Give Me Back My Broken Night // Projects

Give Me Back My Broken Night is a collaboration with Duncan Speakman from circumstance.

It is a provocation to audiences to imagine the future of their city.

Designed specifically for areas under construction or redevelopment, the audience are led by performers through vacant lots and buildings to share what is planned for the area, and what the utopian and dystopian alternatives might be. Before the audiences's eyes, a glowing vision of the future appears, the collective imagining of those present. 

Site-specific fictions are created, using a combination of performance, location sensitive mobile devises, portable projectors and a cinematic soundtrack. With every step the audience walk further into the future, and alternative versions of the area reveal themselves; they become the urban planners, collaborating on their own designs and imagined architectures. 

We are currently developing a new version of Give Me Back My Broken Night as part of a project called Hothouse at Deptford Lounge in south east London. 

Videos: http://www.watershed.co.uk/dshed/open-city-give-me-back-my-broken-night and http://www.watershed.co.uk/dshed/soho-give-me-back-my-broken-night 

History

Give Me Back My Broken Night was originally commissioned as part of Watershed's Theatre Sandbox in partnership with Soho Theatre. We performed at Soho Theatre during its development in 2010 and then as part of the European City of Culture programme in Guimaraes, Portugal in July 2012. These performances were Commissioned by Open City and supported by The British Council with co-ordinators Vanessa Bellaar Spruijt & Irena Ubler.

It was performed in Bristol in April 2013 part of a series of Bristol Temple Quarter commissions coordinated by Watershed, Knowle West Media Centre and MAYK, with funding from Arts Council England. 

After one of the 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' and that the show was both 'innovative and fun'.

In Autumn 2013, Uninvited Guests and Circumstance ran workshops in Rotterdam as part of the De Keuze festival, to develop ideas of how to embed the piece into real and ongoing town planning processes.

You can find an archive of drawings created over the eight performances in Bristol, links to reviews and audience feedback at http://givemebackmybrokennight.tumblr.com/

Photos of the version for Bristol's Enterprise Zone by Jenny Davies can be viewed here.

The technology development of the piece has been delivered by iShed and Calvium.