New Site - coming soon

Chihuahua design are now hard at work on the new Avanti site. There will be a new archive and a more logical navigation system, this blog will be integrated, diary and project pages will allow anyone so inclined to keep up with what we are up to. There will be a big effort here at Avanti HQ to update and refresh the content, a memo has gone round all departments already. Trawling through the archives its amazing what you find, here is a flyer from our days of running a comedy venue. Notice that...... 50p off for OAPs. Bargain!

Mike Lister

Mike Lister and I made our first show as a duo in 1987 and proudly declared that ‘having pulled ourselves out of the gutter our future lay on the pavement’. We had worked together for the previous five years touring outdoor shows to play schemes and had even made it to Glastonbury. But it was in ‘87 that Avanti Display became just the two of us. We worked as The Crayfish Twins, The Shedmen and Percy and Stubbsy in the Rickshaw, in the nineties we had a flirtation with stand up comedy and even opened a comedy club. The Steamy was in Manchester in the damp cellar of The Old Steam Brewery pub just off Oxford Road and there we hosted many acts from the burgeoning stand up comedy circuit with us as comperes filling in the gaps between performers with surreal routines. It was always quite a last minute struggle to write new material each week, I will never forget the humane killer when we performed an unrehearsed ‘swords-through-the-box’ routine with Mike dressed as a pantomime cow!

In 1993 we began touring internationally when we made our first trip to Spain with The Fountain Machine, but it took off spectacularly from 1995 after success in France at Challon dans la Rue with The Spurting Man. I had designed this show to fly on the personnel baggage allowance for two people and so we were really on the road, the one to Manchester airport. It was exciting to be so in demand, I suppose like a band that has a hit single, we were off. In 2000 we made the first of several versions of Hydromania at The National Theatre it was a logical development of The Spurting Man and this led Mike into creating his own large scale works, Albatross and Stormbringer. My ambitions led me in a different direction and we made separate work from then on, coming together whenever there was a Hydromania project.

This year Mike made the decision to leave Avanti Display and the outdoor arts world behind and open a café, it may seem an unusual move but its one Mike has talked about for years, once being outbid by Mick Hucknall, the well known ginger pop star, when one of the railway arches in the Castlefield Basin came up for sale. It subsequently became a swanky bar rather than the rustic tavern, offering earthenware jugs of Spanish wine, which Mike had envisaged. So now there is The Cherry Orchard in Chorlton where Mike can be found, generous as ever, dispensing coffee, specialty teas and if you are in luck his Borscht soup. Just at the moment there is a photographic exhibition of early Avanti shows black and white images of us learning the trade. I wish him the best of luck. At least he’s made it off the pavement after 27 years.

Reliquary Film

Here is a link to the short film about Reliquary made by Without Walls.  Its always a bit painful to hear and see oneself talking about the work, I would always to prefer the work to speak for itself but perhaps thats just me.

Photo is by Olipix.

Autumn dates 6 Impossible Things

6 Impossible Things our Rural Arts touring show will play three dates in November. Here they are.

Saturday 14th November
The Theatre at Beachborough School
Westbury
NN13 5LB
Saturday 21 November
Fownhope New Memorial Hall
Fownhope
HR1 4PW
Sunday 22 November
Quatt Village Hall
Quatt
WV15 6QW

More dates next year.

Reliquary audience Vox Pop Stockton Riverside Festival

Follow this LINK to a vox pop of Reliquary in Stockton Riverside this year. The Audience Experience is a project from www.commissioner.org.ukThey state

'We were aiming for a useful public point of view documentary to capture qualitative experience, we wanted to get more of a sense of how audiences experience a festival and understand or interpret the shows they see)