The Hanging

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

I usually need a bucket or two of coffee before I get started on a Monday morning, and this morning’s Monday morning start was even earlier than usual. Luckily, I was at CB2 cafe in Cambridge, so there was no shortage of caffeinated beverages; and after a bleary start, I was able to begin hanging a Hoipolloi exhibition, which will be on show at CB2 until the end of October.

Sadly, I have few practical skills and little to no common sense. On one occasion, I spent a good fifteen minutes looking first at a picture, then at a nail on the wall, then back to the picture, trying to work out how the two could be united. A reel of hanging wire eventually provided the solution, although this triangular approach (picture, nail, wire...) made me feel a little dizzy at first.

The exhibition showcases photographs of almost fifteen years of Hoipolloi productions, including The Doubtful Guest and Hugh Hughes’ productions, as well some of Hoipolloi’s much earlier shows. The photographs were taken by Richard Heeps and Geraint Lewis. Richard is an old friend of the company and a widely acclaimed photographer, who has published five books of his work. Geraint is an extremely well established theatre photographer, who takes pictures for The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Times, as well as the Royal National Theatre and numerous West End productions.

Most of the photographs are for sale, so if you want a Hugh Hughes print or a picture of the Doubtful Guest on your wall, head for CB2! We should also point out that even when it isn’t being colonised by Hoipolloi, CB2 is a great place to eat and drink. We’ve had lots of delicious company meals there over the years. It’s on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, fairly close to the Grafton shopping centre and Anglia Ruskin University. (Click here for a map.)

Finally, a reminder that The Doubtful Guest is going back out on tour in October and November! The show will be heading to Plymouth, Southampton, Cardiff, Leeds and Cambridge. Click here for the full list of tour dates, and don’t forget to book tickets soon!


http://www.cb2bistro.com/
http://www.richardheeps.co.uk/
http://www.geraintlewis.com/

Video interview with Hugh Hughes

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

After a gentle summer lull, things are getting busy again at the Hoipolloi office. The Doubtful Guest is going back on the road in October and November: you can find all the tour dates here. We’re also preparing to mount an exhibition at CB2 café in Cambridge in September. It will feature work by renowned photographers Geraint Lewis and Richard Heeps, who have been photographing Hoipolloi shows since the company was founded almost fifteen years ago. Most of the work will be for sale, so if you want a Hugh Hughes print or a picture of The Doubtful Guest on your wall, head for CB2! The exhibition starts Monday, 1st September.

In the last blog post, Simon told us about his trip to Helsinki with Hugh Hughes. Just before they left for the airport, Hugh was in the office, and I grabbed him for a moment, sat him in front of a video camera and conducted an interview for your collected viewing pleasures.

In the first video, Hugh talks about how he came to make his award-winning show Floating, how he met Sioned Rowlands at a voice workshop in Romania and how he hopes his shows will help people make connections. In the second part, Hugh talks about his next show Invisible Town, Heidegger and his mother’s garden shed. Enjoy!

Part 1:



Part 2:

Rabbiting around in Helsinki

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

It's Monday evening and I'm now back home after my trip over to Helsinki with Hugh and Aled. Although international touring is exhausting in its planning, the pay-off of actually travelling out to the final destination is almost always worth the effort.

And Helsinki definitely didn't disappoint, with plenty of interesting stories to share!

The trip commenced on Thursday last week with a very early flight out of Heathrow (we checked in at 6am) with the delightful Finnair. Perhaps the most bizarre part of the flight was the addition of a CCTV camera at the front of the plane, giving us first a pilot's eye and then a bird's eye view of take-off and landing. It's actually quite fun to see the world become minature as the plane climbs up into the clouds but I'm not so sure I wanted to see us zoom down the runway and I definitely didn't enjoy seeing the pilot's (increasingly erratic) attempts to line us up with the runway to prepare for touch-down!

Over in Helsinki, the company were performing at Korjaamo, a new(-ish) theatre in the city. Actually to describe it as a theatre is a complete underestimation of what takes place there - it's actually a converted tram depot, with two gallery spaces, two theatres, a trendy bar, a delicious restaurant, a tram museum and even a TV studio (I think I made it onto Sub, a Finnish TV channel one night - in the background behind a continuity announcement!).

Anyway, I made this little video, which will give you a slightly better sense of the space we were performing in...



