Firebird Theatre: Company update, May 2016

Since we received the funding from the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts programme, we have been working with Claire Williamson to start collecting our stories and experiences. There is a lot of material from these writing sessions and we now have the task of shaping it into a new piece of theatre. We will be working with different people during the next stage of the process; we have had a workshop with Fionn Gill and hope to do more work with Fionn. We are also working with Kathryn Hunter and Jack Drewry over the next few weeks.

Fionn working with Firebird artists

We are now meeting with other practitioners and over the next few weeks, we will be able to confirm the other members of the team who will work with us on Firebird is 25, as well as other guest artists.

In April we went to MAYK’s Mayfest Launch, which we really enjoyed. We saw Candoco’s Counteracts at Bristol Old Vic and some people took part in the workshop they did afterwards.

We met Jamie Beddard and Claire Hodgson from Diverse City, they will be bringing their company, Extraordinary Bodies, to Bristol in September and are inviting us to get involved and maybe showcase some of our new work, which will be very exciting.

Finally, we need to move out of Bristol Old Vic at the end of May because of the major renovations and building works that will be happening in the theatre. Bristol Old Vic has offered us a huge amount of support over the years, in particular a space for us to meet and rehearse once a week. We have so appreciated this support and the help they are giving us now to try to find an alternative venue. Firebird will remain an Associate Company and  Bristol Old Vic will continue to offer support whenever they can.

If anyone knows of anywhere that may be suitable for Firebird to meet and rehearse, please contact us, we would love to hear from you.

We need a physically accessible venue that is not difficult to get to and is on a main bus route. Ideally, we would like to meet every Monday for a minimum of 5 hours in the daytime; we would like somewhere that is consistently available to us all year round.

As soon as we know where we’ll be meeting and rehearsing and we have settled in then we will let you know.

This last bit of news makes our performance on the 30^th even more important to us all; a great way of bidding farewell to Bristol Old Vic for a while until they re open in 2018!