That's a wrap for now on Ways of Knowing! 🕳️🕳️🕳️
Such a delight to finally perform the show on home turf, 2.5 years since we premiered! Love you always, Bristol. Lovely show in Exeter as well with a post show talk with Caitlin Kight from Exeter Uni, in which we talked interdisciplinarity, experimentation, prediction and prophecy.
Thanks as ever to tech icon and blue-orange colour co-ordinator @hsfp , @hannsullivaan for transporting set in the SulliVan, @lk_reed for stepping in to op our Bristol shows, @shrine_crimes for the smoke machine assist and to Katy and Matthew at the Phoenix and Wardrobe for having us.
Till next time! 🖤
🕳️ WAYS OF KNOWING 🕳️
Uncovering a mysterious series of visions and omens, Ways of Knowing is a dance-theatre work which investigates the tools we use to predict and prophesy the future, from early meteorological devices to corporate trend forecasting and divination. Amidst an intricate system of set and improvised choreography, found text and visceral sound design, award-winning artists Emergency Chorus wield both science and magic to reckon with our precarious present and enter into the unknown.
📆 20th April
⏰ 7:30pm
📍Exeter Phoenix @exeterphoenix
📆 21st-23rd April
⏰ 7:30pm
📍Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol @thewardrobetheatre
Tickets in bio!
Right, here's the food round up post from Vietnam. I actually knew very little about Vietnamese food beyond phở, bánh mì and bún chả before arriving. Did the research as we went and ate as broadly as possible, eating very few dishes more than once, but after two and a half weeks I still feel like we only scratched the surface. The S-tier highlights:
1-3: Cơm hến in Huế: baby basket clams and room temperature rice with peanuts, pork rind, chilli oil, unripe mango, starfruit and other bits, and a bowl of clam broth on the side. Also, royal cakes made with tapioca and rice flour - the bánh bèo soft and yielding, with pork floss and sweet fish sauce, and the bánh bột lọc chewy and gelatinous, containing a dried shrimp and nugget of pork belly, with a saltier, spicier fish sauce. This was my favourite meal, by a fine but distinct margin. Probably the cheapest too - £6 between 4, and that's including two drinks each!
4-5: Bánh cuốn for breakfast in Hanoi - supple rolled fresh rice sheets with minced pork and wood ear mushroom, and dipping bowls with various grilled meats and sausage. Clean and easy to eat - particularly good with an egg rolled up in the rice sheet. An elite breakfast.
6: Sizzling, chewy lemongrass goat in Phong Nha, rolled up in rice sheets with pineapple, herbs and rice. Not pictured: deep fried crabs with wild betel leaf, iirc (perfect beer snack).
7: Bún chả in Hanoi - the sausage wrapped in wild betel leaf here was particularly good, and the spring rolls the best of the trip.
8: I am in sugarcane juice withdrawal. Grassy, heavenly nectar. This example was a cut above the rest - she chucked a calamansi into the juicer with every couple of stalks - a touch more than seemed to be standard amongst sugarcane vendors, and I found this made for better balance.
9: Streetside BBQ in Hoi An. Herbs and meat. Particularly good dipping sauce, though I have no clue what was in it.
10: Cháo nghêu in Hoi An. Homely clam porridge, mild and rounded. A heavy slick of fried shallot oil and flecks of black pepper providing toasty fragrance.
(Continued in comments)
We had a blast at @cambridgejunction with Ways of Knowing. Big thanks to Matt, Hendrix and Sophie from CJ, and to Maddy Costa for hosting a Theatre Club after the show. Wizard @hsfp on tech and @natnorland from afar with the sick sound rework.
Next stops:
EXETER: 20 April @exeterphoenix
BRISTOL: 21-23 April @thewardrobetheatre
See you there?
A Nov-Dec photo dump that's been languishing in drafts
- winning secret Santa gift
- neighbourhood geometry
- Owen's farewell gig
- words of wisdom
- the Adam Byatt parsnips
- unannounced special guest
- gamelan
- little lamb, who made thee?
- Boxing Day walk
- Miss Steak
- Kieran's masterwork - the Hamhead
Cave content - Thiên đường, or 'Paradise' cave, about 350 million years old and only discovered in 2005.
