The decision to adapt Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms came about for a number of reasons, the most important of which was a shared admiration among us for the novel. In fact, Soul Sister a musical which I’d co-written a few years earlier (and which was nominated for an Olivier award in 2012) contained […]
6 Degrees Below the Horizon had a very turbulent birth. It started life as a British Council project called Tales from the Bar of Lost Souls, a collaboration between three countries and three artistic groups: imitating the dog, The National Theatre of Greece and The Cyprus Theatre Organisation. We decamped to Athens for a month […]
Day 2 By the second day of the exchange, everybody was feeling a little bit more comfortable with each other. The initial ‘nice to meet you’ barriers were down, and we were starting feel more like a group who were working collectively. This notion of belonging was also the starting point for Bradley Smith’s session […]
Day 1 On a rainy a Lancaster Friday, a group of artists shared pizza, drinks and exchanged pleasantries. Fuelled by the community spirit and inspiration provided by Daniel Bye’s Tiny Heroes; this group were meeting to exchange more than just pleasantries, we were meeting to exchange ideas. Last weekend saw imitating the dog and Lancaster […]
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 […]