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Email not displaying correctly? <http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=9bbf73034a&e=cab0873599> View it in your browser. <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=6f81ea8b53&e=cab0873599> Recording the History of Alternative Theatre in Britain (1968-88) through oral history interviews and the collecting of archive material <https://gallery.mailchimp.com/2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c/images/Sally_STORY.jpg> Sally Willis in Story, Photo: Pam Martell. Sally Willis and Pam Martell will lead a session revisiting the Letters from Kafka and Story at our next Third Tuesday Salons. See information below. Unfinished Histories August 2013 Newsletter We wanted before August is completely underway to update you to plans for the Autumn but also to alert you to the sad loss of several key figures from the movement in recent weeks in case you hadn’t heard. Unfinished Histories Exhibition Plans for the exhibition Re-Staging Revolutions: Alternative Theatre in Lambeth and Camden are developing apace. We will open on Sun 10th Nov at 4p.m. in the café at Ovalhouse with speeches, drinks, viewing of the exhibition, the launch of the new Unfinished Histories Company Links web pages and we hope, a live interview with members of a key experimental company which started at Oval. Watch this space for details. The exhibition will be open every day the theatre is open and will include an array of fascinating rare materials from the alternative theatre movement as well as extracts from some of the numerous Lambeth or Camden-linked company founders we and our brilliant team of volunteers have been interviewing over the year, including members of London Bubble, Red Ladder, Hesitate and Demonstrate, Optik, The Phantom Captain, Broadside Mobile Workers’ Theatre, Spare Tyre and many more. We are also planning a series of linked events in the Main Theatre at Ovalhouse, featuring discussions, panels of speakers, playreadings, screenings and live events or components of all the above. Events in the theatre will be ticketed at reasonable price and bookable through Ovalhouse box office. Details are subject to change and we will tell you more in the next newsletter, but current plans are: Mon 18th Nov: Oval in the 1960s and 70s: a panel discussion with extracts from key shows Tues 3rd Dec: Oval in the 1980s: a tribute to Kate Crutchley, to whose memory the exhibition is dedicated. (If you knew Kate and would be interested in performing or taking part/ helping organise in some other capacity, please email us at [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> with Kate Crutchley in the subject line) Fri 6th Dec: Black Theatre in London in the 70s and 80s. Work from the period included the Ambiance season, Black Theatre of Brixton, Temba, Black Theatre Co-op, Foco Novo, Motherland, Umoja, Theatre of Black Women and much more (details to be confirmed) Sat 14th Dec: Alternative Pantos Revisited: a celebration of such pantos as Jingleball, Cinderella Hardup or a Woman’s Right to Shoes, Fanny Whittington and her Glorious Pussy, work at the Drill Hall, Oval House or elsewhere that shamelessly and deliciously exploited the inherent gender confusions of the genre… W/c 17th Dec (date to be confirmed): Theatre Centre 60th anniversary play reading event – the company’s plays for young people 1968-88 featuring extracts from plays by David Holman, Noel Greig, Lisa Evans and others In January the exhibition moves to Kentish Town Community Centre, opening on Sat 4th January with a day-long event focused on the work of Inter-Action with lot of former members of the company attending along with members of the local community. The exhibition will then run from early February to late April at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre. There will be a further programme of events including the talk An Alternative Theatre Tour of Camden. Details to be announced later in the year. Wanted by Unfinished Histories: Help with the Exhibition If you can help with any of our needs for materials to make the exhibition happen we would be very grateful: * We are still in need of more exhibition cases though we are begging, borrowing and building some of these we still need more! Let us know if you work at a gallery etc and have something spare we could loan * We would also be grateful for workshop space to build, paint and store exhibition cases in the run-up to the exhibition * If you know of a reasonably-priced frame-maker who might give us a good price on a job lot, please email us Set dressing We are also keen to get hold of materials to dress the exhibition that evoke specific companies or the times. If you have badges for any theatre companies of this period – or for campaigns of the 70s and 80s – in support of the miners or Rock Against Racism or the Women’s Movement – that you could lend or give us, or T shirts we would be glad to hear from you. We are also in need of a ladder we can paint red…. and a parachute silk… Thanks for your collective help in the past which has found us a new accountant and put