I think that Hugh and Aled were really happy with the show. It's always tricky to work out whether people outside the UK will totally understand and respond to the show in the same way but it's always fun/interesting to see what happens!

Our time at Korjaamo was part of their STAGE Festival, which in turn was part of the wider Helsinki Festival. With the city in a truly cultural mood, we found art popping up in lots of random places and on Friday evening, we were entertained by numerous choirs (including a group of Helsinki's policewomen) everywhere we went. They were at Korjaamo and even at a restaurant where we ate that night. The brochure for this mini-festival also provided us with our other entertainment for the evening - reading the different English translations of the copy...

For example, how do you fancy seeing some...

"Elderly young people pull solid rock songs about streetcars amd [sic] booze-vapored moments of enlightment"

or how about...

"The best female vocalists sing their audience into oblivion"

or my favourite...

"Love poems and sounds of liking a special person"

Actually I shouldn't mock too much as Finnish people speak far far better English than my very poor attempts at basic Finnish! I think I managed only to master "thank you" or "kiitos".

And it is a big "kiitos" to Raoul and all the staff at Korjaamo for inviting us over to Helsinki and making us feel so welcome.

Finally, as a way of bringing my trip neatly to a close and in tribute to the tram depot that hosted us for a few days, the final leg of the journey back to my flat in England was made by tram. Although this time sadly from the far less glamorous location of Croydon!

Hoipolloi elsewhere on the web...

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

I've just given our MySpace page a long overdue update and created a Hoipolloi Facebook Group to complement the Hugh Hughes Appreciation Society.

If you'd like to join either of the groups or add us as a friend on MySpace please feel free to click the links above. (It'd be great if you could write on the Facebook wall too, at the moment it's depressingly bare!)

Don't forget that you can subscribe to this Blog by clicking on the menu to the right. And if you haven't done so already, have a look at our YouTube channel for video previews of The Doubtful Guest and interviews and backstage footage with Hugh Hughes.

Some Facts

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

Things are pretty quiet in the Hoipolloi office at the moment. Steffi Muller, our Associate Director, is away in Edinburgh performing with our friends Menagerie. (Click here for details of the show, Correspondence.) In fact, I’m the only person I know who isn’t going to the Fringe this year. And in the meantime, whilst everyone else in Theatre-land is busy at the Festival, the phone here is quiet and my inbox is empty.

To pass the time, I’ve been learning about Helsinki. That’s because on Thursday Hugh Hughes and Aled will be flying out to Finland to perform Story of a Rabbit at the Korjaamo Culture Factory. The set and lots of our technical equipment is already on its way and I had a great time rummaging around the Hoipolloi store last week, until Richard, our Production Manager, forced me to stop exploring and do back-breaking labour while we packed up the freight. (The Story of a Rabbit set is really heavy.)

Anyway, before we go into Fun Facts About Finland, I should say a couple of things:

1) I have learned everything I’m about to tell you from the internet and Wikipedia. It may or may not actually be true.

2) A lot of the aforementioned websites preface their facts with the adjective “fun” and, frankly, they don’t deliver. I don’t consider statistics pertaining to population demographics to be fun. Nor is the fact that the country’s dialling code is 358. By contrast, my Finnish Facts will be 100% Funtastic.


FACT 1:
Helsinki? More like HELLsinki. Such was the outrage when “hard rock quintet” Lordi bagged Finland’s first ever Eurovision victory in 2006. The group is fronted by the inimitable Mr. Lordi. Past band members with amusing names include a bassist named G-Stealer. Apparently he was kicked out of the band because he kept stealing all the G’s from the band’s alphabet fridge magnet set.

FACT 2:
There’s a statue of a super-sexy mermaid in the market square in Helsinki. On the 1st of May every year, students gather round the statue to celebrate the arrival of Spring. (And to stare at a sexy mermaid, probably.) The statue hasn’t always been popular though. When it was unveiled in 1908, women’s rights groups protested that it objectified women. Two years previously, women in Finland had been granted the vote: that’s 20 years before the same happened in this country. (Wow, those Scandinavians are progressive.)

FACT 3:
The city’s animal symbol is a squirrel.


Well, I'm sure you all got a lot out of that.

Let's finish with a video of Lordi, performing their song, Would You Love a Monsterman?