Arts
Look again at Alice
Fresh from their run in the Sprint Festival at Camden People’s Theatre,
Rififi Theatre Company brings you the magic of The Alice Project.
Transforming Lewis Carroll’s iconic 1865 novel, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland into a diverse experience where dreams and reality merge
and desires and nightmares collide.
Artistic director Rachel Snider, who graduated from the Centre for
Theatre Studies at Essex in 2004, came up with the idea of The Alice
Project while training at Jacques Lecoq Theatre School, Paris. Her
experience of living in a new culture reminded her of Alice – always on
the other side of the looking glass.
By exploring the more complex elements of the tale, Rififi aims to
reawaken Alice for the 21st century, whilst retaining the fun and
absurdist brilliance of the Victorian original in this production at the
Lakeside Theatre on Thursday 13 December.
The Alice Project
Finding the miraculous …in the Hythe
Young people living in the Hythe rediscovered the streets of their
neighbourhood by taking part in an art project. Devised by the University
Gallery and Colchester Community Church, children who attend the K2 youth
club at Hythe Community Centre, mapped, explored, and photographed their
local streets, and created their own collaborative art work.
Their journey of discovery was inspired by Jorge Macchi’s ‘Buenos Aries
Tour’ which was part of the exhibition In Search of the Miraculous at the
University Gallery. Macchi’s tour of Buenos Aries began when he fractured
a pane of glass over a map of the city, and used the fractures as the
lines of his route. Instead, the children played a party game:
blindfolded, they pinned arrows on a giant map of the Hythe. From this he
children created an entirely new view of their community. Armed with
cameras, and accompanied by sound artist Penny Brice, the children took
photographs, while Penny recorded street sounds, and the children’s voices
as they described what they could see.
The result was a sound and photographic sequence of voices and images
made by the children and put together by Penny. The children also created
boxes in which to keep their diaries, photographs, maps and memories of
their experience.
As one child said: 'I saw things on my walk for the first time - things
that I had never even noticed before.' For those that took part in the
project, the ordinary was turned into the extraordinary; offering a
glimpse of the miraculous in the ‘everyday’.
Also in the printed December edition of Wyvern:
