Bristol residency

I had the pleasure to be chosen to be a fellow at New Horizons Leadership Project (https://www.newhorizonsleadership.eu/) and to be partneres with Rachel Clare from Crying Out Loud as an expert. She is based in London, but her organisation works in Bristol and the Solent area too and also internationally as a production company for circus performances. As part of the NHLP project I had the opportunity to spend 3 weeks in the UK shadowing Rachel. We decided that apart from sitting in on her zoom calls and live meetings with the artists who’s work she is producing we’ll be also trying to find time for a short residency and more practical collaborations with the local circus community.

So she organized several meetings for me with the Bristol and London circus community: I visited training spaces, circus schools, met artists, festival organizers and producers in January on my first visit to the UK. The leader of the Masters course on Circus Directing at Circomedia, Jonathan Priest found the proposition of InThisTogethet inspiring and invited us to do a work in progress presentation in February and to hold a workshop for the students of the MA course showing and sharing our process.

So we put together a pretty intense 10 day excursion to Bristol for February 2024:

We had one work in progress presentation at Circomedia with InThistogether. Held one icebreaker event for the artists of UK’s rural touring project: Around And About 2. I gave an aerialhoop workshop to the BA students of Circomedia, we held a 2 part partner acrobatic workshop at the trainingspace Unit 15 and also spent 4 days on residency at Unit 15. And most importantly we had 10 days focused on our work in a different setting.

It was a important experience, as we put out our work infront of a different culture, a different community. We’ve learned that people care, people enjoy and that you can trust a group of random strangers even with your life…. in a controlled environement, in a nice and friendly environement. So our main conclusion was that we have a show already: a nice and a little shallow one. So wedecided that we will try to dive deeper in the upcoming month.