Storytelling PR

Eleanor Bally

A note from Miriam

by

View over the Firth of Forth, Newhaven, Edinburgh.

Hello!

Hope this finds you okay, home, with / in close contact with pals and loved ones.

I just wanted to pop a wee note out from the Storytelling perspective to let you know how we can help – and what’s going on up in Scotland.

Of course all of our current touring work; the brilliant Superfan with Like Animals; Theatre Gu Leor with MAIM; Harry Clayton-Wright’s first UK solo tour with Sex Education; Ellen Renton’s superb Within Sight; and our home at Summerhall has closed its doors for the time being.

At Storytelling we are lucky to have access to some of the best in the business in PR, but also to our accountant and finance manager Sal. Sal and I are jumping on webinars, reading long, long documents and gaining as much knowledge as we can on the current situation to 1) keep Storytelling going, and 2) to be able to provide support for our artists.

To our dear trans, lgbtq+ artists, please let us know if you need any allyship – whatever form that takes – we’re here.

This is going to be a hard time for all – I know there’s nothing I can say. The future will come round, it may look different, I think we all hope it will, and as I’ve said before, artists and events people know how to prepare new strategies, systems and manage a crisis up there with the best of them, so know you GOT THIS.

Take the breaks you need, drink all the tea and wine you need to.

Miriam & the storytelling team X  

P.s: if you need a wee pick-me-up, we’ve put together a Spotify playlist! Give ‘er a listen!

Storytellers love to listen

by

Stuck inside? Us too. You know what’s great for that?

Podcasts. Lots and lots of podcasts, so team Storytelling have put together a wee list of our faves!

Get your ears around ‘em. In some kind of absolute stroke of genius – Matt (Sincere Deceivers) and David’s A Good Service On All Other Lines launches w/c 23 March – it’s a five part series of stories and songs taken from their 2018 Fringe show. So you can have some live work in your ears, with very lovely production values. 

Mim A’s picks:

My Favourite Muder
You’re Wrong About
How To Fail
Two Dope Queens
George The Poet

Mim B’s picks:

Dolly Parton’s America
S-Town by This American Life 
Invisibilia 
Radiolab
This American Life
You Must Remember This – especially the Dead Blondes series 

Emma’s picks:

Armchair Expert
Joan and Jericha 
This American Life
Desert Island Discs
Tiny Desk Concerts
Pop Culture Happy Hour

Eleanor’s picks:

My Favourite Murder
Ologies
The Eleventh
This Podcast Will Kill You
The Dollop
Aaaaaand School Britannia (but we’re a bit biased there)

Yeah, we’re pretty well informed when it comes to podcasts. Jump on twitter and insta and send us any others @storytellingpr

Hot Brown Honey

by

WORD POLLINATION TOUR | DECOLONISE AND MOISTURISE | ROCK THE BOAT

Hot Brown Honey. Image by Dylan Evans.

It’s 2020, and Hot Brown Honey are back. Touring to the UK and Canada, leading a charge for a matriarchal future with their smash-hit, world-wide, sell-out blend of theatre and activism. 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Mother Lovers? A theatrical explosion of colour, culture and controversy, Hot Brown Honey is returning to the UK and Canada after taking the world by storm.  

Equal parts theatrical masterpiece and social activism, a stellar posse of phenomenal women smash stereotypes in an unapologetic celebration of our similarities and differences. Steeped in the Word of the Mother and packing a potent punch of Hip Hop politics, Hot Brown Honey will make you laugh until you cry, clap until your hands bleed and shake every part of what your mama gave you. With lighting, music and costume set to ignite the change we want to be, Hot Brown Honey is an extraordinary production that spins tradition on its head, going above and beyond to challenge boundaries and embrace resilience. 

Hot Brown Honey features a bevy of powerful and talented First Nations women from the Global South from Aboriginal, Samoan, Tongan, Maori, Indonesian and South African backgrounds who are dead set on calling out the patriarchy, shattering preconceptions of colour and having a riotous time doing it. 

