Shunt (theatre company)
The members of the company at that time were David Rosenberg,[1] Lizzie Clachan, Louise Mari, Mischa Twitchin, Gisele Edwards, Su Jin Lee, Laura Cockcroft, Catherine Bowman Shaw, Kirsty Yuill, Hannah Ringham, Serena Bobowski, Gemma Brockis, and Heather Uprichard.
The group was now David Rosenberg, Lizzie Clachan, Mischa Twitchin, Louise Mari, Hannah Ringham, Laura Cockcroft, Gemma Brockis, Heather Uprichard, Serena Bobowski and they were joined by Andrew Rutland.
They began work on their first show The Ballad of Bobby Francois, which was loosely based on the book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Reid.
In autumn 1998 Shunt started bi-monthly cabarets at the Bethnal Green Railway Arch 12A on Sunday nights, where the members of the collective would show ideas for company or personal work in front of a live audience, limited to 8 minutes.
With a focus on experimentation, the cabarets incorporated a multidisciplinary approach, blending theatre, circus, sound, visual art, installation, video, dance, and various other creative forms.
They devised and performed their show Tropicana from Sept 2004 to July 2005, joined by Silvia Mercuriali, Melanie Wilson, Nigel Barrett, Paul Mari, Helena Hunter and Simon Kane.
In 2005, this was followed by the show Amato Saltone in which the company were joined by Ryo Yoshida, Nigel Barrett, Geneva Foster Gluck, Simon Kane, Tom Lyall, Jason Barnet and Rebecca Kilgariff.
Amato Saltone was inspired by the work of Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968), the father of film noir, who, for over 35 years, fed the pulp magazines with countless stories of steamy mystery fiction.
For the price of entry, the public could see experimental performance, art, music, sculpture, talks, film, installation, puppetry, plays, exhibitions, and interventions, which changed every week.
[2] "For four years it played host to all manner of weird and wonderful performances: theatre and dance, art installations, film screenings, bands and DJs, all tied together with an undercurrent of wild abandon.
Along with providing a unique location in which to showcase performance of all kinds, something in the nature of the venue fed into the hedonistic tendency: it was as if the visiting crowds, descending into a space that existed physically outside the confines of everyday life, felt themselves exempted from its rules."
[3] In 2009, Shunt rented a former tobacco warehouse in Bermondsey Street, a short walk from the vaults, where they devised and presented Money inspired by Émile Zola's book of the same name.
The company were joined by Nigel Barrett, Helledd Watkins, Matthew Seadon Young, Dave Vigay and aerialists Pablo Meneu and Anna Perez de Manuel.
The founding members consist of Serena Bobowski, Hannah Ringham, David Rosenberg, Louise Mari, Lizzie Clachan, Gemma Brockis, Layla Rosa, Andrew Rutland, Heather Uprichard, and Mischa Twitchin.
This collage is described as "a framing device that holds together disparate found material: the fragments of reality are not fully integrated into the representational scheme of the work of art".
