Guest Blogger: Pulse Festival

Made In China make theatre that playfully explores the paradoxes of modern identity, by crossing the borders between playwriting and performance art. Our latest show, Gym Party, on at Pulse this Saturday, does so by exploring a particularly big, messy and (we think) universal paradox: our often-secret desire to beat the very people we identify with or need to work with. We made Gym Party with the support of Pulse festival, who co-commissioned it, but also with the support of Pulse's audience, who got to experienced a pretty deranged work-in-progress of the show as we were making it last year.

The flowers are ordered and the train tickets booked for Ipswich. It's exciting to be coming back to Pulse after a year - it's where Near Gone started to gather some momentum, where we learned from the audience response that we were onto something.

Hi this is Bryony Kimmings. I am an artist, I am an activist and I am an aunty. All the A's! About a year ago I invented a pop-star with my nine-year-old niece as a protest against the sexualisation of childhood through popular culture.

After a long history of invaluable support from the New Wolsey, we are very excited to be back on Ipswich soil and part of the wonderful Pulse programme. And it feels all the more exciting to be bringing a work-in-progress that enjoyed some vital, early development with the theatre's Young Company as part of the Big Ideas series back in 2012.

The Forensics of a Flat was a piece that had been sitting in my head for a while when I applied to scratch it at Pulse last year. At that point, it was mostly a collection of words, pictures and conversations about what it might be if I were to make a show about The Flat that I live in.

Why is May 29th such a special day? Because it is the 149th day of the year? Because Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay made it to the top of Everest on this day, or because it was the day when Coca-Cola placed their first ever advert in The Atlanta Journal?