The first Hoipolloi Podcast!

The Hoipolloi Podcast is fully up and running. And in our first proper podcast we are launching a new series called Stefanie Muellers Word of the Week!

Steffi is Hoipolloi’s Associate Director. A woman of many talents, she designs all of Hoipolloi’s productions, performs in most of them and helps Shon out with directing. Now, via our new Podcast and this Blog, she’s going to be showcasing another talent, reigning supreme as the Queen of Vocabulary.

Steffi is Swiss and speaks more languages than I care to acknowledge (embarrassed as I am that my appalling schoolboy French is as close as I’ve come to escaping my Anglophone comfort zone.) Perhaps this is why she’s so interested in curious-sounding or obscure English words, of which she has amassed a rather large collection. Some are fairly common words, which Steffi hadn’t heard before but which appealed to her immediately. Others fit less easily into one’s quotidian idiom.

The precise purpose of this assemblage of semantic sensations has never been entirely clear. Although in the Podcast, Steffi explains that there’s a fun game to be played, whereby you give someone a word and they have to guess or invent its definition. Eventually you try to work all these newly-created nonsenses into your everyday vocabulary. (Edward Lear would have been proud.)

Simon and I are super-excited about our new Podcast-making equipment and we’ll be working hard to bring you aural treats as often as possible. Simon will be boarding a plane in the next few hours as he travels to Australia to join Hugh Hughes. Keep your ears peeled for another Podcast, coming soon from Down Under!

Click here to download Hoipolloi Podcasts via iTunes.

Many thank to El Patojo for the photo!

John Hegley's Hoipolloi Limerick!

Our Artistic Director Shon Dale-Jones just made a small but perfectly formed contribution to John Hegley's Radio 4 documentary There Was a Young Man From Limerick.

It's a lovely little show, featuring a latin limerick allegedly written by Thomas Aquinas, Wendy Cope's limerick version of TS Eliot's The Wastelands, "serious" limericks and lots of discussion of Edward Lear, the much-loved nonsense poet who popularised the limerick and whose work inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly.

You can click here to launch BBC iPlayer and listen to the show anytime for the next seven days.

John Hegley introduced Shon in a typically quirky fashion, with this "limerick":

....Shon Dale-Jones
Who write and directs and who hones
Works for the stage
Which inform and engage
And his company Hoipolloi have used some of Edward lear's limericks in the creation of a biographical drama.

We'd like to thank John Hegley and BBC Radio 4 for inviting Shon onto the show.

I hope you get chance to listen on iPlayer this week if you didn't catch it first time round!

There Was a Young Man From Limerick

Tomorrow, Hoipolloi's Artistic Director, Shon Dale-Jones, will be featured on a Radio 4 documentary about limericks. The show has been put together by John Hegley, the renowned performance poet, who has ammassed a legion of fans over the years (inluding Shon!) with his uniquely comic and quirky performances.

John Hegley is famous for his humourous rhymes and feelgood performances. Recurring motifs of his writing include dogs, his hometown Luton and glasses. In one recent show, he invited everyone in the audience who was wearing glasses to join him on stage for a "glasses dance", and he regularly rants against the "deserters" who opt for contact lenses!

Shon has admired John's work for years and was delighted to be invited onto the show. The two of them met up recently to record some musings on their mutual love of limericks.

The limerick, of course, was popularised in the 1860s by Edward Lear, whose nonsense verse inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly. Arly is about to go back out on tour - click here for my recent Blog post with all the tour details.

There Was a Young Man From Limerick will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am on Tuesday 24 February. You'll be able to listen again on iPlayer for a week after the show is broadcast.

A brand new dawn

With the sunrise over Singapore (the current home of Story of a Rabbit) as today's inspiration, I'd like to welcome you to a new dawn for the Hoipolloi website.

We've finally been able to integrate the website with all our varied content hosts across the internet and this blog, which has been running for over a year, is finally a full part of the homepage.

Other new innovations include a Twitter stream so that we can provide you with the very latest bize-sized news from the world of Hoioplloi and the start of a brand new set of podcasts.

