imitating the dog, one of the UK’s most original and innovative performance theatre companies is one of 20 teams selected to take part in this year’s CreativeXR programme. The northwest-based company has been making ground-breaking work for theatres and other spaces for more than 20 years. Their work, which fuses live performance with digital technology, […]
The Zero Hour, or Stunde Null as it was originally called, was my third show with ITD and it drew on a number of preoccupations that I share with my colleagues Andrew and Simon. As fathers with relatively young children inevitably the first among these is a concern for what the future holds, particularly for […]
Heart of Darkness was written in 1899 at what retrospectively we can see was a transitional period in world history. What we understand now as global capitalism, and which had been anticipated by Marx and Engels half a century earlier, was beginning to be recognised by progressive intellectuals like Conrad who were appalled by European […]
Kellerman, made in 2007 and premiered in its full version in 2008, was ITD’s first large-scale work. Looking back, I am amazed how ambitious we were given that we did not have a reputation for making work that might tour to middle scale venues, nor the infrastructure to actually get venues on board to show […]
In 2003, I was feeling a bit lost. I’d worked on a commercial musical a couple of years earlier which had crashed and burned. Everybody I’d ever worked with seemed to becoming either rich, famous or both, and honestly, I was wondering whether the theatre and I had mutually given up on each other. So, […]
Here’s co-artistic director Simon Wainwright, who leads on production and video design for imitating the dog, answering a few questions about the company’s unusual design process. What makes your approach to production design and scenography different to that of other theatre companies? ‘First and foremost, it is the way in which the design […]
What’s in a name: the early years imitating the dog: a name that was born from the need to have a company title for an application to the National Student Drama Festival that was taking place in Scarborough in 1998. I remember hours of throwing different ideas around and then, in desperation, looking […]
Why is imitating the dog staging Heart of Darkness? ‘First of all, it’s a novel that we have often referred to when making our work. And what’s interesting about the novel is how much it has influenced other novels, and films – Apocalypse Now, for example. And the figure of Marlow, the man […]
Hello, my name’s Marco Turcich and along with my colleague Morven Macbeth I’ve recently had the pleasure of working in Porto Alegre, Brazil as part of the annual international festival Porto Alegre Em Cena. imitating the dog had been asked to hold a 10 day workshop residency ‘Redux – Night of the Living Dead’, culminating […]
Last month I went to Ancona, to direct Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) for Teatro delle Muse. It was only my second opera following on from Tosca two years ago at the same theatre. Directing opera is tricky, there are often a lot of people on the stage; in this case sometimes […]