Journal

22nd April 2013

Give Me Back My Broken Night blog post

At the beginning of April Uninvited Guests & circumstance took to the streets of a very cold Bristol to perform Give Me Back My Broken Night.

The audience met at Harts Bakery, under the arches of Bristol Temple Meads, for tea and cookies, before being taken on a journey into the future of the Enterprise Zone.

Divided into groups, the audience set off with their guides to a number of destinations in the Zone. At each place the guide gave a description of the future, based on actual plans for the Enterprise Zone, or a utopian, nostalgic vision of the future, drawn from historical research about the area. The journey also took in a more dystopian possibility. Wearing headphones, the audience listened to a message from a future in which Bristol is submerged underwater, accompanied by a sci-fi soundtrack composed by Duncan Speakman of circumstance.

The audience also had the opportunity to propose their own version of the future. Participants were given a blank map and a mini projector and invited to describe what they’d like to see on a site where a building had been demolished. As they collaboratively described their ideal future architecture, an artist’s impression started to appear in glowing lines on the map. Click here to see the drawings created by audience members over the 8 performances.

The performance and your tour of the future of the zone ended with a planning meeting in Brunel’s Boardroom in the Old Station, where audiences had the opportunity to propose their ideas and discuss the drawings they’d made more thoroughly.

After one of our fictional planning committees, George Ferguson, architect and Bristol’s Mayor, said that Give Me Back My Broken Night offered the chance to design “unfettered by the limitations of adult reality”, that the show was both “innovative and fun”. Researching, making and performing this Bristol Temple Quarter commission has been a rewarding experience and we were really pleased with the public’s playful, imaginative and thoughtful plans.

There’s been some great responses and you can click here to read what audiences said about the show.

Bristol Culture’s review of the show is available here

You can also view some images from the performance on Flickr.

Posted by Paul: 22nd April 2013