Tamsin Clarke – After Nuestra CASA Scratch Night

Friday, October 11th, 2013

Popelei Theatre
writes Tamsin Clarke

How will you develop your piece after this night? What is your next step? Do you think this experience is helping you develop as an artist? If so, how?

So the festival has been and gone in a flurry of exciting theatre, fun workshops and friendly people – all topped off with lots of beers and bum wiggling to fine Latin music. What a hoot!
The stress and nerves from the scratch night on Monday seems long gone, transformed instead into feelings of excitement and anticipation. Manuela took the stage with her hearty musician and she came alive. She popped out of my head and off the page, out through my words and into the lights – and it was truly exhilarating.

I am and I guess I always will be, a performer at heart. Writing is fun but for me there is really nothing like being on stage. And for that reason it was so nice to be up there with my creation and enjoy it. The audience were incredibly generous and the whole thing felt like magic. My relationship with Jamie developed so sweetly onstage – there was no way of predicting or rehearsing for such a genuine encounter. The moment of the blackout at the end I desperately wanted to continue. I knew there was so much more in my head that I wanted to share.

And so it is back to writing I go. I am going to get stuck into finishing the script; ready with new ideas and thoughts that came from the 15-minute performance as well as the great feedback I received from participants, organisers and audience members afterwards. Once that has been written, ripped apart, re-written and eventually finalized, the plan is to get together with Jamie again and start rehearsing it early in the New Year. Then we will see how we get on. Ideally, I would like to translate it into Spanish and take us off to South America to perform it for a Latin audience. Maybe Edinburgh?
We’ll see what happens.

What I can say with absolute certainty is that having the opportunity to put together 15 minutes for the CASA festival scratch night and getting the chance to perform it at RichMix to a smiling bunch of people, was a huge leap forward in the development of this project. I would still be sitting behind my computer typing away if it hadn’t been for this festival. The support from my wonderful mentor Malu Ansaldo was invaluable and I’m really looking forward to staying in touch and working with the whole CASA team in the future.
Any opportunity to perfect your craft and do what you love will always help you develop as an artist-so gracias CASA for this chance.

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