Twilightofthefreakingods is Stan’s Cafe’s celebration of five wonderful years @ A E Harris. It’s a large scale theatrical experiment taking place this Thursday and Saturday (Saturday event sold out), with a cast comprising of companies who have performed @ A E Harris over the last five years. There will be no rehearsals, and the cast will work from instructions and timetables given to them, with no idea what anyone else in the room will be doing – sure to result in surprises for the cast and audience alike.

As the show is both a celebration and unusually long, the bar will be open throughout serving flaming cocktails alongside snacks and more familiar drinks. Both cabaret and raked seating will be available for you to either engross yourself in the show or discuss it as it unfolds with your friends. You can change your viewing angle whenever you wish to concentrate on whatever strand of action you find most absorbing. Whatever happens it will be an event to which you will always want to say “and I was there”.

Twilightofthefreakingods will be the last performance at the venue before it ‘downsizes’.

Read more and buy tickets via Stan’s Cafe’s website.

On arrival at the exhibition you will given a grain of rice; this grain is you. As you walk around the exhibition you will discover a landscape of rice hills and mountains, each of which represents a different population or community. The rice hills and mountains tell stories from all over the world.

The exhibition is free and will be running from Friday 12th April – Sunday 21st April from 11am – 7pm on weekdays and 11am – 6pm at the weekend. More information can be found here.

• Ping! Which involves table tennis players and a string quartet. It was at Warwick Arts Centre recently and seemed to go down well
• Five Triple Rings, which seems to involve incorporating sport and maths into bell-ringing
• The Voyage, Stan’s Cafe’s “playful opera for a voice, a double bass and eight recorders”
• A screening of Twenty Seven Heavens

The full timetable of events is here and tickets are £6 max.

It’s being produced by the Hippodrome and created by Motionhouse and Legs On The Wall. The latter’s website says:

It involves six performers from Legs, twelve from Motionhouse, a choir of 40, an all women brass band and 140 community performers. It is co-directed by Legs On The Wall’s Artistic Director Patrick Nolan and Motionhouse’s Kevin Finnan.

Sounds impressive.

Incidentally, this is a good example of how to do a website for a project that hasn’t launched yet. None of this ‘watch this space’ or ‘come back when we’re ready’ nonsense. Instead grab a website visitor’s contact details so you can let them know as soon as there’s any news.

Oh, and I’ve also been reminded that Stan’s Cafe are doing a Cultural Olympiad-related project called The Voyage. That one will be on 6 May.

Note: a mention of the West Midlands Theatre Awards 2012. You saw it there first.

I Like Theatre was prompted by Ian Craddock at Old Joint Stock Theatre from an initial idea and Pledge Card from James Yarker at Stan’s Cafe / @ A E Harris.

Ammo reckons Birmingham’s arts scene is too safe and middle-aged, claiming that rather than providing art that appeals to Brummies, “a human tide of middle class professionals floods Birmingham each day from the suburban shanty towns that ring our city”:

Groomed by the local authority and a small elite of ‘tastemakers’, half-a-dozen ‘flagship’ venues and ventures in the city centre now hoover up most of the taxpayer and corporate cash. Just like the banks, they’ve become ‘too big to fail’.

More and more their programming reflects the tastes – and train timetables – of an alien clique.

Meanwhile, Stan’s Cafe remind us that, as of 1 October, city council funding for some of the smaller organisations ended (see my post with bonus hedgehog vid here):

last time I did the sums it appeared 50% of the City’s revenue funded portfolio was being cut by 100% to save 2.6% of the Arts Revenue budget. I can’t conceive how the city missed out on its last two bids to be crowned a Capital/City of Culture.

That last bit was sarcastic, btw.

This from Stan’s Cafe:

It’s sad because Brightspace were behind a huge number of inspirational projects that took artists into schools to work creatively with students and teachers. Now, despite a great report from OFSTED setting out the great value of these projects, the plug as been pulled, the axe has fallen, the bubble burst, the goose cooked, the turkey plucked, the swan sung and the full stopped.

I’d lost track of what’s happening with Creative England – I thought it was going to be based on a partnership of all the screen agencies but here’s a press release:

On Friday 30th September 2011, regional screen agency Screen WM will bring the curtain down on nine years of support for the screen media industries in the West Midlands and welcome Creative England as the new umbrella body for the creative sector.

The closure of Screen WM follows the coalition government’s decision to replace the UK Film Council’s support for film-making, which core-funded the regional screen agencies, with funding through the British Film Institute.

All the best to the folks working at these organisations who are moving on.

Sadly, I’m predicting a few more posts like this over the next few months.

As I type this very sentence people are formulating answers to the question ‘What more can we do to create a better future for theatre in the West Midlands?’ at day two of the West Midlands Theatre Open Space event. Am hoping some notes will appear from this somewhere.

Photo by Graeme Braidwood, cropped by Stan’s Cafe.

It’s probably better to go with no expectations/preconceptions of about what you’re about to see but, in case you’d rather take someone else’s word for how it good it is:

• Terry Grimley in the Birmingham Post (5 stars)
• Exeunt Magazine (5 stars)
• Lyn Gardner in the Guardian (4 stars)
• Pete Ashton (with video trailer, but if you’re going I’d recommend not watching it)
• Lots of people on Twitter

Book tickets here.

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*Alternative titles for this blog post:

• Knees up Constance Brown (didn’t make sense)
• Constance-ly good reviews (just rubbish)