Elastic Theatre: Julius
Elastic Theatre, winner of the 2012 Fringe Report Award for Best Theatre Company, spans performance genres and techniques, moving from music theatre and opera through dance to site-specific and digital work. Its projects are designed to be adaptable to any space. For each location or context, Elastic Theatre challenges itself to radically re-invent productions. In 2011 the company presented Baroque Box as part of the Greenwich and Docklands Festival and featured a large box under the colonnades at the Old Royal Naval College, which became the window into seventeenth century ideas about the human body.
Our support was for the research and development of a new production, Julius, a multimedia dance-opera where an adolescent growing up in 1950s rural Italy begins to experience intrusive thoughts about himself as a Roman Emperor. Inspired by the surreal cinematography of Federico Fellini, the performance will explore the nature of obsessional thoughts and the superstitious beliefs associated to them.
As part of the developmental process Elastic Theatre, with our support, has collaborated with film production company Savage Mills on the filming and production of the first version of a multi-media piece that will be central to the final work. The script was researched with the help of UK’s leading experts in the field of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and in collaboration with GV Art Gallery, Bethlem Museum, The Facility (LMU) and OCD Action. The project, conceived and directed by Jacek Ludwig Scarso, features an original score by Ivan Hussey of Celloman and designs by Nadia Malik. The cast includes dancer Adam Kirkham, circus performer Joachim Ciocca, actress Chiara D'Anna, soprano Maya Sapone and baritone Nicolas Simeha.
The making of Julius was launched at the Pave D’Orsay in Paris, as part of BAW’s New Voices New Projects, in February 2012. The project will continue to be developed across 2013, with an additional Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust. It has been selected to be co-produced by Spitalfields Music Festival 2013 in its completion, to premiere in June 2013 and to be screened across the duration of the festival.
JULIUS has been part of the OCDFilmFest organised by OCD Texas http://ocdfilmfest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/julius.html (screened in Texas and online). It will also be screened at the inauguration of a new unit at Royal Bethlem Hospital next Tuesday and is pencilled for the National Conference on OCD in November 2012.
Julius: a new multi-media work by Elastic Theatre
As part of GV Art’s Theatre of the Mind season
24 August - 29 September 2012
Elastic Theatre, winner of the 2012 Fringe Report Award for Best Theatre Company, presents its first multi-media work, exploring a coming of age story of intrusive thoughts and compulsive rituals. Supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, this is the first instalment of a creative journey investigating the triggers of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, imaginatively depicted through Elastic Theatre’s trademark fusion of physical performance and contemporary opera.
Consisting of a multi-screen film installation, Julius delves into the imagination of an adolescent boy in rural Italy, who learns from his flamboyant teacher about the life, times and many lovers of Julius Caesar. As intrusive images of himself as a Roman emperor repeatedly flash in his mind, he attempts to erase these by performing increasingly complex rituals. The characters who are most intimately involved in Julius’s life are also the protagonists of his obsessions: alongside his Teacher, they include his Grandmother, a Priest and Julius’s closest friend, Brutus.
