This is the first blog about the process of making The Future for Beginners. We’re on quite a journey over the next few months – quite literally – so we’ll aim to keep you posted about how it’s going from different members of the team. The journey takes us from the Wales Millennium Centre this July to Summerhall and the Edinburgh Festival throughout August and then a tour of Wales in the Autumn.
And we’ll be travelling (I’ll drop this metaphor now!) with an amazing team of practitioners – as usual when working with liveartshow I always feel really excited by the diverse range of talents in the room. So joining the team (along with liveartshow’s writer Alan Harris and composer Harry Blake) are two wonderful performers – actor (and ukulele virtuoso) Matthew Bulgo and opera singer Jenny Adams. We initially started to develop the piece with Matt in 2011 for the WMC’s Inkling project and I worked with Jenny on last year’s WNO production of Paul Bunyan. We’re really excited to be working again with designer Will Holt and video design associate Adam Young both of whom designed liveartshow’s first shows Manga Sister and Rhinegold. And it’s great to be working with choreographer Kylie Ann Smith (from the awesome Kitsch n Sync) and lighting designer Isobel Howe – both for the first time. Overseeing everything is our immense producer Cara McAleese (from Royal Opera House towers!) and technical stage manager Kevin Smith.
I imagine there will be blogs from all of them at some stage.
We’ve already completed our first week of rehearsals a couple of weeks ago (we’ve been taking short break whilst Matthew is away doing a show in Berlin) so I’ll blog about that shortly and we’re currently revving up ready for further rehearsals at the WMC next week. Much more to follow!