Wow, it’s been half a year since we kicked Chronic Insanity off with our inaugural show and it’s been a busy six months.
Since September we’ve staged eight runs of seven different productions, all in different venues in and around Nottingham. We’ve worked with over 30 creatives performed to over 180 people and to audiences who don’t identify as traditional theatre goers 86% of the time. We’ve done shows outside and underground, in established theatres and places that have never had performances before. We’ve revived preexisting shows and written and devised new productions. We’ve had traditional stagings, immersive and interactive shows, and even some VR focused shows as well. And at the end of our first two seasons we have performed with many Nottingham institutions; The National Justice Museum, Broadway Cinema, The Nottingham Playhouse. We’ve also managed to make work sustainably and recorded all our shows in immersive video formats, as well as creating work of a high quality and quantity.
How?
Well the truth is that we’re lying. Hardly any of this is true and what is true is highly inflated to make it seem more important than it is.
…
Nah, we’re just joking, but can you imagine?
A lot of people would have read that and gone “I knew it!”. We know this because, since the start of this project, we’ve known people haven’t quite believed that we could do it. That hasn’t mattered. Their underestimation hasn’t slowed us down and we have found support in places we never imagined. Look how much we’ve created! We’re incredibly proud of where we are and where we’re going.
How did we do it though?
Well. We’d say a lot of planning - a lot - and a lot of hard work, and an even more incredible amount of generosity from all the people we have worked with on productions. Thank you to venues taking a chance on a new company, to performers donating their time and trusting us to use it wisely, and to anyone who saw anything we did at any stage and gave us feedback. Thank you everyone that has helped us along the way. Also, we did take most of December off.
Over the next few months we’ll start putting out blog posts about the creation of each of our previous productions. Hopefully, if people want to read them to see the trials and tribulations of staging DIY Fringe theatre at a professional level they will find our posts and be able to learn from our successes and mistakes. We’ll also be writing posts about our upcoming shows, and throwing in a few more articles, thoughts and essays here and there for everyone to enjoy if they want to.
We have some serious plans on the horizon, more scratch nights for Nottingham creatives, perhaps a few workshops, some immersive exhibitions of previous work of ours, and a whole load of shows. Six upcoming shows in Nottingham before the end of August (at least) as well as performances of shows at the VAULT, Brighton Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe festivals.
This will be achieved with a very generous grant from Arts Council England, allowing us to properly pay all the creatives involved in our shows for the next six months, as well as R&D some new performance technologies and more effectively market the productions so we can reach new audiences and get people to hear about the work we’re doing.
For now, get your tickets for Glitch at VAULT Festival here if you’re in London on March 7th-8th or 14th-15th. The show is not only brilliant and touching, but we’ve put a lot of work into making it as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, including ensuring every performance is relaxed and captioned.
A lot of people thought what we wanted to do would be impossible.
Maybe the impossible doesn’t have to be.
All the best,
Nat Henderson and Joe Strickland
Artistic Directors of Chronic Insanity