Clod Ensemble to Present THE RED CHAIR

Clod Ensemble
The Red Chair
Written and performed by Sarah Cameron
Produced in association with Fuel
The brand new show from Clod Ensemble is a contemporary take on storytelling traditions, served with rich language and a dram of whisky
Directed by Suzy Willson | Music by Paul Clark

National Tour 19th February - 25th April 2015 | Soho Theatre 24th - 28th February
PRESS NIGHT: Wednesday 25 February 2015, Soho Theatre

"One of those innovative and anarchic companies thrusting its way through traditional boundaries of theatre" The Guardian on Clod Ensemble

Following performances last summer of Red Ladies at the Southbank Centre and Margate Turner Contemporary gallery, the genre defying Clod Ensemble return with an intimate show with an original dark fairy tale at its heart.

The Red Chair is a surreal ballad populated with larger than life characters, told in rich and saucy Scots dialect which draws the audience into the extraordinary world of a troubled family (with a dram of whisky to help along the way).

A contemporary take on folk and fairytale storytelling traditions, The Red Chair tells the story of a father who eats and eats until he turns into the chair he is sitting upon, the wife doomed to cook his meals and their 'inveesible' daughter.

By turns haunting and humorous, The Red Chair takes audiences on a journey through a landscape of twisted reason, extreme compulsion and eye watering complacency, where domestic drudgery happens on an operatic scale and a father's dereliction of duty reaches epic proportions.

Created in collaboration with artist Sarah Cameron and based on her original book, The Red Chair is performed with the physical vitality that has become a trademark of Clod Ensemble's work, rooted in the training that both Sarah and director Suzy Willson received at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris. Woven into the production is an original sound score created by Clod Ensemble co-artistic director Paul Clark.

Sarah Cameron is an artist, performer and writer. Born in Dundee, she studied sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art and theatre at Ecole International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Young Vic, where she was a member of the resident company that created the legendary production of Grimm Tales, directed by Tim Supple.

She first worked with Clod Ensemble in 1999, touring their production of Greed internationally in 2003. Most recently she appeared in their production ofZero at Sadler's Wells Theatre.

Director Suzy Willson said "Sarah has worked with Clod Ensemble as a performer for many years. When she showed us the book she had been working on called The Red Chair we were blown away both by the quality of the language and by the power of the central image of a father who turns into the chair he is sitting upon. It is both mythic and contemporary, funny and heartfelt. It speaks of family and of ancestry - all the while conjuring up the wild beauty of the Scottish landscape. As well as being a virtuosic physical performer, Sarah is also a sculptor - the story felt to us like a kind of sculpture of words and we immediately wanted to hear and see her telling it."

Since the company's inception in 1995, Clod Ensemble has collaborated with artists working in a wide range of media including performance, dance, music, visual art, photography, film and poetry to make work for theatre spaces, festivals and galleries as well as creating projects and curating work in places where art does not usually or regularly happen including medical schools, day care centres and prisons.

Director Suzy Willson has also initiated a number of projects that draw on the interplay between art and science, including developing the ground-breaking Performing Medicine project which provides training to medical students and healthcare practitioners at undergraduate and postgraduate level using the performing and visual arts. The project has been awarded a Times Higher Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts.

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