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apocryphal theatre was created as an experimental theatre laboratory in 2004 by Julia Lee Barclay with the mission to explore how we construct the world around us, listening for the voices that have not yet formed and experiences we have not yet named. With a focus on how we create sacred and secular spaces, we explore forms of improvisation through rules we create, which after being honed in The Lab are used as ways to structure the projects we work on with Julia’s texts. More recently we have also shown work in progress by individual company members which includes actors, dancers, musicians, live artists and visual artists from seven different countries. Our members currently include: Bill Aitchison, Lukas Angelini, Lucy Avery, Julia Lee Barclay, Alison Blunt, Zoe Bouras, Rachel Ellis, Birthe Jorgensen, Boris Kahnert, Jane Munro, Melina Seldes, Malin Ståhl and Theron Schmidt. Click here to see our Artistic Vision Click here to view biographies of the company members
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Apocryphal
Theatre’s artistic vision/desire/hope is to:
- written by Julia Lee Barclay (1999; revised for Apocryphal in 2005) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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photo © Alex Kent -----------------------------------------------------------------
Julia Lee Barclay is the founding director/writer of Apocryphal Theatre. She started the company as an exploratory lab in July 2004 at Camden People’s Theatre (CPT) (www.cptheatre.co.uk) where the lab still has its home. The lab was commissioned soon after to create an original piece of work for Hoxton Hall, which led to the company being created. Whilst the Hoxton Hall season fell through because of financial issues, Apocryphal went on to create Heart Oven Falling: Gotcha! a two person piece inspired by aphasic emails sent to Barclay by her father after a stroke and work the lab was doing on levels of presence. In 2006, Apocryphal produced The Jesus Guy, directed and written by Barclay, and created with lab members. This Arts Council funded show was presented at CPT and at universities throughout the UK. Apocryphal has shown its lab experiments in venues throughout London, including CPT, The Tate Modern, Lorem Ipsum Gallery and the 2:13 Club (an improvisational music venue at The Lion) and internationally. Currently, the company is beginning a new project based on Barclay’s most recent text Besides, you lose your soul or The History of Western Civilization, which is inspired by her reading of a New Yorker article about the inefficiencies of the use of torture, whichended with an Army general saying “and besides, you lose your soul.” Barclay created her first experimental theater lab in 1997 in New York City, originally under the umbrella of Monkey Wrench Theatre (1994-1998) and subsequently supported by The Present Company (www.presentcompany.org) from 1998-2001. Both labs (1997-1999 and 2000-2001) presented work at FringeNYC (produced by The Present Company), which led to Barclay being asked to teach a workshop based on this work at Chisenhale Dance Space in London, where she met two of her collaborators in Apocryphal. Cathy Turner watched this workshop which led to her writing the article ‘Cutting It Up: Julia Barclay’s Downtown New York Theatre’ for Performance Research published in 2002. Word to Your Mama was originally produced in 2000 by Screaming Venus for FringeNYC and was awarded an OOBR award for excellence and anthologized in Plays and Playwrights 2001. The Present Company subsequently produced Barclay’s texts Word to Your Mama and No One for a London and NYC tour in 2003. In December 2007 she directed a performative reading of Besides, you lose your soul at The Brick in New York City, working with actors she had worked with for years before moving to London. With this reading, she launched Apocryphal-NYC and is in discussions about future joint NYC-London projects with producers and venue managers in both cities. Barclay’s writing encompasses cut-ups of found text, rants, raves, dreams, newscasts, advertising campaigns and general dispatches from the daily horror-show-Happy-Meal. Her directorial approach was inspired by directing The Serpent at Wesleyan University in 1983, which involved actors improvising to discover the territory indicated in a text that had been created in collaboration with Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre and written by Jean-Claude van Itallie. She was further inspired by attending a lecture by John Cage in 1986, in which she heard his music created by a combination of random-chance and improvisation using five different orchestras. The music sounded to her like human thought and she has wanted to create the theatrical equivalent ever since. With Apocryphal she seeks ways to engage with performers and audiences to create theatrical events that can enliven the eye and the ear to the moment in the room, but also unearth the cultural assumptions that create that room. Barclay also collaborates with Bill Aitchison under the name AB to create site-specific work that blurs the boundaries between art and life by making work that is accessible to the audience through active participation in creating their own adventures and enjoyment.
Lucy Avery has been Assistant Director with Apocryphal Theatre since graduating from the MA Theatre Practices degree at Rose Bruford in 2005, working on The Jesus Guy, Has It Started Yet?, Cut Up Close Up and various other lab showings at Camden People's Theatre and beyond. Currently exploring her writing Lucy had her first short play The Last Request published by Brand Literary Magazine in 2007. As director/designer Lucy’s credits include: Silence By Harold Pinter (The Barn Theatre, Rose Bruford) A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter and Footfalls and Come and Go by Samuel Beckett (Malt Hall, Lymington), and as assistant director: Everything is Illuminated (Etcetera Theatre), The Quaker Walk (Artifice), The Day It Rained (The Gantry Youth Theatre). She has also worked with new writers and a composer, devised through theatre-in-education projects, assisted with wardrobe at the Sevenoaks Playhouse and has worked as company manager on The Venus Blazing Tour with Lou Stein Associates.
Birthe Jorgensen is a Fine Art Sculptor and Photographer, educated at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, among other places in Artreview Magazine's exhibition 'Ten of the Best', showcasing editor in Chief Ossian Ward's bid for the future art scene. Her work includes Pauses of varying lengths, One day round about, Collaborations with a Greenlandic Mask Dancer and Attempted landscapes. With a group of fellow artists she has recently been commissioned by The Learning Trust to transform 13 institutional gardens into impermanent embodiments of spectacular imaginary places. In September 2006 she will be delivering a lecture at Iceland Academy of Visual Art on this subject.
Boris Kahnert studied Theatre, Philosophy and German Literature in Bochum and Berlin and gained an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice in London. He worked extensively as lighting designer and technician and also as performer, dramaturge and contributor for exhibitions. He is currently researching the conditions of mutual perceiving in the context of performance.
Jane Munro trained at the Laban Centre, and performed for independent dance companies, including Tara Brandel Dance Company, touring nationally and performing in London based festivals Resolutions and Spring Loaded. She worked as a technique and dance teacher while completing her MA in Choreography at the University of Surrey in 1999. In 2000 Jane began creating her own dance theatre works, performing site-specific piece Dress at the Plunge Club London, presenting her film Mine at the Dance on Screen Festival, The Place, 2001 and her work Sweet Things Shift at The Place in 2002. Jane received a scholarship to pursue a practice-based Ph.D in 2002 to research 21st Century Dance Theatre. She presented her intimate dance theatre work, In Your Shoes at Manchester Metropolitan University and Clarence Mews, London in 2003 and 2004. Alongside choreographing, Jane also performs in both dance and theatre pieces including co-devised piece I’m Going Outside and I May Be Sometime with Cathy Turner at the Phoenix Theatre, Exeter in 2003. Jane performed with Apocryphal Theatre at Camden Peoples Theatre in June 2005 and took part in the Action Theatre project as part of the Artists Programme at Chisenhale Dance Space in July 2005.
Melina Seldes (www.fingersix.com)
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“A myriad of questions spew out and decisions must be made” –excerpt from Zoë Bouras’ performance diary for The Jesus Guy
photo © Alex Kent
photo (Boris Kahnert) © Alex Kent 
photo (Jane Munro) © Alex Kent