Last week, I went to a talk by James Yarker, Artistic Director of Stan's Cafe. I've only seen a couple of Stan's Cafe pieces (The Black Maze and Of All The People In All The World) and have loved both of them. Neither of them were theatre pieces, but I still often quote them as key examples of extraordinary ways to work with audiences. The image above is from It's Your Film.
It was a great talk, made thoroughly entertaining by the fact that James never seemed bored by the ideas and experiences he was telling us about. No mean feat considering we made the poor guy keep talking for 3 hours - what with our rapt attention and questions and the like. I mean, from time to time, you could make out the visible panic on his face as he realised just how much script he still had left to get through, but he never seemed bored by the actual things he was saying - the content. Remembering and recounting these stories seemed to be of genuine value and fascination to him, as well as to us. Or maybe he's just a great performer...
Either way, it was an inspiring talk, which focussed broadly on how you can uphold your artistic vision, whilst also sustaining yourself as a professional company. You can read the text from the talk here - it's well worth checking out, particularly if you're involved in making performance.
Was really great to hear someone talking about making work with a real scale of imagination - that's the size of the ideas, not necessarily the size of the shows - and with such thought for how an audience might experience the work (or idea), rather than just how the artist might want to explore the idea. "We dream dreams and must then find ways to realise them in the real world."
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