I don't want to hold you here too long but I'd just like to thank Arts Council England, through their AmbITion scheme for enabling us to bring together the technical expertise and equipment to make this all happen. And also to Neil Tinson Studio for making it a reality.

Now, go and explore!

Thank you to night86mare for the photo!

Under Construction

So we're almost there... just one final stage to go before we launch the brand new website. And unfortunately, as with lots of construction projects, things don't always go as planned. Please accept our apologies if you've attempted to visit www.hoipolloi.org.uk but been able to reach the intended destination.

Normal service will resume shortly!

A special welcome to anyone who's just been to see Story of a Rabbit at the National Museum of Singapore. We hope you enjoyed the show! If you'd like to keep in touch with the company, please join our free mailing list or, if you use Facebook, why not join the Hugh Hughes Appreciation Society?

Finally, thank you to Foilman for the picture!

The other side of the world

Hugh Hughes and Sioned's plane landed safely in Singapore last night. We've just had a Skype conversation between Hugh's hotel and the Hoipolloi office. Hugh said it was very hot and that the decor in his hotel is rather eclectic.

Soon Aled will be joining them, and while he and Hugh stage Story of a Rabbit at the National Museum of Singapore, Sioned will be sharing her expertise in a series of workshops organised by the British Council.

Next Friday, Hugh will be contributing to a symposium on the subject of autobiography in theatre. He'll be joined by theatre practitioners and academics from all over the world, and I know he feels very excited and extremely priveleged to have been given this opportunity by the British Council, who have been friends of Hoipolloi for many years.

Hugh and Sioned have promised to record their jounrey through Singapore and across Australia on this Blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

And finally, another chance to play with Hoipolloi's interactive, international touring map...


View Larger Map

Thanks to Katie Cowden for the photo above - click here for her Flickr photostream.

The future's a little closer

Ladies and gentlemen,

Please excuse the appearance of the blog over the next few days. We're currently in the process of testing the new website.

For the time being I need to test how the blog entries feed into the new site and make sure everything is working as it should.

So, if you're a regular reader, please bear with us whilst we push the new site to its limits. Normal service will resume next week.

Thank you!

Simon (Marketing & Touring Manager, Hoipolloi)

Getting AmbITion...

Posted by Simon Bedford (Marketing & Touring Manager, Hoipolloi)

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm in the office. It's been a busy weekend, making sure that all was well with the performances of The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes and preparing for a full day of interviews tomorrow.

At the moment, I'm struggling to make some projectors work. It's ironic that this is happening just as I intended to be sharing with you Hoipolloi's leaps forward into the digital age. But hey, not everything runs according to plan when you're working with technology!

For the past couple of years, Hoipolloi and a select band of arts organisations here in the East of England, along with colleagues up in the North West have been part of an Arts Council England scheme called AmbITion.

As the name cunningly suggests, this is all about helping organisations to engage in new ways with the digital revolution that continues apace around us.

At its most basic, it's enabled us here at Hoipolloi to sort out our IT infrastructure and improve the way we operate day-to-day from the office. If you've seen The Doubtful Guest, it also helped us to work with a far more powerful set of projections within the show.

But from your point of view, as a reader of this blog and, I hope, a visitor to our main website, the biggest change is yet to come!

For the past couple of years we've been experimenting with a variety of social media tools to help provide a greater insight and engagement with our work.

We've posted videos to YouTube, photos to Flikr, we've created a variety of Facebook groups (here and here) and started this blog. My latest mission is to explore the possibilities of Twitter, which I intend to become an integral part of our communications in the near future.

Up until now, these tools have been fragmented across the web. But this is all set to change and in the next few weeks we'll be releasing a brand new homepage into the big wide world which for the first time brings all these elements together in one place for you to all enjoy.

For the time being, you'll have to be patient with us as it's not quite ready. But I'm stupidly excited about it and will launch it with great fanfare very soon.

In the meantime, if you'd like to find out more about AmbITion, please visit the project's website which is ever expanding with case studies, hints, tips and helpful videos like this one...



I'll admit that it does feature me very fleetingly (!) but more importantly it helps to introduce some of the ideas behind successful digital marketing and people with far more interesting ideas than me. Enjoy!