Block

2013: Work in progress:

Block was initially created following on from an concept from Ali Williams to make a show from a giant Jenga set. Before heading off for her sabbatical in Kathmandu she set up a trainee creation project "Over the cold winter months, NoFit State’s three trainee performers have been hard at work in our main space with director Paul Evans. Combining acrobatics, acrobalance and trampoline, Block explores construction and carnage. The piece sees Ellis, Emily and Lee construct and deconstruct towers using 24 x 4.5m blocks designed and made by RWCMD graduate Debs McShane.

The original trainee cast for this show was made up of
Emily Nichol, Lee Scott Tinnion, Ellis Grover, Blaze Tarsha. Nat Whittingham and Fred Rendell
and they worked with trainee producers Camille Beaumier and Emily Morgan

A work-in-progress showing was performed on Friday 1 February 2013 at 3pm, at NoFit State, John Street. On returning from Nepal in 2014 Ali looked at the documentation from the trainee project and decided it had great potential to be a new outdoor show.

2014

In 2014 Ali approached Kevin Finnan from Motionhouse. Ali and Kevin had been talking about a nofitstate/Motionhouse collaboration for a number of years and this seemed to be the ideal project to fuse Circus and Dance and for the companies to work together. Nofitstate applied to Arts Council Wales who committed to funding the next phase of R&D

2015:

A first date with Motionhouse took place. We ran five days of R&D in Feb and 5 more days in March, the cast was made up of six circus performers and 4 dancers with view to shrinking back to a cast of six to eight for the next phase. The research was directed by Kevin Finnan with Paul Evans as Circus Choreographer. On the 10th day of R&D we arranged a showing, invited the sector to give feedback and created a trailer which can be viewed below
The feedback from this first collaborative showing was extremely positive and a decision was made to raise money for creation and to tour the show in 2016. In Autumn 2015 we did a further four weeks of creation, also funded by ACW. This involved two weeks of focused circus development led by Paul Evans and two weeks of creating choreography led by Kevin. we have applied to Without Walls to fund the final two weeks of creation in April.

Cast for second R&D Phase
Kipat Kahumbu, Winston Reynolds, Axel Akke, Esther Fuge. Ali Stranger, Lee Tinnion, Andrew Davis, Danny Conner, Alasdair Stewart, Ariadna Girones Mata

Final Creation Credits
Creative Producer -Ali Williams
Artistic Director -Kevin Finnan
Choreographer and circus director -Paul Evans
Cast- Lee Tinnion, Andrew Davies, Amer Fernandez, Africa Llorens, Danny Conner, Alasdair Stewart, Luka Owen
Touring Booking - Camille Beaumier (NoFit State) and Jo Valentine (Motionhouse)

2016:

Final R&D at Le Citron Jaune - Centre National des Arts de la Rue in April, before world premiere at Norwich & Norfolk Festival. European tour follows with 74 performances in 7 different countries that reach 34,350 people. Further dates planned for 2017.