Starring Lisa Fa’alafi as the Game Changer, Kalala Sione as The Love Liberator, Hope Haami as Hope One the Beatboxer, Cody Raymond as The Shape Shifter, Crystal Stacey as The Peace Maker and Busty Beatz as The Queen Bee. 

Co-creator and Director Lisa Fa’alafi says: “We’re telling our own stories and putting them into a big theatrical explosion. We are going, you know what, it’s our time to shine. We’re all from these amazing heritages and we all live in Australia and we want to show the world what we’re made of. We really do believe ‘You cannot be what you cannot see’, so we are just doing it; we are putting more brown faces on stage.”

Recipients of the 2017 Three Weeks Editor’s Award at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2016 UK’s Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing With Form, Helpmann Award for Best Cabaret Performer and Green Room Awards for Best Production and Best Design and a 2018 UK Theatre nomination for Best Touring Production, Hot Brown Honey have lit centre stage at the most prestigious venues and festivals across the globe including Sydney Opera House, Queen Elizabeth’s Hall, National Arts Centre Ottawa, Brighton Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Auckland Pride Festival and Hull Freedom Festival, to name a few. 

Co-Creator/MD Busty Beatz: “The Arts has the capacity to shift culture and we are living in a time where the paradigm is shifting enormously. We live in a culture that needs change urgently.Not tomorrow. Right Here. Right Now. We stand in the Creative Revolution.At the forefront we give Love and Respect to First Nations People. We give Love and Respect to those who have come before us. To the Game Changers Myth SlayersPoets, MoversMusic MakersGround Breakers, Truth Sayers, Shake em up Women Queens, Queers and Risk Takers. We are the Change Creators – This is our world Mother Lovers and we are here to MAKE NOISE!”

In 2020 Hot Brown Honey are ready to Rock The Boat, unapologetically fierce, defiantly shattering preconceptions in an explosion of colour, culture and controversy. Fighting the Power never tasted so sweet. 

Media Contact: Miriam (+44) 7825642225 miriam@storytellingpr.com and Eleanor eleanor@storytellingpr.com at Storytelling PR LTD.

Within Sight

by

By Ellen Renton
Presented by In The Works

Spring UK Tour March – June 2020 

Ellen Renton, Within Sight. Image by Bibi Schwithal.

Scottish Spoken Word artist Ellen Renton has lived with albinism her whole life. An estimated 1 in 17,000 people in the UK do. But what if there was only one achievement that would deem that life successful? Within Sight dismantles ableism, inspiration porn, and the myth of the Paralympics. 

This is a poetic exploration of living with albinism – an inherited life-long condition that means people produce little or no melanin, affecting the eyes, skin and hair and resulting in various levels of visual impairment.

One of society’s most misunderstood conditions wildly shrouded in myths and misconceptions, Ellen will tour the UK this Spring with her debut solo work urging audiences to reconsider representation.

Through softly spoken but hard-hitting words and an impressive cardio display, we follow the journey of a young athlete who goes out for a run in an attempt to clear her head after receiving news that she has narrowly missed out on being picked for the GB Paralympics team. 

As she runs, she recalls the events that have led to this pivotal moment, reflecting on relationships between her body, her senses, and her sport. She contemplates what her future will hold in a society that has forced her life into a binary: to succeed and be an inspiration, or to fail and be pitied.

Hot-tempered with passion and fanatic in her strong work ethic, the protagonist’s complex character defies the one-note depiction of disabled people in popular media. 

Spoken word and poetry is fast becoming one of the world’s most popular mediums for marginalised artists to address societal prejudice and discrimination. Ellen set out to create a work that is personal in its topic but universal in its narrative of how society fails disabled people.

Confrontational, complex and emotional, the show is a display of the power of spoken word theatre.

