You may have noticed the absence of our monthly news. We’ve decided to change the format slightly so news updates will be posted here on an irregular basis with newsletters circulated when we’ve got important announcements and exciting things to share.

Currently Northern Creative are beavering away behind the scenes writing applications and working on infrastructure. However, we will be venturing out into the big wide world to attend Devoted and Disgruntled 7 25th – 27th February.

Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Oh! One other thing - here are some fab photos of  Northern Creative performing Silos at Compass Late.

At Accidental Festival

Before we all batten down the hatches to enjoy our seasonal break I thought I’d take the opportunity to ‘take stock’ of the year for Northern Creative and to recap on our journey so far.

The year took off to a flying start with  an Open Space residency at Bradford Theatre in the Mill. Here we continued to develop our un-nerving portrayal of a dysfunctional family, Elephant in the Room, and shared it with an audience as work in progress.

Citizen Clown

Next we began rehearsing Sarah Wallis’ darkly comic monologue Citizen Clown which went on to be performed at the Carriageworks in April as part of Midget Gems. Development of Elephant in the Room continued and had another outing at New Stages 2011 before going on to headline at the Accidental Festival’s Studio Sessions which took place at The Roundhouse in May.

Summer was all about reflection, planning for our next steps and attendance at West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Transform season, the Emerge festival of new work in Leeds and at the Authoring Theatre conference at Central School of Speech and Drama.  As Autumn approached Northern Creative invited artists to participate in the early stages of research and development for their next project, Silos.

Silos Weekender

Ten artists participated in the ‘Silos Weekender’ and we enjoyed a really fun and productive weekend of exploration of the potential of stillness and silence. Silos was then selected for Compass Late, a platform for new artists with projects in their early stages of development as part of the Compass Festival of Live Art in Leeds.

Silos at Compass Late

2011 has been particularly significant as our initial year of ‘incubation’ courtesy of the University of Leeds who have supported and continue to support us in numerous ways through their Incubator scheme. We’ve begun a mentoring relationship with Forced Entertainment (in particular Cathy Naden) which continues to be transformative and invaluable. Other relationships have been forged with talented and inspirational theatre and arts people in the region and beyond. There are so many people to thank that I could not name everyone here so I extend huge appreciation and thanks to everyone who has made a contribution, large or small, to everyone who has given their time and energy, their words, their wisdom and their creativity to Northern Creative’s work this year.

Have a great seasonal break and we look forward to seeing you in 2012!

Over two long weekends in November five performers, a director and a sound designer discovered hidden depths in popular party games.  From our discoveries we constructed the first work in progress showing of  ’Silos’. 

Silos has been a first step away from a script lead process into the world of devised contemporary performance/live art for Northern Creative. Cathy Naden helped us along the way with various techniques and top tips. It was great to have her in the rehearsal room with us. 

Image by Jon Wakeman @eaststreetarts

We shared the fruits of our labor at Compass Late as part of the Compass Festival of Live Art. The audience turn out was awesome, the six companies who presented work were brilliant and the whole festival was very exciting. We’re thrilled to have been part of an event of this magnitude.

Our thanks go out to everyone involved and to everyone who came along to watch. We’d love to hear from anyone who has any feedback to share: info@nctheatre.co.uk .

Our current project in progress – ‘Silos’ –  is taking shape and will enter its next phase of development in the coming weeks.

We’re very excited to have been selected to show an extract of the work at the Compass Festival of Live Art.

We will be part of Compass Late which is a regional artists’ platform for work in its early stages. The event will take place at Leeds City Art Gallery (Munroe House) on 25th November 21.00 – 24.00.

Imagery for Silos

The showing will be followed by informal feedback. Please come along and let us know what you think! Click here for further details about Compass Late.

In other news…Northern Creative have become members of East Street Arts who are an organisation committed to the development of artists in Leeds. We’re looking forward to using their facilities and getting to know them and the other members.

We had a very encouraging response to our call for performers for the Silos workshop weekend. Thanks to everyone who sent their CV. We selected a group of artists and had a really enjoyable weekend exploring the polarities of silence and sound and movement and stillness.

We played lots of games and had fun rediscovering various childhood classics. Then we began to adapt them and to explore them in terms of generating material for performance. The results were striking when combined with certain visual and aural elements.

Saturday workshop

Thanks to the performers for their energy, openness and enthusiasm and to Sid for his outside eye, encouraging feedback and film and photography. The two pieces of work devised by the group were sensitive, subtle and engaging and the weekend ended on a high with much optimism for the future of the project.

Further exploration and development will continue over the next few months.

August has been all about preparations for Northern Creative’s next project which kicks off with a weekend workshop. Performers are invited to get involved.

by Anouk Kruithof & Japp Scheeren

‘Silos’ weekender September 2011 

‘Silos’ is an exciting new devised theatre project which invites you to explore the absurdity of isolation and the cacophonies and silences of our internal worlds.

What does aloneness sound like? What fills the gap when there’s nothing to be said and language becomes incidental? What happens when the words run out? Or there’s no one to hear them? What can we hear in the pauses and the ‘in between’ of the lines?  Join Northern Creative in this initial phase of research and development to find out.We are inviting performers for a weekend of investigative workshops.

Both serious and playful, this practical work will focus on the possibilities of performing with or without spoken language.

Untitled by Jaap Scheeren

Taking physical presence as a starting point, using structured games as a tool for generating material and experimenting with pre-recorded sounds and music, we’ll explore what emerges in the apertures of words, story or character, how to play with the un-nerving, anticipatory qualities of unspokeness, and how to inhabit in the space opened up by stillness and silence.

The weekend will culminate in a sharing of our work and our accumulated findings from the weekend will feed into the ‘Silos’ project at large. Invigorating and challenging, the workshops are an exciting opportunity to participate in an evolutionary creative process and will appeal to performers who are interested in devising and who enjoy using physicality in performance.

Northern Creative are an emerging theatre company currently being supported by the University of Leeds’ ‘Incubator’ scheme and are mentored by Forced Entertainment.

Workshops will run on 16^th, 17^thand 18^thSeptember 2011; Friday evening, 18.00 – 21.00; Saturday 10.00 – 16.00 and Sunday 10.00 – 16.00. Attendance is required at all three sessions. The workshops will take place on campus at the University of Leeds.

For further information please contact Joanne on jlh@nctheatre.co.uk.

To register your interest, please send CV to info@nctheatre.co.uk  by 9^thSeptember 2011(places are limited).

We enjoyed a brief outing to the Authoring Theatre conference at Central School of Speech and Drama earlier this month where we found out about shifts and changes in landscape of theatre and performance. Then most of July’s activity has been focused on meetings of one kind of another including de-briefs following Elephant in the Room.

Northern Creative are part of a scheme called ‘Incubator’ which is run by the University of Leeds to help establish emerging theatre companies in the region. One of the features of the scheme is mentoring and Northern Creative are very excited to be working with Cathy Naden and Eileen Evans from Forced Entertainment on this basis.

Preparations are underway for the next Northern Creative project which will begin with a series of workshops in September. Details will be released shortly.

Enjoy your summer holidays!