Leoni Amandin on Happy Deathday and The Really Useful Cabaret:
Tell us about your shows at this year’s VAULT Festival and the journey to making it?
Happy Deathday allows audiences to step into a world where talking about the end of life isn’t a taboo anymore. Expect ridiculous deathly shower thoughts, a battle between the simple biology and the complex poetry of death, an introduction to the fascinating funeral industry history and current developments, some end of life planning arts and crafts, and a look around the world for ways to do dying better.
I started devising this show after publishing my grief poetry anthology No Guide To Grief, realising that my interest had shifted from grief to end of life planning. The first supporter of the show was Holly Delefortrie, a theatre practitioner and good friend I met on the European Theatre Arts course at Rose Bruford.
We shared a rehearsal room, wrote festival and funding applications together and became each other’s outside eye. Through my research I connected with end of life doula Sabrina Singh and funeral celebrant Carole Pluckrose, and the funeral directors of Arka Funerals who provided invaluable insight. I’m thrilled to contribute to VAULT Festival‘s colourful programme. My website, Twitter and Instagram.
The Really Useless Cabaret presents a wide variety of comedy bangers such as White Van Man (about catcalling), Very Truthful List (about conspiracy theories) and Gaydar (not being able to tell a guitarist from a left-handed lesbian). Expect to be taken on a journey by a queer wannabe comedy singer/songwriter who is currently very unsure and insecure about everything.
This show was devised by a collective of music and comedy lovers. I met Rebeka Dio on the European Theatre Arts course at Rose Bruford who brought Sinead Hegarty along to the first meet up after I sent a tweet out about wanting to do musical comedy. Sinead had already written lots of comedy songs, so we got to work adapting and writing some more material.
The themes of sexual identity, internet rabbit holes and the inner critic emerged during the process and after getting lots of brilliant constructive feedback at our scratch performance at The Cockpit Theatre we felt ready to put on our first show at the incredible VAULT Festival! Our linktree.
How did your training on the European Theatre Arts course at Rose Bruford College prepare you for your work as an artist in industry?
The course introduced me to a wide range of theatre practices I had never heard of before. Some instantly appealing, some grew on me and some still haven’t quite got there. It made me realise that theatre comes with a set of rules that are constantly daring us to break them. Theatre can be whatever we want or need it to be. I have revelled in that realisation ever since.
Billy Maxwell Taylor on Rain Pours Like Coffee Drops:
Tell us about your show at this year’s VAULT Festival and the journey to making it?
Rain Pours Like Coffee Drops is a meditative movement theatre experience reflecting on workplace wellbeing through a rainy world where coffee drips slowly.
It started from my dissertation on European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford in 2021 and since then has evolved through various commissions with NDC Wales, Richard Chappell Dance, Volcano Theatre and two Arts Council Wales Create grants.
With each iteration, we were able to dig deeper into the meditative world and nourish the movement research. However, a key part of the process was also reflecting back on its journey as a site-specific piece, a contemporary dance piece and a rather intense dissertation!
A core part of the project was to offer working opportunities for early-career artists and graduates due to the depletion of these opportunities following the COVID-19 pandemic. We have tried to foster a space for growth and continual learning as we navigate the transition from education into the industry.
How did your training on the European Theatre Arts course at Rose Bruford College prepare you for your work as an artist in industry?
Without the holistic approach of European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford, Rain Pours Like Coffee Drops would not be possible. Being able to switch between marketing, application writing, directing, performing, sound creating… there are a lot of hats in self-producing work! I feel the uniqueness of European Theatre Arts is that it creates bamboo artists: flexible and adaptable to a constantly shifting industry.
Tatenda Naomi Matsvai on Dark Matter:
Tell us about your show at this year’s VAULT Festival and the journey to making it?
Dark Matter is a solo show I’ve been working on since August 2021, I got to scratch it at theatre Peckham as we came out of lockdown, I was lucky enough to be given space to make something new for Peckham Previews Festival, now Peckham Fringe.
I wanted to make something that celebrated my cultural heritage and fused my interests of Afrofuturism and African oral tradition that I began exploring in my dissertation research, so you could say that was the beginning of this show’s journey.
How did your training on the European Theatre Arts course at Rose Bruford College prepare you for your work as an artist in industry?
The course at Rose Bruford College prepared me for so many elements of making and performing dark matter, our performance prep sessions helped me learn how to write copy for my own work, create budgets, contact team members, basically self-produce, which is predominantly what I do for this project.
The collaboration we experience throughout the European Theatre Arts training has sustained me in all my collaborative relationships, where I try and maintain some of the core values I learned while training such as what an ensemble is, and how to problem solve when devising with other performers to make work, namely my work on a design led movement show In this Smoking Chaos at Queens Theatre relied on the use of play, complicity and mutuality to devise the movement choreography at the core of the show.
Find out more about studying on our European Theatre Arts BA (Hons) course.