Albemarle

Albemarle is an ambitious new project currently in development. It started with a dream Chris had in the small hours of Monday 18th June 2012 in a hotel room in Exeter, in which he was really happy with his life: his mum was still alive; he had a new boyfriend that he really liked; the comedian Simon Pegg was his next-door neighbour; he had a great conversation about theatre with an old friend; and above all, he was making a dance piece called ‘Albemarle’.

On waking Chris found that he really wanted somehow to stage that dream and explore it from within that reconstruction: to try and make the elusive show, and at the same time find a way of representing the conversations that took place in the dream.

In Albemarle, Chris wants to use that process of reconstruction as a base from which to investigate the idea of the dream, the glimpse, the kind of aching evanescence that theatre has in common with a Utopian politics, a sense of a better life that’s both intimately close and utterly ungraspable.

Albemarle represents a major step up in the scale at which Chris Goode & Company is creating work. The piece takes forward some of the formal questions that we explored with ‘GOD/HEAD’, around the mix of testimony, storytelling and theatrical abstraction. It also involves working with choreography and dance for the first time, layering this against the story-driven exploration of the themes outlined.

IMAGES

Credit: Richard Davenport

REVIEWS

Coming soon

CREDITS

Lead Artist – Chris Goode
Ensemble - Akeim Buck, Maddy Costa, Jo Clifford, Naomi Dawson, Jeni Draper, Kristina Hjelm, Jonny Liron, Pauline Mayers, Tom Ross-Williams, Theron Schmidt, Toke Strandby, Heather Uprichard, Ric Watts, Jamie Wood

A Chris Goode & Company production

Commissioned by West Yorkshire Playhouse

To date, the show has been developed with the support of National Theatre Studio, Theatre in the Mill, The Bike Shed and West Yorkshire Playhouse, with financial support from Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Arts Council England.

DATES

Upcoming

Future dates to be announced soon.

History

March 2014 The Albemarle Sketchbook, Transform 14, West Yorkshire Playhouse

October 2013 The Albemarle Gathering, West Yorkshire Playhouse

2013 Development work at National Theatre Studio, Theatre in the Mill, The Bike Shed, ArtsAdmin and West Yorkshire Playhouse.