli Sandé’s single, Heaven, directed by Jake Nava (Beyoncé -Single Ladies) as well as a slate of varied and well-received short films ranging from sci-fi to comedy.
In 2012, she worked under Creative Director, Danny Boyle, as a member of the ensemble cast of the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, where she performed in front of a live audience of 80,000.
This year sees the release of her debut feature film, The Long Road, in which she plays lead female love interest, Rosie.
Phoebe is also a writer and in 2013 she penned, produced and performed in a sell-out run of her first play, The Tea Diaries, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before it made its London fringe debut at The Tea House Theatre, Vauxhall.
As a voiceover artist she narrates audiobooks, corporate films and video games.
Phoebe is represented by Michael Keane at Elaine Murphy Associates. Read more

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“I was a bit of a loose cannon. I was expelled for not turning up…”

We’ve had a busy few months with our outreach for A Secret Life. We’ve been meeting many wonderful local people and hearing all about their teenage years – and I’ve been popping into Wimbledon Guild so frequently recently I feel like I’m almost part of the team there now! We’ve heard about people’s very different school experiences and yet how career options for women in particular were so very limited for so many years (mostly nursing or secretarial or working in a shop). We’ve interviewed people aged 65 years to 92 years old (the wonderful Derek) at both community centres and individually. The ladies at Merton & Morden Guild kept us laughing with their hilarious first date stories, while at the Katherine Low Settlement we heard what it was like growing up gay when being gay was still illegal…

Meanwhile, it’s also been great fun engaging young people with the audio recordings of elderly people’s memories and how it compares to their own experiences. I think some of the Year 10s at St Marks Academy, Mitcham were surprised to hear Jim (age 82) started smoking when he was 12 and gave up when he was 14, while Jane’s story of not wanting to go to a party because she couldn’t afford the ‘right’ thing to wear resonated with some of the girls. We talked about their stresses about exams and career choices and the pressure on image today, especially with the positives and negatives of social media.

If you’re coming along to see A Secret Life (and you should because it’s going to be great!) you’ll get to hear the words of some of the real people we’ve spoken to as part of the script that Tamara Micner is currently beavering away at putting together. You can book tickets here.

For now, we’ll leave you with a few of the things we’ve heard:

“I had several boyfriends but this time they all came to the door together at half past seven. All to pick me up. My mother was fuming…I was a proper flirt. I just knew when to stop.”

“I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema, my mum and dad didn’t approve of going to the cinema til I was probably 13 or 14 probably, and that’s when I can remember Elvis Presley films coming out, and being an Elvis Presley fan and wanting to see all his films so that’s when we had to take our little white socks off and get in the queue and hope we’d get in even though we were under 15.”

“I was a bit of a loose cannon. I was expelled for not turning up…I did frustrate them, I know I did. I just went and did things that drove them crazy.”

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Our residency at Wimbledon Space

Wimbledon Space Residency

Wimbledon Space Residency

We had a fantastic time during our residency at Wimbledon Space exploring new digital theatre piece A Secret Life for Theatre 503 for the Wandsworth Arts Fringe in May. We learnt loads about the directions the piece might go in and the support from the lovely students was brilliantly helpful.

This is a project about the elderly’s memories of adolescence, connecting teenagers today with those memories and how they compare to their own teenage experiences. We have been interviewing and audio recording some amazing local people in Merton and Wandsworth and hearing their varied stories about being a teenager – whether that’s growing up in a men’s club and being taught billiards, hating school and playing netball was the only thing that got you through it, not being able to afford the right thing to wear to a party and so not wanting to go, or the joy of first love. There’s differences in what people went through as a teenager – and yet a lot that is the same years later.

Wimbledon Space Residency

Wimbledon Space Residency

So, Tamara, our writer, and I started off our residency by listening to our audio recordings so far, writing down anything that might be interesting for our play and putting them on A4 paper in coloured pens on the wall – we separated them into topics such as family life, school, hobbies, figuring out who you are…

Meanwhile, Francis got to work on the app for the piece. Our audience will hear the inner thoughts of a character via audio through an app they have downloaded to their smartphone. The students tested their design skills in a new way helping us to design the user interface of the app to make it not only look good but also be simple and clear to use.

About half way through the residency we also realised that some of the students at Wimbledon College of Art are still teenagers so we could get their responses to our elderly people’s audio recordings and their own thoughts on being a teenager (again more coloured pens and big bits of paper on the walls). We tempted people in with the lure of biscuits (who doesn’t love a chocolate digestive?!), asked them to watch and listen to the audio recordings with added pictures projected onto the walls and recorded their responses via questionnaire.

Overall, thank you so much to Wimbledon Space for this brilliantly useful and productive residency! We learnt a lot and consumed a lot of biscuits.

 

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Acts Re-Acts 3 Residency at Wimbledon Space

ACTS RE-ACTS 3

ACTS RE-ACTS 3

Baseless Fabric is excited to announce a residency at Wimbledon Space as part of the Acts Re-Acts 3 between 19th February & 16th March.

We will be exploring a new piece using digital technology based on interviews we have been doing with local people from the South West London area.

For more information check the Wimbledon Space Event.

 

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Sneak peek of ‘Drifting Dragons’

If you weren’t lucky enough to make it along to our public sharing at the end of our Arts Council funded R&D of ‘Drifting Dragons’, you can get an idea of what we’re up to in this video. Thanks to Oskar McCarthy, Ayaka Tanimoto, Rosemary Hinton & Greg Harradine.

We’re now onto the next stage of the project planning for the full production in the summer. So if you like what you see stay tuned!

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Thanks for supporting Drifting Dragons!

A big thanks to everyone who came to the public sharing of our new opera Drifting Dragons inspired by local people’s stories in Merton. We were so pleased that so many people were able to make it and gave us such positive and useful feedback via a lively Q&A session, filmed interviews and questionnaire forms. We’ll now be developing the piece further towards full production on the streets of Merton this summer (and perhaps further afield, who knows) so watch this space…!

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Drifting Dragons Public Sharing

We’re having a public sharing of the R&D of our new opera Drifting Dragons on Friday 29th January at 4pm at New Wimbledon Studio. We would love to get your feedback on the three scenes we’ve written so far and your ideas for how the piece could develop. We’re aiming to work towards a full production in the summer in various locations on the streets of Merton so all your ideas would be very helpful! All ages welcome. Refreshments will be provided.

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Cast announced for ‘Drifting Dragons’ the new Merton Opera Project

Baseless Fabric Theatre is proud to announce the cast for its new Merton Opera Project.

OSKAR MCCARTHY – Jason
AYAKA TANIMOTO – Sadie
ROSEMARY HINTON – Violin
GREG HARRADINE – Guitar / Composer

AYAKA TANIMOTO

Ayaka Tanimoto

Ayaka Tanimoto

Ayaka Tanimoto graduated from the Royal College of Music with a Bachelor of Music (BMus Hons) in 2009 and a Masters in Vocal Performance (MPerf) in 2011. Having trained extensively under Margaret Cable and Patricia Rozario OBE, Ayaka’s studies were supported in by the Okada Cultural Foundation Scholarship as well as the Mie International Exchange Foundation Scholarship (Japan). She then continued her training as a Scholar at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Alexander Gibson Opera School where she sang the main role of Sesto in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito.

Ayaka has won numerous awards in Japan and the UK including the 1st prize at the 3rd International Ernest Bloch Competition in London. To date, Ayaka has taken to the opera stage many times, singing 2nd boy and 2nd Lady in Mozart’s Magic Flute (Longborough Festival Opera & LFO Tour), Iolanthe in G&S’s Iolanthe (Brent Opera), covering Darabella in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (Opera de Baugé), Poppet in Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan (British Youth Opera), Flora Bervoix in Verdi’s La Traviata (Opera Lyrica), Suzuki in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Bury Court Opera/Grimeborn Festival), and Chorus for Opera Holland Park.

Ayaka’s future engagements include, singing Suzuki in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Bury Court Opera and Secret Opera) and Chorus for Opera Holland Park. ayakatanimoto.com Read more

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Merton Opera R&D is well underway!

Well, we’ve had a pretty fantastic couple of weeks meeting lots of different people, hearing their amazing real life stories and getting their ideas for what our opera about friendship should be about. We’re feeling totally inspired by everyone and feel very lucky to have met both older people who’ve led such fascinating lives and young people who’ve got so many great ideas!

Raynes Park High School Workshop

Raynes Park High School Workshop

For our young people’s workshops we had great fun leading workshops for Wimbledon Park Primary School, Raynes Park High School, the Merton Youth Concert Band and the 4th Morden Girls’ Brigade to teach them about the process of creating stories and song writing. Thanks so much everyone who was involved for all your fantastic ideas. I didn’t realise digging to China with spoons was such a common childhood activity!

Greg and I now have a strong idea of what the story of our piece is – the overall idea is inspired by various conversations with everyone, specific storyline ideas that have come up in our workshops with young people or via our online questionnaire, and little bits of personal stories or short lines people have said are making their way into the libretto. Greg is now hard at work writing the music for these first few songs (or arias and duets) and I’m busy casting our singers to help us bring the piece to life in rehearsal. We’ll be holding a sharing to invite everyone to give feedback on what we’ve done so far so stay tuned…!

P.S. If you haven’t yet filled in our online questionnaire and would like to be involved please do so here

Take the Friendship Quiz

 

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What does friendship mean to you?

Merton & Morden Guild

Merton & Morden Guild

Exciting news! We’ve been given Arts Council funding to create a new opera in Merton and we need your help! We are talking to people based across the whole borough to gather their stories about friendships throughout their lives and how these friendships change over time. So far we’ve been talking to the wonderful people at Merton & Morden Guild (including at their fantastic Christmas lunch!) and some lovely ladies from the Wimbledon Cancer Friendship Group. Thanks everyone for their time and great stories!

Merton & Morden Guild

Merton & Morden Guild

We’re talking to lots more people at different groups in the new year so if you have a story about your friends that you’d like to share with us we’d love to hear from you!

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