Lionboy: London Unicorn

A few weeks ago it was Lionboy's final week playing at the Unicorn Theatre in London. After 8 weeks on tour it all ended with a great last week of performances in London and it was nice to be back in the city! Being on tour has been an amazing experience with a lovely team and cast it was a great place to get the experience of attempting to produce same show in very different venues. Listening to different house systems and how they were set up for each venue was really interesting. The unicorn perhaps one of the more fiddly setups with it's curved auditorium and not a lot of space for front of house positions. Luckily this was one of the venues on the list with a centre cluster in it's FOH setup which helped a lot in separating voice-overs and music for intelligibility purposes.

The hardest thing to judge from venue to venue was the mix between our live Percussionist (Stephen Hiscock) and the playback music, along with the Voice-overs on top of all that. Making sure the narrative was clear whilst keeping the drums and music at a level that drove the scene on was always a difficult one to achieve, each venue reacted differently to the drum kit particularly, Wales for instance had a stage about 4 times higher and wider than the Unicorn, pretty cave-like in its acoustics, but again was an interesting challenge.

Lisa Kerr & Adetomiwa Edun

Lionboy Tour: Bristol

Complicité have just began the tour of Lionboy a new show for kids based on the trilogy of books (with the same name) by Zizou Corder , which tells the story of Charlie Ashanti, a boy who can speak to cats, and his journey to free his parents from the "corporacy" which also leads him through a circus where he meets a pack of lions and sets out to liberate them...

I've been working as Associate Sound with Tom Gibbons as Sound Designer, and i'll be operating the show for the rest of the tour. The show, so far, has been well received and we had a lot of fun finally getting it onto the stage in-front of an great audience.

From a sound perspective the the story is illustrated using sound effects and music that reacts to the particular form of storytelling that has been conceived for this show. One of the interesting parts for me is having a live percussionist (Stephen Hiscock) on stage, jumping from a full drum kit to traditional Ghanaian instruments, to provide underscore and musical accompaniment to the action on stage.

Lionboy will be touring around the UK, and the next stop is the Liverpool Playhouse for a week (week commencing 3rd June), followed by Oxford Playhouse, Warwick Arts Centre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Wales Millenium Centre and ending with a 2 week run at the Unicorn Theatre in London.

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Catch up on 2013

As i've been pretty bad at updating lately I thought i'd pop an overview of the year so far for a bit of a reference and sharing, and will hopefully be a bit more detailed about each soon!  :)Complicité Open Sound Workshop

To start the year off I was part of a Complicité open sound workshop with participants from all over the world taking part. We took a week to work with sound as a rehearsal tool, led by, Complicité associate, Catherine Alexander. It was a really interesting chance to see how sound can effect the way a rehearsal process can evolve, how it can be used to analyse characters and scenes and map out sections of stories, to reveal new stories. Some really interesting sound experiments with both recorded and live sound/music.

Inspector_Sands_Rock_Pool

Inspector Sands, Rock Pool Working as Associate Sound Designer to Elena Pena, on a show for 3 - 5 year olds, the show was created by the company and Directed by Lucinka Eisler. The age range for the show created a bit of an extra challenge for us, but an interesting one! The show is set in a tiny rock pool, where a crab and prawn have been washed up and find themselves stuck! We used a mixture of Sound effects and Music (composed by Tom Mills) to create the audio world of the rock pool and the outside human world too, using props on stage to help make the music come from the stage and turn into playback music.

Hamlet fencing 2

RSC HamletPhoto by Keith Pattison

At the start of the week Hamlet began its run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon-Avon, Directed by David Farr the production will run until September 2013 in rep alongside As You Like it and Alls Well That Ends Well. It was great to work with the team at the RSC, some lovely people and just a nice a place to be. It was a learning experience I really enjoyed. The theatre itself is in a thrust configuration since its renovation a few years ago, which was an interesting space to work in.