Chapter 6
2008-2010

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First large scale outdoor experiment to re-stage routines from ImMortal on the "doughnut staging", outdoors, for Swindon Festival. This led to the Parklife Enquiry.

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ACE gave a grant of £156,800 (this is the highest project grant ever given to a circus company by ACE)

Ali convinces Indian Customs Officer that she is a trapeze artist, in order to blag her way through Customs with all the equipment! (4 mins)

In December, funding from the British Council enabled NFSC to take a specially commissioned work (loosely based on Macbeth) to Mumbai as a part of the Mood Indigo Festival.

Restaged Immortal for a student festival in Mumbai a week after the big terror attack. Travel funded by British Council and everyone on a freebie. A week of rehearsals without rigging set and instruments that were all impounded at customs until the day before the show, audience of 3000 being fed through one metal detector , turning into a riot and the audience being chased off campus by riot police . managed to perform several hours later.

Many many stories about this one! (Ali W)

Parklife Enquiry - Go to Show Page

Originally titled The Great Outdoor Circus Enquiry, the Parklife project is a large scale creative conversation to explore and develop ideas for large scale outdoor circus performance, new ways of working and new ways of creating extraordinary experiences for our audiences. The conversation can happen in many modes – singing / music, theatre devising, circus skills training, exchanging skills and approaches with other practitioners, engaging with objects and equipment, site responsive work, public engagement – and will include collaboration and creative exchanges between professional artists and creative practitioners at all levels of professional development, creative community groups, the passing public and anyone else who wants to join in. The conversation has begun with a creative development week, ‘It’s A Week’, which took place outside a derelict warehouse off the Millennium Coastal Path in Llanelli, South Wales.

Parklife has been commissioned by the Without Walls consortium of UK arts festivals. The first Parklife residency will be at Stockton International Riverside Festival 24th July – 1st August 2009. Residencies planned for 2010 include Brighton Festival and Norfolk and Norwich Festival. We hope that the Parklife project will result in some great ideas for a large scale outdoor circus performance in 2011.
Creative Director’s report

Without Walls ( Parklife!)

In February we were invited to tender for a Without Walls commission (Without walls is a consortium of English Festivals who commission new works)

The distinctive performance language of Immortal was developed through a series of large scale collaborations between artists and communities (Stepping Stones Trilogy). We decided we would like to return to the creative spirit and ethos of these collaborations in order to invent a performance language for outdoor contexts.

In 2008, we were invited to stage a large scale outdoor community performance as part of Swindon Summer Festival and were able to begin a process of enquiry into the creative potential of outdoor circus.

This experience raised a number of key questions for further exploration:
• How to effectively showcase high level circus skills for audiences of several thousand?
• What theatrical format and structure will enable us to engage large numbers of audience in a meaningful, memorable and inspiring experience?
The tender to Without Walls was successful and we have been working with Orit to develop this new performance project which has been commissioned by Stockton 2009, Norfolk and Norwich 2010 and Brighton 2010. We will be resident in local parks for a week, work with local communities and create festival finale shows at each venue. The project begins with a week of set development, followed by a week of creative development with the CAST ( a mixture of professionals, emerging artists and community volunteers)

NoFit State hurled the tent off its circus to unleash a fiesta of invention, spectacle and creative collision. Parklife reinvented what is possible in public space, and created an exuberant new form of outdoor circus theatre.
Parklife brought an impressive aerial playground to the public and embarked upon a creative journey before their very eyes.
100 deck chairs invited passers-by and local residents to join a joyful open-air circus residency. With parklife, NoFit State drew in the energy, passion and talents of communities up and down the UK through taster workshops, open house rehearsals, impromptu performances and early morning happenings.
Cheerleaders, kickboxers, freerunners and belly dancers worked together with out international company of world class circus artists to craft thrilling large scale outdoor shows, uniquely for and by the community.
Parklife pushed the boundaries of what can happen in public space to deliver a powerful, inspiring and spectacular celebration of the passion people share for what they do.

A restaging of ImMortal routines at The Big Chill music festival with artists from ImMortal that were not on tour with Tabu.

Eastnor Castle

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For photos go to main site

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We wanted to explore how we might develop our style of circus into theatre spaces. Stretching the Wire was a series of weeklong workshops led by different directors and choreographers, each with their own approach and artistic interest. We invited performers we were interested to work with to participate in this lab based training programme.There was an informal showing at the end of each week and a discussion about which skills and approaches we might like to develop in a theatre show. We worked with: Frank Armstrong (Voice), Kevin Brooking (Clown), Angela DeCastro (Clown), Liam Steel (Physical theatre), Amit Lahav (Physical theatre), Mladen Materick (Visual theatre) and Firenza Guidi (physical theatre); the Lab process was facilitated by Orit Azaz.

The download is a copy of the Info for Artists.

You can also find the Evaluation Report here

During the project planning stages of the 4 Elms development, the church sold The Annexe and NoFit State was forced to look for a temporary home elsewhere, to bridge the gap between leaving the Annexe, and the completion of the 4 Elms development. The Welsh National Opera rehearsal rooms in John St became available, and NoFit State took on the building on a 5 year lease, with a break clause after 2 years that could be invoked by either party.

"NoFit State has moved into a new home in the centre of Cardiff. The company has taken over what used to be the WNO building in John Street, Cardiff. The building will become the office and rehearsal space for the company, a space for professionals to train and develop work and the base for community activity. The company runs classes for people of all ages in all sorts of circus skills including trapeze, acrobalance, chinese pole, rope, silks, juggling, unicycling.

The company is looking for people who need rehearsal space and wish to hire great space at very competitive rates. We have two large spaces, a fully rigged main training space and a large dance studio. The building is bigger than our current needs and we’d like to share our space with other arts organisations that need space for rehearsal, training or classes."