BE Ready

Today BE Festival launched it’s 2014 programme in a small event at The REP which even my ineptitude failed to totally wreck. The big news is that the festival which was born @ A E Harris has moved to The REP and a clever twist they are solving the riddle of being at The REP and retaining the factory feel by eschewing the venue’s plush foyer, bar and restaurant and reversing the venue. Audiences will enter through the back door. They will socialize in the venue’s workshop, eat on the main stage, visit an exhibition in the paint shop and see shows in The DOOR and The STUDIO, but here they will still enter from back stage.

A measure of how impressively the festival has grown is that where once they received 60 applications from companies wishing to perform this year they got 600. So we can expect the quality of the 12 they have chosen to be very high. Blanch and Shock are back doing the catering, which will be a treat.

Now Stan’s Cafe are no longer hosting the event we are freed up to contribute on a more artistic level and so I am running a workshop in which I share all my great wisdom with anyone brave enough to take on such a burden. It looks like I’m programmed in direct competition with Matt Burman, but in the immortal word’s of James Ellroy about Frank Sinatra – “He’s no threat”.

More of a threat is John Motson, who has just been beaten to (though more probably undercut for) the job of hosting the BE Festival Awards Ceremony on the evening of 12th July by The Commentators, who are bound to make an excellent job of proceedings.

Finally but most centrally the BE Festival is kindly hosting our newest show Finger Trigger Bullet Gun which forms the first half of a double bill with last year’s festival winning company Out Of Balanz and their highly acclaimed physical theatre show Next Door. £12 = two shows, the maths sounds promising.

My ineptitude? …totally fluffed by cue for the domino topple as part of the launch event. Flustered I forgot the sequence was supposed to go Atresbandes VIDEO Dominos (set off by Miguel). That is why I always try and leave the acting to other people – I’m a liability.

Atresbandes are on at mac birmingham on 30th April with their new show Locus Amoenus (if I recall correctly they won the BE Festival prize in 2012). You may as well pitch your tent in Cannon Hill Park as the following night Kindle Theatre are at the same venue with A Journey Around My Skull directed by “Stan’s Cafe’s very own” Graeme Rose.

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