These are busy times for many people. We are delight to announce that in a couple of weeks (22nd April) Improbable will be bringing their new show The Bear to our venue @ A E Harris. Later that week Stan’s Cafe Associate Artist Bernadette Russell will be at the venue with a Work-in-Progress Preview of her new show 366 Days of Happiness, a show with serious roots in Birmingham. If you want to come and see this you won’t have to pay any cash but you do need to be invited (which is easy). Details of both these shows are on the @ A E Harris website.

Over at MAC next week (16th – 20th April) there are further showings of the Jane Packman Company show A Thousand Shards of Glass, which you may have missed when it was at @ A E Harris last year.

If you need to earn some cash before seeing these shows maybe you can become the new/first producer for The Other Way Works (though you will need better qualifications than just needing the cash).

If you need to make cheese, friends of Stan’s Blanch & Shock can show you how in London on 20th April.

At last it is here, Theatre Fever, a fortnight in which we celebrate theatre made and performed in the West Midlands. There is always a lot happening on the region’s theatre scene but Theatre Fever has chosen to put the spotlight on this fortnight.

Gathered in its program is just a cross-section of the huge variety of theatre open to the public at any given time. For the most part it is a marketing exercise (our new show The Anatomy of Melancholy is part of our and Warwick Arts Centre’s contribution to the celebration), but there are also Holding Space commissions adding to the richness of possibilities open to audiences. To see everything that is highlighted as part of Theatre Fever visit this website. To see what elements we are hosting @ A E Harris visit this website. (more…)

Tonight we semi-gatecrashed the opening of the Visual Arts strand of the Perth International Arts Festival and as a result caught the switching of of Jim Campbell‘s great installation Scattered Light. In reductionist shorthand it could be described as the world’s lowest definition television screen. A host of lightbulbs (they are in fact LEDs disguised as lightbulbs) are suspended in a 3D matrix 80 foot wide, 20 foot high and 16 foot deep. They pulse and flicker in an apparently random sequence until, when you are stood square-on to the piece a decent distance away, you start to see in the pulsing and flickering a series of shadowy human figures crossing the ‘screen’. Squint, so the hard circles of light start to dissolve into each other, and the image resolves further to become recognizable as commuters crossing the floor of Grand Central Station’s waiting room. Low Definition – beautiful. (more…)

Saturday night is the last chance to catch Reckless Sleepers @ A E Harris, they’ve had a great run, it would be great if they could go out on a high with a good audience. Please check out This Is Not America Part 3.

That’s it, it’s October and ‘the season’ has officially kicked off and suddenly there’s loads to see. Theatre Absolute are promoting a show The Wedge in their shop front venue from 23rd. October.

Before that, Box of Frogs have their latest improv. night returning on Wednesday 17th.

The following night is the first night of Eat! a coming together of Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Black Country Touring. Featuring/staring ‘our very own’ Graeme Rose.

‘Our very own’ BE Festival (not really ours at all) is on tour with Best of BE including gigs in West Bromwich and Coventry. Three great short shows which all had their UK premiere’s @ A E Harris as part of BE Festival in July.

Big Brum’s year long Edward Bond celebration has a festival weekend full of action at Warwick Arts Centre 2nd & 3rd November.

Reckless Sleepers visit @ A E Harris for a week in November.

The New Alexandra Theatre are hosting a thriller called Blue/Orange.

Meanwhile, down the road at The Blue Orange Theatre, Birmingham School of Acting turn to Tom Stoppard.

Stan’s Cafe? We’re in Newcastle and London with vinyl.

Fans of both Puccini and contemporary engineering should flock to The Crescent Theatre next week to enjoy Midland Opera‘s production of Turandot and/admire a set, including this magnificent, fully functioning staircase, entirely made out of cardboard. How do we know about this? Fabrication has been underway all this week @AE Harris. It would be disloyal of us not to mention that The Merchant of Venice, the first production of new local company Fred Theatre is at our place also starting on Tuesday.

On Saturday I take a rare trip to Bristol’s Arnolfini to contribute to Remake a symposium (part of the Performing Documents series), about the restaging of old performances. I have been asked to talk about our re-staging of The Carrier Frequency, a piece of physical theatre made in 1984 by Impact Theatre Cooperative. Time passes amazingly fast, ironically re-enactment itself feels like ancient history, in fact there were 15 years between the original production and our recreation, 13 years between our recreation and now.

The organisers are scrabbling around for a VHS player on which to show the recording we based on our recreation on. I’m scrabbling around for the lead that connects my laptop to other people’s video projectors (the German term ‘Beamer’ is much better than ‘video projector’, maybe I’ll use that from now on).

BE 2012 viral trailer – PROMO BE 2012 from BE Festival on Vimeo.

After an intensely busy few months it is time to ease off slightly and watch other people do their thing. In this case BE Festival 2012 with its gathered companies from across Europe. It promises to be a fun week down @ A E Harris.