Cafe Theatre Productions

@KatsuraSunshine: the only Westerner #Rakugo performer: The Art of Japanese Storytelling at The Forge in Camden

Katsura Sunshine is the name given to Canadian Gregory Robic of Slovenian parents – by a Japanese master of the art of Rakugo – story telling to make the audience laugh!

I got the impression that 3 years of ‘apprenticeship’, i.e. ‘learning by doing’ and being with a master is like Zen training. But Wikipedia mentions Buddhism as a root.

Yesterday, the German fairy tale Godfather Death was the main story at this delightful venue in Camden The Forge. The intro was a personal account of recent experiences – a wonderful kaleidoscope of cross-cultural discrepancies and similarities.

What a treat to live and learn in these exciting times in this exciting global city and to get to know such wonderful people as Pam Almaz, Sally Willis and Katsura Sunshine!

July 25, 2016 0

What is the future of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?

What is the future of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?

The Fringe has grown to a mammoth event – indeed the world’s largest of its kind. But do we really understand the impact of the size on the quality of the Festival? Could it be that the stem is too weak to support the bloom?

My first encounter with the Edinburgh Fringe was in 1983, when I brought my production of Dialogue with a Dying Man by Michael Almaz. We performed in the Little Lyceum, located in a “hole in the ground”, more or less where The Traverse Theatre now stands. Despite being a serious drama in a midnight slot we got great audiences and very good reviews. I fell in love with the city and above all with this intoxicating Festival.

In 1990 I returned with my Ab Ovo Theatre Company. We hired Hill Street Theatre, produced four of our own productions and hosted 21 others. We broke even and I decided to continue as an Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue producer.

This year could have been my 27th Festival as a venue producer, but it isn’t. I am stopping, not because I am bored of it but because it has changed into something I can’t support anymore. For me it has lost its artistic purpose and is shifting to a structure that is profitable for some shareholders and ruinous for artists. I really don’t like the direction the Festival is going with its unscrupulous and often unlawful cut-throat competition. Continue reading “What is the future of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?” →

June 27, 2016 0

You can’t make it up: last night we were watching the agonies of the 19-year-old black woman and the 69-year-old former actress, sharing their problems with their mother and their psychiatrists.

Afterwards we were discussing the gaps and connections between personal and societal pains. The remarkable play highlights psychiatry as a ‘labelling industry’.

This morning I get the email from the excellent site Humans are Free:

Non-Conformity and Anti-Authoritarianism Now Considered an Illness: ‘Opposition Defiant Disorder’ leading to
The Brave New World of “Mental Health Disorders”.

I don’t know what it takes to change

from feeling ‘victim’ of our parents, to free non-wounded spirits;
from being marginalised as women (12% in science in technology), as blacks, as anorexics, as mental health patients to creative entrepreneurs doing meaningful work;
from following mainstream media ‘prescriptions’ to questioning and seeking meaning in life our own way;
from having been victimised by white collar criminals in horrendous home repossessions and bankruptcies to getting justice and compensation;
from being in the imagination of an ageing actress to becoming real conversationalists
from a seriously ill society to one that wails, heals and does better for future generations…

I think that friends would be therapists, if they knew how to listen and how to respond. But who teaches us communication?

Coming to join us in the delightful Lion and Unicorn pub in Kentish Town before and after the play is a beginning for joining likeminded thinkers and ‘feelers’.

Linking ‘personal therapy needs’ to ‘social healing strategies’ embrace topics of our conversations. The lovely pub has a front and a back garden.

Come! Join us ‘social healers’, inspired by Sally Willis and Rachel Summers and their Theatre of the Shared Unconscious.

#FarFromFiction Exposing Unspoken Pain in #pub #theatre #KentishTown

Ever since I was told that my pain is ‘psychological’, I dug deeper and deeper into psychology, psychotherapy and the intriguing links between Self and Society. In fact, “Personal Growth and Social Transformation” was the topic of one of the conferences I organised in Geneva between 1978 and 1981.

“Far from Fiction” addresses the issue from the points of view of

a 19-year old woman who is anorexic and self-harming and “can’t eat because she can’t live”;
a 69-year old Social Anthropologist who is a former actress and “murdered her soul” during her life;
labelling ‘cases’ in mental hospitals that are ‘Far from Reality’!!!

We end up having to Oppose Deception!

Fortunately that has just happened on a large scale:

Temple of Baal Arch Cancelled in New York City

But what do you and I need to do make such good news happen?

healer heal thyself
we need to look at our wounds, acknowledge them, cry for them and heal, heal, heal;
one of my mantras is: I deeply and completely love and accept myself!

Far from Fiction is an EXCELLENT encouragement to FEEL our feelings AND express them rather then hide them behind ‘complex needs’!

We may have to buy our own ‘Freudian slippers’, as Sally Willis shows us…

First though, come and join us: any night from tonight until Saturday – in the Lion and Unicorn pub and theatre near Kentish Town tube where the show starts at 8pm

April 12, 2016 1

#Hashtag #whatever: Challenging links between #Self and #Society

“Far from Fiction” was launched tonight by Cafe Theatre Productions at the Lion and Unicorn theatre in Kentish Town:

http://www.lionandunicorntheatre.co.uk/

This week, every evening will be an opportunity for responding to the amazing performance of Sally Willis and her young colleague Rachel Summers, until Saturday April 16th.

The delightful pub in the ground floor offers a great space for discussions before and after the performance that is

simply amazing
absolutely fabulous
and very, very moving – in most dramatic tension in and between both actresses.

GOlive – review

April 11, 2016 0

FAR FROM FICTION: Public Reading @ Conference on ‘Aspects of Female Sexuality’ of Tavistock Institute @T_I_H_R

The video – published on this Facebook page – is of a technical rehearsal.

The first performance was last night at the Tavistock Institute:

hard hitting: calling a spade a spade about ‘society’ maybe being more responsible for our individual ‘problems’ than we ourselves?
making fun: the language used to camouflage rather than address the real issues in and between people;
provoking: society being unable to ‘help’ children who are being mistreated by their parents…

Two wonderful actresses, lovely ‘Freudian slippers’ and other and a subtle comment with the aid PowerPoint slides.

Speculating from the introduction, the Institute seems to be more preoccupied with ‘curing’ perpetrators than with soothing the wounds in children and victims…

Instead, we discover institutionalised child abuse to propagate the paedophile agenda, or, as John Hemming MP used to say: