And The Winner Is Pursued By A Bear

Saturday saw the fourth annual Irish Blog Awards take place and I managed to make it along (see my review or sorts here) as ‘Devious were shortlisted in the Best Arts & Culture Blog category on the night alongside Pursued by a Bear, The Asylum, Chris Judge Illustration and Scamp.

The shortlisting is great for us – it did spark a few conversations on the night and it’s nice to see your blog get from nomination through to the long list and finally into the top five. We do have great plans for the blog and site and very much intend on being back in that same final five for next year (fingers crossed anyway).

Thanks too for the big cheer! It’s interesting to see who’s been following us, catching up with Trainspotting and all the other shows (I did leave some copies of the Trainspotting DVD with people that had a viewing session in Dublin yesterday).

Though I didn’t get to congratulate her in person on the night, big hat tip to Fiona of Pursued by a Bear who took the gong in our category on the night.

To quote Robin Blandford on his review of the night…

…the blog awards is a spotlight on you to do something great, you got the audience – go do it… start a company, publish a book, make something better, create something, start something, become someone, enable something, grow someone, harder, better, faster, stronger… you have 364 days left. GO!

While this was my third year in attendance and I was the only deviant there, hopefully we’ll get the whole crowd down for the fifth show in 2010.

Welcome To Mother Superior’s

Following on from last week’s adventures of Renton and Sick Boy as they look for a fix, comes the rest of the scene as they reach their destination: the drug den of Johnny ‘Mother Superior’ Swann (Paul Young).

This is the fifth video from our production of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, performed in the Watergate Theatre in Kilkenny, last June.

The audience are introduced to the Mother Superior and the lost souls he takes under his wing, like Spud and Alison. And Alison’s infant daughter Dawn. Bad things can only happen. It goes without saying.

For more Trainspotting clips, see the Devious Theatre YouTube.

We’re Off To The Irish Blog Awards

The shortlists for the Irish Blog Awards have been announced and as a group, Devious Theatre are delighted to see DeviousTheatre.com included in the shortlist for Best Arts and Culture blog as sponsored by Poetry Ireland.

We started the blog running back in 2006, gave it a bit of a kick in 2007 in the run-in to Cannibal but over the course of 2008 we’ve been putting a serious effort into using the blog to promote the work that we do, both as a company and as individuals. Given that myself, John, Ross and Paddy are blogging outside the realms of DeviousTheatre.com, we feel we’re in a good position to help the company get the best from the blog.

So that’s what we give you – the best of Devious Theatre. Over the last year we’ve been providing insights to rehearsals, comments from directors, actors, notes from back stage, insights to our design process, video clips of recent performances and much more besides.

Through DeviousTheatre.com we’ve also released our first podcast, a full-version download of ‘The War Of The Worlds‘ as produced by ourselves last October (download MP3 here).

One of the best pieces of advice that we were given starting out was simply “archive everything”. That’s what we continue to do. But rather than an archive of old material, we hope that you’ll get an insight to the living material, the flesh and bones of this company of devious actors who strive to make a mark for Irish theatre.

Hell, we might even get to blog at a little at the Awards itself (if the budget allows it!).

With a lot of the committee tied up, I (Ken) will be attending the awards night this coming Saturday. We’re the only theatre company to be shortlisted (and possibly nominated in the first place) and from what we can tell, we’re also the only representative for Kilkenny at the awards.

But we’re not the only ones nominated. Joining us on the shortlist for Best Arts & Culture Blog are Scamp.ie, Pursued By A Bear (at the Irish Times), Chris Judge and The Asylum. Looking forward to meeting more artsy bloggers this year – if you see me, do say hello!

Paddy Dunne Has A Weblog

Since a few of us all have blogs that cover our fields of interest (both Devious and other) we said we’d stage a little introduction to us, what we do and what those said blogs involve. So here’s the first such post.

Paddy Dunne has been on the good ship Devious Theatre for nearly 3 years and it’s safe to say that without him, the company wouldn’t look quite as swanky as we do.

Paddy has been chiefly responsible for our promotional design since the very first production Heart Shaped Vinyl back in August 2006. Since then he’s lent his extensive skills to the promotional campaigns for the revival of Heart Shaped Vinyl (The 5 decades of music teasers), Cannibal! The Musical (the slightly sacrilegious Last Supper homage) and the rainy, neon Kilkenny set poster spots for Smitten. However, the height of Paddy’s commitment to poster campaigning came with the 10 poster strong Trainspotting set which saw the characters of Irvine Welsh’s novel get a new reintroduction in time for last June’s production. A truly astonishing piece of work by Paddy and something we’re all quite proud of.

