gOoD mOrNiNG (or afternoon or evening or night)
I hope you’re all as well and happy as you’d like to be over this spring equinox/easter weekend/dual bank holiday. I’ve missed you all.
I’m ranting to you today about space. Here’s a quick catch up for any of you who are unfamiliar with our journey occupying Nottingham spaces for our monthly open mic/scratch night Allsorts. Allsorts has had 4 homes in it’s brief 1.5 years of life and we’re currently homeless. And we’re working out how not to be, short of inviting you all to our living rooms once a month, which would be cosy but a) impractical and b) going against my rule of dividing living space from working space (my wfh office doesn’t count ok it’s the exception and you wouldn’t all fit in there anyway)
So. Below is the potted history of Allsorts So Far, the longer catch up, the tea, the info on hOW we got these spaces as free as possible (I know some of you, looking at you club wormholers, might find this interesting if you ever need to look for space again, but we also thought it’d be useful for anyone else looking to start up anything like this.) And also Nat wanted to write a blog with a liberal use of parentheses (again).
So, March 2022 - we started, as fresh as a post-pandemic daisy can be, with a yearning to be in rooms with people and try some stuff out™ without the pressure of being paid to present fully formed things or the expectation from a paying audience for you to present fully formed things.
As fruitful as the pandemic had been for us (Joe), digital spaces are only as creative and free as their platforms and users allow. In fairness this is like all spaces, we’re just all a lot more familiar with physical ones, us being physical beings and all. So we hunted down the available spaces within Nottingham City Centre, to put on some kind of scratch night that was less insular and up-itself and more open friendly to non-theatre-ers. Joe nosied around for a couple of months and we found a friendly nationwide chain of record shop-cum-gig-venue, calculated we could easily throw music into the brief and contorted ourselves into a gig theatre open mic format. And so, we began with…
Space 1: Rough Trade
Photo: Ben Macpherson and band (Sam Marshall and Doug Deans) performing a noir monologue about the children's TV show Come Outside
Price of Hire: free/ £150-£250 an event
Covers: space w/raised stage, bar staff, technical, back line (drum kit, amps, mics etc), occasional doorman
It was strange because initially, it was free! Then, we realised that they were hoping to make money back on bar sales as our audience grew, which they didn’t quite do at a rate or number that they hoped for, so they wanted to start charging us. Their music events are usually much more well attended if it’s for a band or an album signing or a club night like GladRags and they very much didn’t adjust their expectations for a smaller cosier cabaret-esque theatre event. They had more bands that wanted to tour and we took up 1 whole night each month that could be making them money instead (I know). They were very kind about it, offered to write us a glowing recommendation to other venues if we needed it but lmao COMMUNICATION folks, sadly very important! Could’ve done with that from the start.
Price of entry: Pay What You Decide (PWYD) with a recc. of between free and £10. However, we never checked tickets, mainly free tickets were popular and in fairness, the bar was well priced and the cozzie livs was just beginning - take the free stuff when you can.
Range of Acts: lots of music, understandable. Lots of white boys with acoustic guitars; less understandable but lockdown was hard for everyone. Poetry and onstage collaboration with live music in the background (<3). Gig theatre pieces, strange experiments reading people’s fortunes via The Simpson’s Top Trumps, Quinn’s incredible analogue ink projections creating swirling colourful spotlights; the works.
Highest audience number: 21(?)
Honestly can’t remember. I’m a terrible 21st century labourer, I forgot to do the most important thing which is to collect data on people so you can tailor your service to them !! But I reckon we started to hit the late teens/early 20s if you include that night where those random photography boys from Trent Uni wandered in and were like ‘damn COOl can we write you guys up’. Plus everyone wanted to finally play their songs they’d written in lockdown, we showed off a couple of our things coming up (24,23,22 before its run at Omnibus theatre in London, Summer of 2022) and Nat would have one too many San Pelligrino’s and bitch about dating apps; it was fun for all the family.
Time: 4 sessions (once a month March to June 2022)
Sales report: £10 - bless you to the person who bought a full priced ticket <3
Alas, our time with Rough Trade had to come to an end, given the above financial issue. Considering we weren’t making money doing it or paying any artist to do so, 250 squids is a little steep to put on a fun evening of entertainment so we relocated to…
Space 2: The Chapel, above The Angel Microbrewery
Photo: The Crone (Liam Webber), on stage with a volunteer who may not have known what they got themselves in for. Lighting by Quinn Greytryx
Price of hire: free/£100 an event
Covers: space w/very raised stage, technician included (!) occasional open upstairs bar
And then they started charging us, as electric and heating prices were going up
(cOZZIE liVs grrrr). We paid that once and then moved on because. Again. That’s £££.
Price of entry - PWYD without ticket checking, free tickets available and surprisingly, the most popular choice
Range of Acts: We started to branch out. Samara (the girldemon from the ring) made her first entrance, more comedy started to work it’s way in, we had people trying out new scripts they’d written with willing participants demonstrating, clowning and improv and exhibiting of previous work; lots of lovely stuff.
Highest audience number: 12?
Unsure! We definitely got more members of the public turning up who were in the pub and wondered what was going on upstairs. Never saw them again so who knows if they liked it. I can only hope that they were so floored when I took my sock off to make a puppet and sang the execution alphabet, that they were stunned into silence and had to go home and look all the methods up online.
