fan mail

here's a good example of the cute stuff we are getting ...

Hey Luke and Christy,

I loved your show yesterday. It was awesome and really funny!!! Thankyou for coming all the way to Colac. You are both really talentedand I loved all the acrobatic skills you used in the show!!! You also played your characters well and it was one of the best plays EVER!!!!!!Once again THANKYOU so much for coming and showing us everything!!!!

Rosebud

Christy and Luke have a workshop to teach in the morning so I take a walk along the beach and out to the pier and just make it back to the hotel before the rain.

Rosebud Performing Arts Centre. A six pm show which has all the magic of evening, its getting dark and some of these children are up past their bedtime. A little line of adults in the front row have a gorgeous time laughing at all the little jokes. There's something great about kids getting to see their parents having that kind of fun and the show enters an different realm of shared amusement. A dad with an eight year old and a ten year old boy are practically rolling on the floor in the back row, rocking from side to side, clutching their mouths and each other's arms.

Within an hour of us leaving Rosebud a woman has written us an enthusiastic email to say thank you.

It feels a little like the end of a tour but it's not quite. Home for a few days before going to Altona.

grampians in the evening

Beginning the long drive to Wodonga. From Casterton its eight hours. We leave at 4pm and have to be in the theatre at 7am. The evening light and then radiolab into the night make everything ok.

Casterton

Haley from Glenelg again, focussing lights on the Caasterton town hall stage. There aren't enough chairs and we have to scrounge more at the last minute. One little row of seniors who have been bussed here sit almost at the back, their set grey curls standing out a little from the crowd of red school uniform tops. One comes up to Christy at the end to tell her how strong she is. The children are like a football crowd. The tricks and slapstick and interractive moments are cheered and clapped and yelled. It's fun and hilarious and almost overwhealming.

We pack up in record time. Gotta drive to Wodonga tonight

Heyward

It's icy cold and raining but the hall is pretty and a couple of hundred children are on their way

Hayley, the tech from Glenelg shire, and I set up our desk

Luke and Christy build the set on stage


and two hundred children roar their way through the show.

I have the most disasterous fumble-fingered time on sound but no-one seems to notice. The kids ask to learn the Ari handshake at the end. A bunch of them are waiting for the bus and the question and answer time gets extended. They are full of things they want to know and when the bus arrives we don't want them to leave. Feels like an important part of what we do.

shep to colac

Breakfast back at Fryers where the café staff get even lovelier. We talk Bubblewrap. The letters. If we were going to edit them, how would they? What is the purpose of each letter? The monkey letter is about connection – it’s the moment the two characters first connect. But then Christy says something else, she says it’s like a message to the adults in the audience, to trust us, we’re making something for them as well.

Luke drives us to Colac. Straight through Melbourne and out the other side. It’s funny to see the city and get on the ring road and be so close to home but not stopping. Christy dj’s an amazing retrospective set on her i-phone. Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, the Cranberries

I have this sense of Victoria, tangling and rolling out around us. The Murray, Campaspie, Goulbourn, Loddon. The left over flood damage, the irrigation ditches, the land sales on the edge of the city. I forgot that a regional tour would give me a bigger sense of the country I live in.

Old postcard of Lake Colac. Thanks Wikipedia

mother's day

Show two is even smaller but just as sweet. A bunch of adults laughing more than the children and Luke turns one of the letters into a mother’s day letter.

After the show we chat to Steve the Program Manager who says they were trying an experiment. Kids’ shows on the weekend. They don’t usually do it. They either program kids’ shows for a school holiday audiences or weekdays for schools. During term-time weekends, everyone’s already at sport. He says he won’t do it that way again. He loved the show and wants to have us back next year. Gold stars for us.

Steve tells us to check out the art gallery so we do before we leave and I have a moment in front of a sculpture. Like being in the presence of death. Or life. I am made silent. Here is a photo. It gives you something like the sculpture.

We wander around Shep. Find the fryers café and drink coffee and talk touring. All the ways we could be lining up tours, for Bubblewrap again and for Kapow. How to get paid to administer it - Christy wants an office and a big map. We talk funding applications, caravan parks, if we want to do Adelaide Fringe next year and what venue would work for us if we did. We all agree that the good thing about doing Adelaide is seeing a whole bunch of shows and getting to make friends with all the folk making them. The café staff pump up Neil Young real loud for clean up time and we laugh when they suddenly realise we are still here and apologise

Come back to the hotel and make an exhaustive list of all the funding we could possibly apply for this year. Work until 10:30 at night on our Showcase Victoria pitch.

Shepparton

The road less travelled

Somewhere between Swan Hill and Shep, we realise that the road we want to take is closed. Luke is pretty keen to take this road but in the end we take a long way round following the Melways, the vic roads website and our noses.

At the Shep performing arts centre get greeted with the info that it’s an eight-hundred-and fifty seat theatre and they’ve only sold 90 tix. Damn. It’s the first venue this has happened.

The tech team are young, everyone is under 25 and its fun having a venue managed by them.

Justie! - the 18 year old trainee who operated lights with me.

I am still learning the light plotting job and for the first show there is a light which casts a shadow on Luke’s face for a bunch of the significant moments of the show. It makes me feel bad each time he pops his head up into the shadow. The good thing about doing two shows in the same venue is we have the chance to fix it for the second show. I’ve got a list called ‘things to tech every single time’ and I keep adding to it.

We get some walk ups, and the audience are all ushered in to fill up from the front. They are real sweet and interactive. Making up games to play with Luke each time, joining in with his throat clearing cough, so that the show goes on for an extra 5 minutes because the game is so fun and keeps getting repeated.

Its real fun not to have to bump out, but to come back to the hotel at 3 in the afternoon and have baths and loll around.

the second best set ever

Drove to Swan Hill, beating the Melbourne afternoon rush hour. Silence. Sunset. My Touch of Country Melancholy playlist singing “Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” and “In my mind I’m gone to Carolina.” Checked in to the hotel by 7:30 pm and walked the streets of Swan Hill, finding the river and the safeway in the darkness.

Awkward family fish photo. Hello Swan Hill

Started bump in at 7am at the Swan Hill Town Hall, impressing the venue crew as usual with Luke and Christy’s ability to carry the whole set into the theatre with only two loads. Once we were all in and had programmed the lights, Tim, the techie, said “This is the second best set I’ve ever seen.” We laughed and had to ask who the best was.

“Play school,” was his firm reply.

40 minutes before the show I realised that Die Roten Punkte had been there the night before as part of comedy roadshow.

Die Roten Punkte - a peice of german rock gold

Facebooked Dan and, like a miracle, he showed up at the theatre just in time for the show.

It went well. A real mix of high school, primary school, special school kids. One boy who did low-level groaning the whole way through. I wondered for a moment if the sound system had a problem and then realised what was happening. Made me think of Mark Haddon. Lots of sweet interactions and questions at the end in the question and answer session.

Dan came up with a big smile and we made a lunch plan where we met Clare also. Compared touring notes (the differences between touring evening comedy and morning childrens shows) and told hilarious stories about our adventures.

Spent the afternoon op-shopping our little hearts out: Vinnies, Salvos, the Red Cross, the RSPCA. Some serious quality to be had.

Swan Hill op shop haul

Time to write and read and watch movies this evening. Time to strategies about our lives and the company. Feels luxurious.