Toasted

Congratulations team Toast! The Brisbane Festival season wrapped up on Sunday. Thanks to all you Brisbane folk who made it to the show. We had a fantastic time in your sunny city. Thanks also to Brisbane Festival for having us! If you’re still in Brisbane, there’s another week to go of great shows. We all managed to see Cantina, and were blown away. Go see it!

For those of you who didn’t make it to Neon Toast, here is a review of the lastest season.

Check out the gallery for the latest production pics. Video to come.

Peace from team Neon Toast.

We have lift off

We had a great first show tonight, with a lovely warm audience. Tech is over. Dress is over. Even opening night is over. And we mean O-V-A-H. But the show is not! Three more performances to go…

Aint Brisbane a little bit pretty though. Nice ferries. Well done.

Brisbane Festival poster boy and sidekick

The Turtle

Pretty in a Twin Peaks kind of way

Brisbane or bust

We’ve had our showing for colleagues and friends, we had our final rehearsal last night, and today we get on a big bird and head up to BrisVegas. Woop woop. Spare us a thought as we convince the check-in crew at Tiger Airways to let us put our bucket on as luggage…

And a big thank you to Ellie’s mum, who sent us this beautiful chookas!

FLY-YA

It feels like we are flying now. We had a run on Saturday for our outside eyes Vicky and Hayley who gave us lots of constructive feedback and guided us on expertly. Ellie is sewing madly, getting costumes ready for our dress rehearsal/showing next week for friends and colleagues. It’s that time where decisions are to be made and costumes to be finished. The flyer has been approved by Brisbane Festival…to the printers!

Show us your ute

Dodging oncoming cars and entertaining passers by, we took advantage of the three minutes of sun today to get a few shots.

Lean on me

 

Another day in the office

News: Richard Sneddon joins the team

The smooth sounds of Richard Sneddon’s original piano solos will now form the soundtrack of Neon Toast. While a big black bucket becomes a luxury bath and three strangers prepare themselves for their date while recounting the type of person they hope to meet tonight, Richard’s romantic music will set the mood. Thanks to muckle pup for making this connection happen.

Ellie might come out of the sack now we've got some music for the classified scene

Ellie and Zac are good in the sack(s)

We had a very productive rehearsal last Saturday. Vicky Kapo, our outside eye and mentor came along and helped us work on the ‘sack dance’. We’ve transformed these regular flour sacks into underwater creatures.

muckle pup composed a new track for the dance and he’s adding the final touches to it now. Think deep sea, sonar, breathing.

Hayley Dallimore also came last rehearsal and helped us work on the scenes in the bakery between Harry the hard-working baker, and the two ladies who come to interview him and change his life.

A pause for breath

 

This bit is noisy! The bags make a really satisfying sounds when they are in action like this.

 

Sea creature meets sea creature

Neon Toast to show at Brisbane Festival September 15-19

Brisbane Festival 2010 has invited us to show Neon Toast in the Under the Radar program this September. We are very excited about this.

Our collaborator Kerrily moved to bigger pastures in London, and now we have a great dancer Zac Jones who has joined the team and taken up the task of re-developing the show with us for the Brisbane Festival season.

We are in rehearsal at the moment, and are making some fantastic discoveries. We are re-developing lots of the material and in lots of cases, making whole new sections. Zac and Ellie have a great rapport together as dancers and the new material is getting us all very excited about the upcoming season in Brisbane. 

Stay tuned for rehearsal pic and updates. And hope to see you Brisbane-ites at the show in September.

The show is on 15-19 September, at Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts. To book, click here.

In the beginning, there was toast…

To make great bread you need the right ingredients, the right chemistry and the right timing. The same can be said of finding love.

The beginning

Neon Toast was first created by Kerrily Aitchison, Eleanor Riley and Rachael Dyson-McGregor for the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2009.

The show is about Harry, a hard-working, lonely baker whose world is changed forever by the interest a woman shows him after coming to interview him about his craft. Love and the way we humans search for it is the main focus of the show, and after exploring hundreds of classified ads and online dating sites, these attempts at relationship have been physicalised into theatre, dance and character sequences that intercept Harry’s world.

The show is humourous, energetic and heart-warming. It explores the funny side of finding love, the emotional side and the out-right bizzare.

Our trio being comprised of two dancers and an actor who had worked together previously in interdisciplinary forms, we created a work using contemporary dance, character based narrative and a form that lies between the languages of theatre and dance. You could call it physical theatre, or theatre and dance collaboration, it has many names, but I like to call it the space in between theatre and dance. Its what happens when dancers and actors get together to create material based on a common theme. Its not quite narrative theatre, but its not quite dance either. Neon Toast has all three elements, and the blend makes for a very entertaining and exciting evening at the theatre.

Here are some highlights of the 2009 show