First off, my album of the week Passenger - All the little lights.
Last night was my last performance in Bianco 2013 but I’ll come back to the end, at the end.
Going right back to Brighton when I last wrote anything, we then moved to Bristol. There we where performing on the Creative Common, Bristol is an amazing city which I hope to spend more time in the future and was extra special because of a number of old and new friends and even some family who I enjoyed catching up with.
From Bristol we dipped back into Wales with time in Narberth and Bangor, nature tipped its hat to us and gave us amazing weather for practically the whole time.
We then did a quick stop in Stoke-on-Trent where we did just 4 shows that were all different! On a challenging schedule we moved up to Edinburgh for a month at the Fringe! In Edinburgh we really smashed it with sell outs night in night out. The thing that really made Edinburgh special was the huge number of other things happening, despite a few issues in the company with illness and injury the show was so solid that we had confidence to be able to really relax into it and enjoy it and also to enjoy the Fringe. I saw so so many other shows in that month including some great ones. So many in fact they might merit a blog post on their own.
So from Edinburgh we moved to the final stop in the tour, Brecon. A much more chilled out affair compared to the high pace of Edinburgh where we had gone up to 8 shows a week. Despite quieter audiences compared to what we had got used I cannot think of a more fitting way of ending the tour, being close enough to Cardiff to have lots of Nofitstate friends come to see the tour out with us.
And that brings us to the end. As I progressed through the tour my mind increasingly moved to the end of the tour, in a kind of curiosity I wondered how it was going to feel. How would the final week be? The final day? The final show? The final act? The final curtain call? The final blackout? When you’ve been doing the same amazing thing with the same even more amazing group of people you just never know how you’ll be when it ends. The bubble is being burst, slowly as we begin to go our separate ways and are forced to say “Until next time” but we will all take a little bit of the bubble with us and hold it close to us.
As I went in to the final show I could feel it wasn’t a normal one, the energy in all of us was something I’d never experienced before, it wasn’t just a group of performers giving their everything which we did every day. It was a group of performers savoring every minute of the two hour show, as if we wanted to make sure we took in everything, our eyes brightened and opened, our ears twitched and our skin prickled.
The curtain call is something I never want to forget, we bowed and the audience gave us back as much as we had given them, we didn’t want to leave them and none of left the main space as we usually did in the final moments, preferring to stay together and with the audience. We got an encore we bowed again and then we celebrated, self indulgently we called for ‘one more tune’ the band played, we danced, a company of 50 together not caring if we had an audience of 400 watching what for me was a private celebration.
The first people had to leave that night, partying until they absolutely had to return to their life, 24 hour on we are leaving bit by bit, one by one and we slowly pack up and prepare to move on to the next wonderful adventure.