As an actor, Paddy has appeared in Cannibal! The Musical and Trainspotting (above, as Uncle Cha Cha.)

Paddy works primarily in the field of graphic design and also works as writer/director/actor on the web sitcom Vultures. His blog covers all of Paddy’s preoccupations, interests and of course, work. It’s called PaddyDunneHasAWeblog and with a quick click on it, it’s there for the reading.

Choose Life

This is the fourth video from our production of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, performed in the Watergate Theatre in Kilkenny, last June. The scene (above) features Ross Costigan as Renton espousing his theories on life and of course, heroin. He’s soon joined by a very Sick Boy (John Morton) as the craving starts to kick in.

We’ve also unleashed a new batch of Trainspotting photos which can currently be found on the Bebo and Myspace pages and will soon be updated to our Flickr account.

For more Trainspotting clips, see the Devious Theatre YouTube.

Tools For Theatre Companies: A Forum

We’re approaching three years together as a theatre company.

Three years of meetings, chats, planning, finance, funding, arguments, resolving arguments, advertising, pimping (of shows, not cast members), tea drinking, writing, scripting, lighting, directing…

We’re often asked how we do it. A conversation yesterday threw up the suggestion that we’re setting trends in certain areas. Far be it from us to believe we’re setting trends, but we feel we’re making good use of the tools at our disposal. Tools that are at everyone’s disposal, if they know how to find them.

As such, we’re giving you some insight as to how we work together as a company both online and offline.

We’re all busy. We’re all working on other projects – Ross is tied up with his photography, working on Vultures and Kilkenny Music; I’m (Ken) running my own business and also heavily tied up with Kilkenny Music and getting My Music off the ground while churning out podcasts to beat the band; John is looking after Mycrofilms and their headline project Vultures; Kevin, now living in Kilkenny again is working day in day out; Niamh is studying theatre in college and Paddy, outside of his design work and living away from Kilkenny, is writing for the Vultures series with Mycrofilms.

As interconnected as we all our in our day-to-day work, we’ve got to stay connected as a theatre company, something which wouldn’t have happened without the use of “the forum”.

Many a conversation over the past two years has finished with “we’ll catch up on the forum” or “it’s on the forum”.

“The Forum”, in our case is an online message board installed on a server we all have access to. Not only do the committee of deviants have access to it but every show gets a dedicated cast, crew and staff message board as well.

In an age where everything is online and everyone has a mobile phone, having a central access point like a forum is vital for the continued success of Devious Theatre. So much so that the use of the forum for discussing and planning internal projects and deadlines was so helpful that it soon became a must for other groups we’re involved with as well once people could see how useful it was.

Your current web host may provide you with free forum facilities to add into your own account. We opted to install a copy of PHPbb on an account for ourselves and haven’t looked back since. When conversations, ideas, scripts, suggestions for plays, contact numbers for cast members, lighting guys, sound guys all have to be logged and archived, a forum is a great place to do it.

Here’s some suggestions for free forum software that may be useful for your theatre company.

• phpBB
• SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
• Vanilla
• MyBB

While we’re sticking with phpBB, Wikipedia also has a good list of forum software for you to check out and compare.

Update:Check out this comment from Jess at New Leaf Theatre in Chicago to see how they’re using forums for their day-to-day connectivity.

Vultures circle the funny bone again

Vultures is a project that all of us Deviousers have been working on in some capacity over the past few years. By the series wrap we’ll all have played feature characters and we’ve all contributed to the making of the project since it first made it’s tentative bow in December 2007.

For the uninitiated, Vultures is an internet distributed sitcom centred around the detectives of Vulture Private Investigations, a seriously low rent detective business in small town Ireland. The series follows the comic mishaps of the detectives as they struggle with the competition, the opposite sex and their own constantly thwarted ambitions.

The fourth episode has just gone online at www.VulturesPI.com (where all Vultures content is housed for your viewing pleasure). The episode is entitled ‘The Case Of The Poisoned Dates’ and can be watched entirely free of charge on the website. The production can also be subscribed to for free on iTunes.