us in touch with numerous individuals from companies we were keen to find. If you can help with any of the above email: [log in to unmask] or phone/ write to us here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=ea03158ab5&e=cab0873599> . Wanted by Unfinished Histories: Funding/ Fundraising help While we have funding from Heritage Lottery this year and have expanded our work and our collections in many directions, with lots of plans for the future and lots more interviews to do, companies and venues to build pages for, events and exhibition plans we would like to develop, we have no guaranteed funding for next year. We would therefore be interested to hear from anyone interested in working with the company to help fundraise on a percentage basis as we work to build on our current success. If you are in a position to offer a donation, large or small, to the company, we would love to hear from you via email or you can donate by Paypal <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=98442a4864&e=cab0873599> . We are a charity so your donation can be tax-deductible Third Tuesday Salons The programme of Third Tuesday salons at our base in Bethnal Green will continue on Tues 17th Sept and Tues 15th Oct following the success of The Phantom Captain and Agit-Squat events where many of those involved in original productions have attended to contribute, such as Weed, contributor to James Saunders’ play Squat, and comedian Tony Allen, founder of Rough Theatre. Tues 17th Sept: The Artaud Company revisited. With Michael Almaz, Sally Willis and Pam Martell founded the company in the late 60s, with productions including Monsieur Artaud, Dreyfus, Letters from Kafka, Story and Masoch which toured extensively in the US and Europe. Sally Willis’s performance as Kafka’s long suffering fiancé was acclaimed by audiences wherever she went on her solo tours through Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany and Austria both in English and German. Sally and Pam will lead a session revisiting the Letters from Kafka and Story. For more information including extracts from scripts and reviews, click here. <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=f92c6f5a2a&e=cab0873599> Tickets can be booked here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=1890685ae7&e=cab0873599> . Tues 15th Oct: A discussion on psychotherapy and theatre with various former alternative theatre practitioners who now work as therapists including Natasha Morgan formerly of That's Not It (Room, Mother's Arms, An Independent Woman and others) NB The Third Tuesday event in November will in fact take place on a Monday! It will be at Ovalhouse on Mon 18th Nov – see above Obituaries <https://gallery.mailchimp.com/2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c/images/kate_crutchley003.jpg> Kate Crutchley in Steve Gooch’s Female Transport at the Half Moon. Photo: Nobby Clark It has been a bad period for losing people. Kate Crutchley died on 21st July 2013 after a long period of illness. Kate was an inspiration to the project and a key figure in my own involvement in the alternative theatre movement. Reading the leaflets for the 1980s when she was Theatre Programmer at Oval House as it was then, (now Ovalhouse) the range of work she programmed or commissioned including Black and Asian theatre, experimental work, gay and lesbian theatre, women’s work and combinations of several of these like Theatre of Black Women, was an inspiration. Prior to this she had worked as an actress at the Orange Tree, transferring to the West End in The Lady or the Tiger? and was a key part of the ensemble who created the first production of Steve Gooch’s Female Transport at the Half Moon. As an actor and director she was part of Any Woman Can, the first lesbian play by Gay Sweatshop, going on to direct plays for both the men’s company and developing the women’s company show Care and Control based on verbatim testimony about the struggle of lesbian mothers to retain custody of their children, which helped influence debate and encourage change in attitudes. Anywhere to Anywhere about women pilots in the Second World War was also a verbatim piece developed with Women’s Theatre Group: Kate had been influenced by and worked with pioneering documentary theatre-maker Peter Cheeseman at Stoke and his wife, writer Joyce Halliday. Productions with the Women’s Project at New End included Michelene Wandor’s Aid Thy Neighbour, and Kate was central to the major Women’s Festival staged at Action Space Drill Hall in 1977, including directing Susan Griffin’s Voices. Her appointment as Theatre Programmer at Oval House in 1981 followed a production of Sue Frumin’s Bohemian Rhapsody. She stayed there for 10 years encouraging numerous artists to make their first shows or new work like Natasha Morgan with That’s Not It or Adele Saleem with Hard Corps or the multi-cultural Changing Women group led by Nancy Diuguid. She brought in or encouraged more verbatim works like Vauxhall Manor School’s Motherland where schoolgirls interviewed their West Indian mothers’ generation about their memories of arriving in Britain. She also