Rachel Blackman
Rachel Blackman for Stillpoint presents:
STEAL COMPASS, DRIVE NORTH, DISAPPEAR
Created and Performed by Rachel Blackman Directed by Emma Kilbey
WINNER! Outstanding Theatre, Fringe Review Award 2010
WINNER! Best Female Performer, Brighton Festival & Fringe Award 2010
ZOO Southside 16-28 AUG 4pm (5pm)
Forming the second in Stillpoint’s Triptych: Three Attempts at Love, a collection of three poignant and powerful solo works traversing the human predicament of the struggle to love, Steal Compass….is a provocative and sensual piece created and performed by theatre maker Rachel Blackman, with the first of which, The Art of Catastrophe, winning high critical praise at Brighton Fringe Festival 2010.
Steal Compass… tells a witty, elegant and unflinching tale of Martin, whose professional life is blooming while his personal life is spiralling into chaos. Told through Martin’s own words and via the parallel lives of the women surrounding him in his life; his increasingly disappointed lover, his savvy performance poet wife, his adoring five year old daughter and his unimpressed biographer, Martin is eventually placed in a situation that he must confront. This poetic performance road trip explores professional success, personal chaos, Fellini and the tendency to disappear when the going gets tough.
Performed with Rachel’s exquisite physical capacity to embody each of the different characters, woven into a funny, moving and intelligently constructed narrative and made all the more extraordinary by bursts of powerful yet delicately poised physical storytelling, this is a rare theatrical treat not to be missed.
“Rachel Blackman has the rare ability to effortlessly and unselfconsciously merge poem and prose, abstract and literal, verbal and physical. Her writing is sparse, her characterisation is both gentle and savage, her themes of power, gender and identity feel unforced and timely.” Tim Crouch (Writer, Performer)
Stillpoint is a Brighton (UK) based theatre company that produce the work of performer/ theatre maker Rachel Blackman with various associate artists. Stillpoint create powerful devised work that combines integral physical language with dark humour and cinematic intimacy. Steal Compass… is the one of three solo pieces in Stillpoint’s body of work Triptych – Three Attempts at Love, a collection that also includes their critically acclaimed piece The Art of Catastrophe, and new piece The Growing Room (in final stages of development with the Brighton Festival and The Nightingale, presented as a work in progress at the Brighton International Festival in May 2011). This is Stillpoint’s first presentation in Edinburgh.
Rachel Blackman is an award winning performer, theatre maker and Artistic Director of Stillpoint. Previous solo work, Aperture won best script at the Sydney Fringe Festival. Recent credits include Ghosts in the Machine with choreographer Billy Cowie and the ongoing live theatre experiment Katy and Rach. She also appeared as Charra in Matrix Revolutions.
Emma Kilbey is a Brighton-based director, performer and Stillpoint associate artist. Former artistic director of Sweetspot Theatre, and co-creator of Radio City Theatre, her directing credits include The Caretaker (Marlborough), Baby with the Bathwater (Nightingale), Fame (Sallis Benney), The Fastest Clock in the Universe (Sweetspot), Talk (Sweetspot), The No 9 Bus to Utopia (Brighton Fringe, 2010).
