AREN'T PEOPLE KIND


FIRST UP BEST DRESSED

'It's the smaller work or the single, fully-formed idea that is often the most engaging... Stadium Rock's brilliant First Up Best Dressed offers the chance to tell the story behind a piece of clothing you are wearing and then swap it for somebody else's garments.'
The Guardian, (Lyn Gardner) as part of Micro Festivals round up.

'The microfestival at BAC was a vibrant and buzzing combination of short experiences, fuller scripted pieces, sound work, music, installations and intimate performances – one highlight being the items of clothing dotted around, inviting you to take them in exchange for an item of your own, and its story.

www.hannahnicklin.com/


EACH OF US - Audience Feedback

'Congratulations on the show. I enjoyed it immensely... they did themselves and you proud. It made me laugh and cry – that’ll be theatre then!'

'I thought it was a lovely show, and was really moved by it.'


CABLE - Audience Feedback

‘I really enjoyed Friday night's performance. It was a slightly unsettling experience but I very much enjoyed the journey... it was very like musical improvisation. I liked when the music got SO LOUD we couldn't hear what was being said...'

'The show made me think I was listening to a stream of consciousness/someones inner thoughts/ dreams and memories and at times I felt like I shouldn't be there. I felt it was about memories and subconscious thoughts…'

'I was first of all interested in this (to me) strange new genre. At the show at the Arches I was TOTALLY engaged from start to finish. I could have watched/listened for longer. I felt connected to the performers as they told their own stories. I liked their little ‘home bases’. I enjoyed the improvisational feel. I liked the sounds. There was SO MUCH to look at.

It was about experimenting with art forms. It was about storytelling. And loneliness. And city life. And relationships.It was about entertainment.

I liked the ‘gig’ feel of it. I liked the lighting. I liked the 3 very different characters. My favourite bit of dialogue was when John and Kim REALLY chatted in the supermarket. I’d like to see that developed I wanted more of the spontaneous drawing.

I really did enjoy it very much, and hope Cable continues to exist…'

‘I think that the piece was really brave and played with form and was genuinely risk-taking and I think in terms of the colour of the whole [Arches Live]festival it was a valuable addition.’


The Scotsman Review of The Marshmallow Test ****(Joyce McMillan)

'Back at the Forest Cafe, meanwhile, it was time for The Marshmallow Test, a clever and hugely promising 35-minute interlude by the Edinburgh-based performance group Stadium Rock, based on an experiment in which all-American kids were told that if they could resist eating a marshmallow for 20 minutes, they could have another one. Stadium Rock seem a bit ambivalent about the ideas around deferred gratification that informed this test; they pile on the fluffy pink marshmallow imagery, bombard us with pink balloons, and leave us with a strong suggestion that if we want to eat the marshmallow of life, then we damn well should.'



The Herald Review of The Marshmallow Test (Neil Cooper)

'Back in the scientific Sixties, boffins seeking to explain and expound upon the nature versus nurture debate put infants through a series of increasingly ludicrous behavioural studies to ascertain how they were shaped, and indeed shaping up. The Edinburgh-based Stadium Rock company take Walter Mischel's most famous candy-coated parlour game as their starting point for Marshmallow Test, a playful multimedia treatise on temptation, pleasure, self-control, deferred gratification, out and out desire and other things little girls may or may not still be made of when they grow up.

Over 25 minutes in duration, performers Xana Maclean and Katy Wilson, alongside electronic musician Dougal Marwick, recreate the test in a work-in-progress that's already a fluffy pink confection of a show.'


SAC Artistic Evaluation of DeoxyriboNucleic Acid

Overall rating - Excellent
DIRECTION: Absolutely terrific direction (Xana Maclean) – tight, well rehearsed and with a deep understanding of the play, the director used the talents of her young cast to the full, giving each one value. The staging was innovative and always interesting, This was especially important in a very wordy play, but the direction gave the words full value – we were never in doubt as to the play’s theme although the direction was never obvious , sometimes quite abstract in fact.
USE OF MUSIC - One of the actors operated an onstage sound system playing hard core dance music – very effective, very appropriate.



Audience Member comment on The Other Red Shoes

‘The Other Red Shoes was a uniquely conceived and innovatively executed piece of verbatim theatre.' (Audience member)



Edinburgh Evening News review of Fugee **** (Darren Scott)

'If you saw a group of 17 Scottish teenagers in hoodies and skin-tight jeans hanging around, you probably wouldn’t expect them to both entertain and inform you at the same time. That was exactly the case with the Royal Lyceum’s remarkable youth company’s latest production, staged at the Traverse this weekend... Expertly realised, the audience quickly knew where the narrative was taking place, despite the set consisting of only five large red boxes, with the cast seated onstage at all times.'


