Short Summary
We are a new company, fascinated with exploring where the intimate, familiar world of consciousness fuses with the bizarre, absurd and curious world of our dreams. We are facilitating a series of workshops which explore dreams and the ways in which we perceive them. We are also devising a piece of original theatre for performance at The Edinburgh Fringe, and hopefully a follow-up showing in London.
Our play, Snooze, is showing at The City Cafe, Edinburgh on August 1st - 8th at 12.30pm.
Trumpets sound, lions roar, feathers flutter and sequins line the floor. Roll up, roll up to the circus of dreams. But at what point will consciousness intervene?
Follow three souls who have found home in the travelling circus: Ringmaster rules the roost, Ariel clambers the rafters and Dolly soaks in the spotlight.
Chimaera Theatre invite you on an intimate adventure into the colourful and twisted universe of their vaudeville dream circus. Explore the spaces the mind inhabits when consciousness isn't watching. Dreams collected from a workshop series inform the storytelling, with original music, movement, language and playful interactivity.
Our workshop series, The Dream Harvest, encourages participants in areas with major arts funding cuts to create a performance exploring their dreams. They will present their work to each other, as well as family and friends, at a final sharing event. We will be using some of the material gathered from these sessions in the process of devising our play. We will be working with children, adults for whom English is a second language, and those who are seeking work.
What We Need & What You Get
Things we need your money for:
Marketing: As a new company, we do not yet have an established fan base, but we want peope to see our exciting play in all its glory. In order to get people through the door, we need to print posters and leaflets. This, unfortunately, costs money.
Set: Although our set isn't in any way lavish, we do need three large silks as well as a few other magical items. The ultimate dream is a live elephant.
Costume: Each circus character needs a costume motif. We want these to be as beautiful and rich as possible to truly evoke the vibrancy of the circus space through a single item.
Equipment: Our production does not use much expensive equipment, but there are a few basics that we need to hire (chiefly sound equipment).
Extending our workshop series: We are really passionate about the workshop side of our creative process. We were fortunate enough to gain a small amount of funding to facilitate two workshops in Somerset. We would like to extend this project to a series of workshops across the UK, and possibly beyond. Any surplus money would go towards the goal of a nationwide Dream Harvest.
London showing: at the current time, we do not have enough funds ot show the piece in London. However, we would love to present the piece in a place that is more accessible for the majority of our friends, family and funders. With your money, we can.
Accomodation, food and travel are all quite expensive for Edinburgh festival. We intend to cover these costs ourselves, but as struggling artists are not able to pay for much more than this. We therefore need to secure funding for most other aspects of our production.
In exchange for your lovely money, we are offering some amazing and unique perks based on our circus play. Casually glance to your right for more information on specific perks.
If we don't reach our goal, we will still use your money towards our fringe performance and workshop series. We will just have to vastly scale back our production, which would be a massive shame.
The Impact
By funding this project you will be helping a new theatre company get their first performance off the ground. In the current economic climate, private funding is of the utmost importance, and without your help new, imaginative pieces would never make it to the stage.
