The Fabularium - Part 2 - October Plenty

October Plenty in London

The next phase was to take the show to London. You may remember in the past I've talked about the October Plenty festival with the Lions part theatre company, which Gareth was involved with and I went along to last time I was working in London. Well for October 2014 we were part of the festivities, which was very exciting.

Our play was interspersed with a couple of other classic folk tales performed by other actors of the Lions part.

2 chickens and a cockerel
 in rehearsal for one of the folk tales!

You can see from my last October Plenty post some of the different things that are involved with the festival but to give you a quick run down of the performance for us; we started with the procession at The Globe theatre where some fantastic performers sang excerpts from The Tempest. From there we processed to Borough Market where there were lots of different activities; fun and games, and food were going on there throughout the day, and at 2pm it was time for us to perform! The performance went really well. The performance space presents it's own challenges as it is underneath London Bridge railway. It is also a large space and of course busy so the sound will only reach so far into the audience, but that said it went really well and the audience seemed to really enjoy it.

In procession

Prior to the festival we had lots of rehearsal, and this was down in London again with Sonia Ritter giving us direction. This was an intense but fruitful time. We went through each scene in very close detail, every movement evaluated, every line purposed. It is tiring to work this way as it takes a lot of concentration and decision making, but it does mean that every action is thought out, and every moment pushed to it's full potential. There were also other things to prepare for the festivities, from drilling conkers, to learning traditional dance, the days were long but richly varied and there was a great team spirit.

Learning the John Barleycorn dance

Beautiful mask

Actress Rosie tries on one of
 'the goddess's' (from the opera excerpt) head dresses.