Scotsman review of DeoxyriboNucleic Acid *** (Joyce McMillan)

The set and sound design (by director Xana Maclean with Paul Rodger and Philip Pinsky) are as cool and evocative as the acting is fine.


Reviews of Natura Morte Here:

www.thearches.co.uk/theatre.htm



The Scotsman Review of Cable - as part of Arches Live round up(Joyce McMillan)

'There was the shouty Cable by Stadium Rock of Edinburgh, a show full of sharp urban stories and amazing sounds; but unable to shape itself in any way that would hold the attention.'


Testimonial from participant in the NTS Exchange Project

‘In 2006 myself, along with eight members of the Lyceum Youth Theatre embarked on the process of creating a devised performance as part of the NTS Exchange Project. The group and Xana were keen for our performance to be dynamic, experimental and completely original. Therefore over the next few weeks Xana planned workshops which would explore varying ways of coming up with material. The first was using pictures, photographs and pieces of text as stimuli. Following this Xana instructed the group to go out and observe people in the street, and pick an individual to base a character on. We then worked on physicalising this character. However the most challenging workshop was to create a solo piece using this character with a medium of our choice, such as writing or dance etc. [...] Xana kept the group creatively open, motivated and challenged which resulted in a successful performance which was diverse, dynamic and also felt very personal to the group.’


The Herald Review of Chatroom **** (Neil Cooper)

Teenage dreams aren’t the only things that mess up a young person’s bedroom after dark. Access to the internet has opened up an online world that has made hanging about street corners being bored pretty much redundant. That doesn’t prevent an equally familiar teen angst taking root, however, as the rise of suicide and self-harm chatrooms makes clear.
Enda Walsh’s play, commissioned by Shell Connections and performed here by the Lyceum Youth Theatre, opens up a clandestine world where idle chatter about the merits of Harry Potter and the proclivities of Britney Spears Hit Me Baby One More Time video can suddenly lurch into a call for J K Rowling’s assassination. More destructive urges manifest themselves in the tortured figure of Jim, who seeking only to offload his troubles, is manipulated into becoming a potential martyr for his own lost generation.
Some dark material this, which Xana Maclean’s sensitively handled production neither sentimentalises nor flinches away from, with Walsh’s hip, knife edge text given added poignancy by a pulsing, slo-mo sound collage operated live by LyT members.
In style, Maclean has utilised some of the signatory gestures of Suspect Culture, while the largely static, pretty-maids-in-a-row staging resembles that of Sarah Kane’s Crave. More importantly, Maclean has drawn some remarkable performances from a bright, brave cast, who, given the tender, wise age they are, are only too aware of the issues they’re dealing with.
Steven Croall as Jim is particularly brave, as he finally unleashes his child within with gloriously unselfconscious abandon. Such an upbeat ending may seem like a cop-out, but, in its sheer audacity, its affirmation of life suggests our blind youth may not be so doomed after all.

Scotsman Review of I Love You Numb *** (Joyce McMillan)

‘Katie-Anne is young, pregnant and still dealing with the memories of a childhood darkened by her mother’s mental illness. Jennifer runs the cafe where Katie-Anne finds work, but has her own obsessive compulsive problems; and between them they strive towards a way of being friends, and of living with mental health issues, rather than becoming victims of them.
Cat in a Cup specialise in theatre for children and young people; and in this imaginative and haunting show, they use a chorus of seven young women, as well as two professional actors, Lucy Gaizely and Catriona MacInnes – to create a 60 minute piece that’s more like a meditation in music and movement and fragments of dialogue, than any kind of conventional play. In a sense, the show can do little more, in this format, than raise a few questions and conjure up a few powerful images.
But the performances are eloquent, Xana McLean’s direction is strong and thoughtful. The live electronic music is beautiful; and the look of the show, designed in rich reds and stainless steel by Claire Halleran – is memorable, a fine arena for a dance like struggle between mental; life and death that, as a programme note reminds us, affects one in five people in Scotland every year.’


A World Away // evaluations showed that:

100% of schools agreed the performance was entertaining and enjoyable and 100% agreed that the music was suitable and appropriate