Aside from being shockingly beautiful, what's most bizarre about it is how the space feels almost intentionally mapped, formations spaced out thoughtfully for the best viewing experience, as if an exhibition of contemporary sculpture (and with the same distancing feeling of being able to look but not touch) - but all this with no artist, architect or curator, having happened completely apart from human experience. We kept interpreting the formations - 'look, there's a hut/snail/temple/wig/termite/oyster mushroom/little dude/etc' - at the same time as knowing that they have no relationship to any of those things - being before those things, or unseen by those things. It's really the most alien place I've ever been.
I enjoyed a very special meal last week at @samrubsamrubthai in Bangkok. Chef Prin and team present a new menu every two months, drawing from different regional Thai cuisines and produce, with Jan-Feb's menu taking inspiration from the Northern provinces of Phichit, Phitsanulok and Uttaradit.
The dishes honour tradition at the same time as pursuing their own refined aesthetic sensibility. I really like the 2-month menu change format: it of course means the restaurant is never in danger of getting stagnant, but also that the dishes are necessarily deeply researched and developed, and the sequencing and balance of the menu as a whole is deft and coherent (sometimes 'daily-changing menu' is just code for 'rushed and ill-thought out'). It must be a hell of a lot of work.
You just feel this is a restaurant with tons of personality, doing things their own way - and a flawlessly choreographed service, beautiful to watch from the counter seating. I loved it. (Worth noting one should definitely go very hungry, or else bring a stretcher to be carried out on).
Ok, in order:
1. Out of chronology dessert ingredients
2. Snack - fermented rice cracker
3. Fried lotus seeds and Manila tamarind, with rock salt. Very simple, just letting the natural flavour of the seeds come through. The Manila tamarind is nutty and starchy, not at all like regular tamarind.
4. Cocktail of pineapple liqueur, salted plum wine, calamansi and something else that I forget. The cocktail menu is also rewritten every 2 months.
5. Then a sequence of three rice rolls, starting with a fresh one filled with a five-spice marinated and smoked quail's egg, fried galangal on top, and tart yellow chilli nahm jim. Maybe my favourite bite of the meal. Melty soft textures, precise contrast between mellow and bright.
6. A chewier rice paper roll filled with toothsome squid and a sweet peanut filling (texturally and flavour wise a lot like saku sai moo). Accent of makrut lime zest and fried shallots on top.
7. A warm lobster rice roll, with the tomalley stir fried with coconut milk, coriander root, pepper etc. Fried garlic, chilli oil. Warm, fatty, welcoming flavours.
(cont. in comments)
New Year’s Eve party Cube style - a Jools Holland/Hootenanny themed joint, complete with:
- conga line procession up the hill with recorders to see the fireworks at midnight
- the Jewel of Holland (aperol for orange, gin for Dutch, cinnamon syrup for speculoos, prosecco for NYE), worked up by @richhowthough
- drunk battery powered yodelling nanny goat courtesy of @rosa_e_eaton
- educational lecture on the connection between Jools and the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet courtesy of @natnorland
- bandeoke incl. infinite 4-chord-song segment featuring house band @finn.hodgson@leofield.work and Michael
- 2 second left hand boogie woogie piano loop at brain curdling volume piped into the toilets all night
- appearances from the Clock Person (@mossy_margins ), Flavor Flav (@mr_hopkinson ) and multiple Joolses
- one real celebrity musical act in the form of Wendy Miasma @miasma.corp
- reading of Jools’s noise complaint diary regarding the wedding venue neighbouring his Kent mansion from @brendacallistheatre
- @kieran.woods29 reviving the historical custom of ‘sin-eating’ off of a corpse (Jools Holland) to absolve the dead of their sins (i.e. an excuse for him sample three brands of dog food in front of a paying audience)
Last year the Cube had everyone hand in all time-keeping devices at the door. This year there was as much time-keeping (accurate and otherwise) as possible - many chants of TIME! TIME! TIME! in respect of the Clock-Person. Typically chaotic and collaborative. High spirits behind the bar and the DJ decks. Silver tinsel in the tree at sunrise.
Proper pics by the artful @tomyblueart
Lost all my photos after I broke my phone. Not super sad about it. In the three weeks since getting a new phone I have mostly taken pictures of performance/work things. Jumbled up here we have:
New R&D on Something In Your Voice with @apollohelo@loreaburge@hannahparshons and @yasclarke
The Interval takeover (pictured: screening Sweetener and performing with @jo_hellier and @hannsullivaan )
Hosting Past Works Recycling Plant with @nameddeborah and the students of Bristol School of Acting, plus a past works workshop at Exeter Northcott
delicious shows at Transform and Kunsty festivals
plus a trip to the pumpkin patch, and some great menu formatting