Good vibes, not as cosy as Rough Trade. Angel is much bigger, higher ceiling, higher stage, feels a lot more intimidating as an audience member. Also, it gets fuckin freezing in there in winter and I was not keen to revisit Polly’s initial outing into the frozen tundra of a Midlands-room-above-a-pub.
Time: 3 sessions (July, Sept, Oct - we had August off because Edinburgh Fringe and then we showed 52 Souls off to y’all in September)
We paid for the final session and moved on to wherever would have us next.
Turns out, Joe was already anticipating hiring a space for something and thought, as Joe is want to do, to kill 2 birds with one stone, bringing us to…
Sales report: £100.00 - Ah well, we broke even at Edinburgh, we could handle it
Space 3: Surface Gallery
Photo: Samara (Sarah Todino) and Jerome (Joe Strickland) performing as the first incarnation of the Spooky Band, with lighting by Quinn Greytryx.
See No Hear No Speak No Evil was an exhibition of 3 of Chronic’s digital immersive experiences.
Criminal Intent - An immersive audio installation where a music festival is raided by the police
PVC - A virtual reality ambush - A VR experience where a dystopian drug deal goes comedically wrong
Interdimensional Phishing Scam - An interactive audio app where you talk to operators from a series of call centres in alternate universes trying to find out more about a PPI claim
We were on for approximately a week. And seeing as that was November, we squeezed in an Allsorts whilst we were there as a sort of ‘exhibition opening night’
Price of hire: this was tacked into exhibition hire fee - it was about £450 for 2 weeks. Roughly.
For the top floor of a mostly empty gallery space, with some chairs
Price of entry: PWYD without ticket checking, free tickets available and the most popular choice.
Range of Acts:
More stand up and alternative comedy squeezing in, random singing started to work it’s way into the open mic/free reign sections (personally I think everyone is inspired by Holly’s voice: incredible), the spooky band’s debut
Highest audience number: 18?
Unsure - two people left after the first couple of acts, I think they were very confused. Everyone froze their tits off because single pane windows do not constitute adequate insulation. But the bar was obscenely cheap, the staff had a good time, personally think that’s always a good indicator of good vibes
Time: 1 session
Sales report: No idea, no such thing exists for this night
Surface Gallery was a stop gap, we all knew that. We’d been talking to Nonsuch about coming on board as associate artists so without further ado…
Space 4: Nonsuch Studios
Photo: Our wonderful compere Nat Henderson hosting one of our events at Nonsuch Studios, photo by Kate Spencer
Price of hire: FREE because we were associate artists, minus VAT and credit charges
Nonsuch would take everything made on the bar, we’d take everything in ticket sales. Pretty sweet deal.
Price of entry: PWYD, free tickets available
Range of Acts:
So many. Christmas themed nonsense, several drag debuts, strange performance art, incredible singers demonstrating their own songwriting, storytellers, clowns, occasional improvisers, exhibits, alternative comedy mimes, amateur dramatists, baby stand up comics - Allsorts it was named and Allsorts was given.
Highest audience number: 57?
We started to attract a little more attention from people who’d just heard of us as an open mic and wanted to try something out, which meant their friends would also book tickets to see them perform. Tastes began to clash on a couple of occasions and some audience members were definitely unaccustomed to the laissez faire nature of the event as unpolished and a space to try things, rather than a space to be judged on them. I’ve read recently about the dearth of locality as partially responsible for the loneliness epidemic/pandemic across the western world. Kurt Vonnegut (I know) when writing about this, pointed the finger of blame to massification of media, individuals fixating on the same national level celebrities as everyone else, abandoning their locality of arts, music, theatre, athletics, etc. The Twitter thread following was a fascinating little dive into the social effect upon performance (https://twitter.com/girlziplocked/status/1773456107672863153). That people behave differently in front of a small known few rather than a ‘large faceless crowd’. I know I perform differently, with whatever nonsense I’m spilling into a microphone, if there’s a majority of people there that I at least know the name of. I was happy for us to grow though - we had done already anyway, it was nice to bring more into the fold.
Time: 12 sessions
Sales report:
December 2022 - £50.50
Jan 2023 - £39.5
Feb - £63.5
March - £56.83 (1 year anniversary)
April - £62.5
May - £42.42
Jun - £45.67
Jul - £17.06
None for August (Fringe again)
Sep - £38.25
Oct - £15.84
Nov - £7.18
Dec - £22.36
All in all, pretty solid considering we didn’t do a huge amount of advertising.
Time: 1 year :’( Too soon
I’m still very sad about the hole left behind in Nottingham’s scene after these guys had to move out. I very much hope they can come back because Jesus Christ there’s no one else who’s central and does it like them. Nonsuch as a company is still active, they’re currently based at Broadway Cinema but still. I miss the times we had in that space; I miss it dearly and I believe others do too.
What now?
We’re… still looking! We’re still talking to people, places & things - we’ve been turned down by places and we’ve turned down places.
If anyone’s got any ideas, please do let us know. DM us at Chronic Insanity theatre on instagram because, let’s be honest, its kind of replaced twitter rn (I refuse to call it X, it will deadname that app as long as I please, because Elon can go sit on a cactus). Also, sign up to our newsletter to keep in the loop about when Allsorts starts back up again!
Now signing off, it was lovely to rant at you all - I hope to see you soon at an Allsorts 2.0 xx