The VAULT Festival is coming to town! From January 24th to March 18th, over three hundred new shows explode across a festival of festivals in their Waterloo home. With new venues, new bars, new food and plenty of surprises, VAULT 2018 is the biggest, fairest platform in London for artists to present innovative, daring work. Today we had a chat with RedBellyBlack and their piece at VAULT Festival 2018, Ok, Bye.
The all-girl and all-grr production team behind RedBellyBlack Theatre is bringing a newly devised show called Ok, Bye to VAULT 2018, following a merry old time at last year’s festival with People’s Choice Award Winner A Year From Now.
Kate and Vicki, who have co-created several of RedBellyBlack’s shows, like to ask each other awkward questions. (It’s all that coffee we drink. It lowers the inhibitions and makes us chatty.) All of our shows have come from conversations we’ve had about stuff that we find difficult to say, like “where are we going to be in a year?” which became A Year From Now, and “pretty much everything ends, doesn’t it? Weird.” which became Ok, Bye. We had the idea for this particular show over two years ago when we were working on a completely different production, so it’s a long-term passion project that we can’t wait to show people. The basic idea is that we asked ourselves (and a lot of other people) what really happens at the end of things. Life is made up of saying goodbye to stuff, whether it’s a job or a house or a waste-of-space lover, and we wanted to know what really happens when the fat lady inevitably sings.
At the heart of this piece is the idea that saying goodbye is really ok. It can suck sometimes, and a lot of the time it hurts, but sometimes it’s amazing and liberating. We may not even realise that we’re doing it. We like to tell stories in all sorts of different ways: we use live music on stage, we write from our own lives, we interview people about their experiences and we love creating powerful movement sequences. We believe that no two stories are the same, so we tell each one in a unique and personal way.
Using our signature style of physical theatre and devised storytelling, three actors will demonstrate what people actually mean when they say “goodbye”. Expect joy, disaster and, above all, a memorable experience.
OK, Bye is running at the VAULT Festival from the 7th to the 11th of March at 19:45. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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