The team for Within Sight is disability-led, and the show has been designed to flip accessibility on its head. With minimal staging and text-based performance, the show has been created for all to enjoy without relying on sight. Ellen enlisted filmmaker Kiana Kalantar-Hormozi to create a visual backdrop aimed at providing a glimpse of what the world looks like through the eyes of someone living with partial sight and a musical score by Jack Hinks. 

On creating Within Sight, Ellen Renton said, “I wanted to challenge people to think about the role that they themselves play in perpetuating ableism, and specifically, to talk about the poor representation of disabled people in today’s society. The show mixes a fictional narrative with the reality of living with albinism, confronting the audience with their expectations of what a disabled life looks like.”

Event information: 

5-6 March, 8pm – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 
19-21st March, 8pm – Tron Theatre, Glasgow 
15 May, 7.30pm – Dunoon Burgh Hall
21 May, 8pm – Canada Waters, London
30 May, 2pm – Platform, London
4-5 June, 7.30pm – Byre Theatre, St Andrews 

Every venue will host BSL interpreted shows with an adapted ‘touch tour’ pre show available for visually impaired audience members. All performances are captioned and relaxed. 

Tickets available from In The Works.

Symbiosis of art and science at Summerhall this April

by

We began as part of the body by Beverley Hood.
  • See, hear and smell the fusion of art and science in Edinburgh Science Festival exhibition series, Syncrasy 
  • Bong Joon-ho leads Cinehall programme of apocalypse thrillers and nature documentaries
  • A live music line-up with chemistry: Colonel Mustard and the Dijon 5, Grace Petrie and David Ford & Jarrod Dickenson

We’re shaking off the winter blues and slipping on our lab coats – the Edinburgh Science Festival returns to Summerhall. An interactive library of food additives, apocalypse movies and the backdrop of our former Vet School home combine to make Summerhall the perfect place to experience the satisfying, gloopy compound that is Art(Science)2

Art, science and technology combine in our science festival exhibition series, Syncrasy. Co-curated by Summerhall and ASCUS Art & Science, Syncrasy is made up of three exhibitions, We Began As Part of The Body by Beverley Hood, Oscillations by Victoria Evans and E-Number V2.0 by Sneha Solanki. Each exhibition plays with how we understand and interact with the world around us – from the microorganisms that produce artificial flavours in our food, to the ethical questions around artificial skin cells, to the music made by the tide. Syncrasy invites audiences to smell the food additives that now form such a large part of our diets and get up close and personal with scaled-up models of human skin cells. 

In our newly established Summerhall Cinema programme, Cinehall, nature documentaries meet apocalyptic thrillers in a science inspired lineup. British zombie flick 28 Days Later and climate-change chiller The Day After Tomorrow sit alongside Cane Toads: The Conquest and (the frankly adorable) March of the Penguins. On 17 April we’ve got kids classic Finding Nemo, followed by Academy Award-winner and Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s creature-feature thrill ride Host on 18 April. 

The team behind Edinburgh Hogmanay’s Message From the Skies, Bright Side Studios, bring their new interactive installation to Summerhall’s Old Lab. Elemental invites audiences to explore the four elements the ancient Greeks believed made up the universe: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. On this magical multi-sensory journey, children and adults alike will move through an intriguing, immersive digital world in which magic meets alchemy and alchemy meets science. 

Slightly less scientific but just as much fun, our live music lineup for the start of Spring has a whole lot of chemistry. Our songwriters circle night All Work Together brings Carla J. Easton, Withered Hand and Rachel Sermanni to the same stage on Friday 3 April; Genre-hopping party band Colonel Mustard and the Dijon 5 rock up on Saturday 18 April; there’s the return of folk singer Grace Petrie on Tuesday 21 April; on Thursday 23 April there’s a special double headline show from singer-songwriters David Ford and Jarrod Dickenson. 

All exhibitions are free. Check the Summerhall website for gig, film and installation tickets – we can’t wait to welcome you to Summerhall this April!