staged, with her own company Character Ladies, a range of innovative women’s and lesbian work including delicious high camp spoofs and musical celebrations of the Ladies of Llangollen as well as straight plays. See here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=ca8c836232&e=cab0873599> for more. Susan Croft Snoo Wilson Snoo Wilson who died suddenly on 3rd July was one of the most radical and innovative playwrights to emerge from the alternative theatre movement, addressing a fascinating array of subjects in whacky, surreal and consistently inventive and challenging ways. He saw the theatre as a place "where you could play a game of Let's Pretend the Physical World isn't as Solid as the Daily Telegraph says it is." He cut his teeth with Portable Theatre, the writer-led group he helped set up with Tony Bicat, Howard Brenton, David Hare and others, for which he wrote the hard-hitting Pignight 1970, Blowjob 1971 and The Pleasure Principle (the Politics of Love, the Capital of Emotion) in 1973. He contributed to group-led playwriting experiments like Lay By (1971) and England’s Ireland and later wrote Vampire (1972) for their offshoot company, Paradise Foundry. He went on to work with Joint Stock at the Royal Court The Glad Hand (1978) and to have plays at the ICA (Flaming Bodies, 1979) and Soho Poly (The Soul of the White Ant 1979) and to produce a whole series of plays at the Bush including A Greenish Man (1978), More Light (1987) and Darwin’s Flood (1994), producing a body of work where Mary Magdalene, Nietzsche, the Kray Brothers, Jung, Wallis Simpson and a line of dancing gorillas could vividly co-exist. See <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=0ed104b823&e=cab0873599> Guardian and other press for more. George O'Brien George O'Brien died at the end of May. He was a member of the innovative dance company Moving Being before joining the performance art group John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in the early seventies for a few years. He later went on to become illustrator. His John Bull Puncture Repair Kit collaborator Mick Banks writes more here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=6f8a7cdde4&e=cab0873599> . Olwen Wymark California-born, Olwen Wymark moved to Britain in 1951 and married actor Patrick Wymark. She began writing with radio plays but went on to produce numerous plays with small-scale theatre companies. In Stay Where You Are (Traverse, 1969) Ellen becomes the butt of a series of games, designed to shake her out of her restrained politeness into authentic emotion. She wrote The Technicians for Voyage Theatre Company that same year. In Best Friends (Orange Tree, 1977) playwright Baba’s fictional characters intrude on her life. Incarceration is central to Find Me (Orange Tree, 1980) where understanding of Verity’s illness eludes family, psychiatric professionals and herself. In Brezhnev's Children (Moving Target, 1988) seven women, quarantined and separated from their babies in a post-natal ward, by a hostile Soviet system, rebel against their confinement. Other plays include Buried Treasure (Tricycle, 1983) and versions of Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s plays Waking Up (Riverside Studios, 1983) and Zola’s Nana (Shared Experience, 1987) See Guardian <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=706a518960&e=cab0873599> for more. Events Productions Tasha Fairbanks, writer and company member with Siren as well as Sidewalk, Theatre Centre and others scored a major success last year with Fog, her new play co-written with Toby Wharton and directed by Che Walker, about two families, one white and dysfunctional, the other black and aspirational at the Finborough. It is going on national tour from 10th Sept to 11th Nov. See here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=271a457057&e=cab0873599> for further details. Two of our volunteers on Unfinished Histories Company Links are involved in shows on the Camden Fringe: Ray Malone directs Heads Bodies Legs, an absurd comic thriller combining theatre, music and animation. It runs at Camden People's Theatre till 25th August. Book tickets here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=f56e60ff0b&e=cab0873599> . And Lucie Regan features in 4x4 Squared by Billy Hicks at the Etcetera Theatre, a brand new collection of short plays, investigating the highs and lows and everything in between of this crazy little thing called life. Further details here <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=ba0b4b8afe&e=cab0873599> . She is also helping to produce a show called Oxbow Lakes, a gothic little tale with songs which asks, whatever happened to childhood? What are we so frightened of? Can anyone remember how to play? The show is going up Sept 4th- 28th September 2013, Wednesdays to Saturdays at 7.30pm. 17-20 Parr St, Hoxton London N1 7ET. Experimental, surreal, it plays with form. Meanwhile our Chair Danny Braverman is taking his devised piece Wot? No Fish!! to Edinburgh This solo show tells the funny and moving story of how he discovered the lost art of his Great-uncle Ab who every week for 54 years drew a