Hello!
We’re trying to raise some money to get our show, Dreamsick, up to the Edinburgh fringe. While it’s an invaluable place to showcase work, Edinburgh is a crazy expensive festival to play at, especially with short term rents just going up and up. So we really need your help to make it up there.
Any help at all is appreciated! Sterling based of course, but just sharing the crowdfunder and spreading the word would be a huge help too.
Why do we want to get to Edinburgh?
A few reasons! Edinburgh is the UK’s bigest arts festival, and a really good place to get work seen, both by new audiences but also crucially by programmers and reviewers, which is really important to us as early career makers. This is how we build relationships with new venues, and expand our network of support into the coming years.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, or at least in the aftermath of any social acknowledgement that there is a pandemic, we feel there’s a need to try and regain momentum and reestablish our presence on the … scene. Developing Dreamsick during the pandemic required a huge amount of graft, as well as a generous grant from the Mead Foundation – but in order to make that work worthwhile, we need to jump at this chance to find new audiences.
We want people to see the show, because we think it’s an important piece of work in the current moment. It tackles the issue of gender identity in a way that is soft and introspective, as well as tangling it up with anxieties about the future in interesting ways.
What actually is the show?
Dreamsick is a solo performance. There’s a bit of dance in it, and quite a bit of music, and quite a lot of storytelling. It’s quite gentle and quite sad.
This is probably our best attempt to sum up the show:
An architect in San Francisco draws portraits of people as buildings, Elon Musk plans his colony on Mars, and a woman, walking her dog, encounters an angel.
With lyrical storytelling, fragile image-making and meticulous sound, Dreamsick is a nocturne of memories, dreams and visions. A solo performance about the losing of hope, the architecture of gender, the act of transformation, the construction of the future.
Which I think takes in most of it.
What will the money go towards?
Here’s a list!
- Accommodation
- Travel and set transportation
- Marketing
- Posters and Print
- Rights for Music
- Technicians and operators
- Sourcing some fresh props and set pieces
These are all pretty unavoidable we think – we need somwhere to live while we’re there, we need to get up there somehow, we need to get people to come to the show, and we need the show to be operational when they do come.
Who are we?
Dreamsick is being put on by a team of 2:
Nat Norland is a writer, performer and composer. They have shown work at venues including The Space, The Wickham Theatre, The Warwick Arts Centre, CLF Peckham, The Wardrobe, and Camden People’s Theatre. They have written music for Here Comes the Sun by Joseph Morgan Schofield at CPT, and Days– And Counting, an online exhibition for OH! Open House in Singapore. They have had poetry published or exhibited by The Poetry Society, The Buxton Festival, and Wildfire Words. They are an associate artist of Emergency Chorus. They’re @natnorland on twitter.
Ben Kulvichit is a director and performance maker, and co-Artistic Director of Emergency Chorus, who were named one of the five best young theatre companies in the UK by The Guardian in 2018. He has developed and shown work at and with organisations including New Diorama, Bristol Old Vic, Cambridge Junction, Warwick Arts Centre, VAULT Festival, HOME, Third Angel and Sheffield Theatres. As a freelance performer, dramaturg and lighting designer he has collaborated with artists including YESYESNONO, Nathan Ellis, Ava Wong Davies and Jack Bradfield (Poltergeist Theatre). He also works as a critical writer and as National Reviews Editor for Exeunt Magazine. He’s @B_kulvichit on twitter.