This week's news from the Coliseum...

As we hurtle towards April (where is 2012 going?) LipService’s hilarious Move Over Moriarty opens at the Grange Arts Centre next week and we are getting ready to open our second production of the season – Bill Naughton’s Alfie – which opens on 11 April.

Towards the end of April Education and Outreach will be producing a performance at Earl Mill Arts Centre in Hathershaw, Oldham. Tunnel Visions is a site specific performance where audiences will travel through a converted mill space in a replica train carriage. This large scale project has taken inspiration from the Lydgate Tunnel which closed in 1963 and will use new technologies and new writing, the performance will transform this old mill space.

Site specific theatre is a really exciting way of working and each production is unique to the space in which the performance takes place. There are theatre companies across the country that only produce site specific theatre For example; Grid Iron Theatre company perform in disused warehouses, parks and town houses. In fact, Star-Cross’d (our open air summer production) is a site specific production, being performed in promenade at Alexandra Park. For Tunnel Visions, audience members will take a seat in a train carriage and travel around the space stopping at various points for different sections of the performance, travelling back in time coming across anything from dinosaurs to suffragettes.

Each performance will last 30 minutes and there will be 11 performances over the course of Friday 27 and Saturday 28 April. Tunnel Visions has been devised and will be performed by the Coliseum’s TheatreLAB and DigiLAB groups which are made up 30 of young people under 25yrs. DigiLAB focuses on the digital and technical aspects of theatre production. Since the groups were formed they have worked on a variety of productions including main house shows and interactive performances which have all embraced digital technology. Imitating the Dog – the design team behind our current tour of The Hound of the Baskervilles – will be working on Tunnel Visions using projections to create the different time periods. This will be a great opportunity for the members of DigiLAB to develop their understanding of technical design even further by working alongside this innovative company. Anyone who saw Hound will know what stunning effects Imitating the Dog can conjure up.

This will be a really exciting piece of theatre and writer Rob Johnston has also recently won the King’s Cross Award for New Writing 2011. The whole company have been working really hard to make the performance a success and I’m really looking forward to boarding a carriage for the first show.

See you out and about.

Kevin Shaw
Artistic Director