cartoon on his wage-packet for his wife Celie. Wot? No Fish!! is an extraordinary story about love, art, history …and catering. Catch it at 2 -26 August at 3pm- Edinburgh Festival, Summerhall (Venue 26) or 23, 24*, 26, October at 7:30 and 27 Oct at 4:30 – JW3 (Jewish Community Centre for London), 341-351 Finchley Road, London NW3 6ET Click here for more details <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=bfee3b903c&e=cab0873599> . We would also like to draw your attention to several Exhibitions: Made Possible by Squatting. This group have been collecting proposals for works and workshops towards an exhibition in September and an online archive, collectively celebrating how squatting has positively affected the lives of individuals and communities in the UK, specifically London. The group who are curating this event attended our recent highly successful Agit Squat session in July which looked at alternative theatre plays from the 1970s about squatting, while practitioners from that period shared stories about how squatting allowed them to afford to live and produce theatre. The group hope to host a further opportunity to take part in a public reading of James Saunders’ documentary play Squat in September. Their work is part of campaigns to prevent the further criminalisation of squatting by its extension to non-residential property, which a few politicians are pushing for. Go to www.madepossiblebysquatting.co.uk <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=6729e5425b&e=cab0873599> for more information Eelpiland: the Birth of Rhythm and Blues Many of the Twickenham squatters in Grosvenor Rd were linked to the alternative community on Eel Pie Island in the Thames. Over the summer of 2013, Aurora Metro are celebrating Eel Pie Island’s music heritage through live music, an exhibition, a new book The British Beat Explosion and a film. See Eelpiland <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=5fca46fe4a&e=cab0873599> or Arts Richmond <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=a3107e52ec&e=cab0873599> . Exhibition open from 1st August to 29th September 2013 at The Stables Gallery, Orleans House, Riverside, Twickenham, TW1 3DJ Tues-Sat 1.00pm–5.30pm, Sun and BH 2.00pm–5.30pm Free admission. email: [log in to unmask] | telephone: 0203 261 0000 and Kentish Town City Farm: the first 40 years a Heritage Lottery-funded exhibition at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, 2nd Floor, Holborn Library, 32-38 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8PA until 30th August. In celebration of the anniversary of the first City Farm in Britain – started as part of Inter-Action. Mon 10-6 Tues 10-6 Thurs 10-7 Fri 10-5 Alternate Sat 11-5. Also see their web site <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=0b9f975971&e=cab0873599> . Conferences UH will be taking part in several conferences in September including: Past is Prologue, at Goldsmiths College A day of dialogues and presentations exploring the ways in which artists draw creative potential from archive material such as photographs, film, artefacts and oral histories. Wednesday, Sep 18, 10am-6.30pm ICCE Goldsmiths, University of London, New Academic Building, Lecture Theatre LG01 SE14 6NW See here for details <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=15266c3ab3&e=cab0873599> . Turning the Page: Creating New Writing (1945-2013) This V&A/ University of Reading conference 13th September 2013 – 14th September 2013 growing out of the research project exploring the ACGB archive, Susan Croft (who was Director of New Playwrights Trust [later Writernet] from 1986-1989) will be giving a paper on ‘New Writing in the Alternative Theatre Movement: New Models of Practice and their Discontents’ exploring some of the relationships that emerged looking at both companies which marginalised the writer and the text and others which sought to place writers at the centre of decision-making and examining some of the experiments that were instituted. See here for further details <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=e318b5efd9&e=cab0873599> . Best wishes and hope to see many of you on 17th September! from Unfinished Histories Director: Susan Croft, Associate Director: Jessica Higgs Project Co-ordinator: Vanessa Bartlett Web Site Co-ordinator: Sam Nightingale Board - Danny Braverman, Vanessa Lee, Sue Timothy <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=2022281202&e=cab0873599> www.unfinishedhistories.com <http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=bbd6205ba5&e=cab0873599> Logos Our mailing address is: Unfinished Histories Room 15, St Margaret’s House Settlement 21 Old Ford Road London, England E2 9PL United Kingdom Copyright (C) 2013 Unfinished Histories All rights reserved. <http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=monkey_rewards&aid=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&afl=1> Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp Web Bug from http://unfinishedhistories.us2.list-manage.com/track/open.php?u=2eb6dd9ce5c17946ff0f6079c&id=9bbf73034a&e=cab0873599 <http://www.mailscanner.tv/1x1spacer.gif>