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The Butcher & the Beast

A new puppet show about 200 years of butchery, anatomy & medical discovery, & the dubious decisions of one man, Fred, in his quest to understand life & death

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The Butcher & the Beast

The Butcher & the Beast

The Butcher & the Beast

The Butcher & the Beast

The Butcher & the Beast

A new puppet show about 200 years of butchery, anatomy & medical discovery, & the dubious decisions of one man, Fred, in his quest to understand life & death

A new puppet show about 200 years of butchery, anatomy & medical discovery, & the dubious decisions of one man, Fred, in his quest to understand life & death

A new puppet show about 200 years of butchery, anatomy & medical discovery, & the dubious decisions of one man, Fred, in his quest to understand life & death

A new puppet show about 200 years of butchery, anatomy & medical discovery, & the dubious decisions of one man, Fred, in his quest to understand life & death

Zoe Hunter
Zoe Hunter
Zoe Hunter
Zoe Hunter
1 Campaign |
London, United Kingdom
$1,170 USD $1,170 USD 32 backers
47% of $2,450 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal
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The Butcher & The Beast

The Show

The Butcher & The Beast is a new puppetry show about Fred - a butcher, barber-surgeon, body-snatcher and student of anatomy. Fred has devoted his life to the exploration of death by studying bodies and dissecting corpses – human and animal, from embryo, through various stages of life and states of putrefaction in death. Fred's story is a journey through 200 years of medical discovery and understanding about what it is to be human. An audience with strong stomachs, open hearts and probing minds would be desirable but not essential.

 

Who we are

EekNGrr Productions are Sara Ekenger and Zoe Hunter. Sara is a an award winning puppeteer, set and puppet designer-maker and automata creator who began her career working in design and new store development for Ikea. Her passion for innovative design led to theatre and further study at Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Zoe is an accomplished performer and puppeteer with a background in Law who also studied at Central School of Speech and Drama specialising in devised and physical theatre. Zoe has been making and touring work nationally and internationally with big names in the arts for the last ten years.

We are founder members of the acclaimed touring company Unpacked and have worked for many years making puppet and physical theatre and film with an impressive range of companies including National Theatre of Scotland, The Rowan Tree Theatre Company, The Point Theatre Eastleigh, The Brighton Dome, The Old Vic Tunnels, The Royal Opera House, Barbican Bite, The Metro Newspaper, Bikini Films, The Assembly Rooms and the Pleasance for the Edinburgh Fringe, The Battersea Arts Centre, Scene Productions, The Ambassador Theatre Group, Minor Entertainment, Dante or Die, Touched Theatre and many many more. In the past we have both separately headed up successful, ambitious projects and shows but this is our first independent project working together.

 

How did it all start & why is this so important to us?

The Butcher & The Beast is a labour of love that started two years ago when we created a short fifteen minute piece for The Puppet Grinder, an adult cabaret shown at the Little Angel theatre in Islington, starring Fred the Butcher and a skeletal automaton both made by Sara.

The piece was reworked, filmed and shown as part of The National Theatre of Scotland's hugely successful 24 hour screening of five minute films in honour or their fifth anniversary. You can see the whole film by following this link to the National Theatre of Scotland http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s800

or this link to Vimeo http://vimeo.com/24480391

The Butcher & The Beast taps into our mutual fascination for the dark and macabre world of pathology, the extraordinary evolution of surgery from the backstreet barber-surgeon with their dirty cut-throat blades to the modern operating theatres and the uncharted possibilities of modern science and risks of going under the knife. The forefront of surgery is the playground of pioneers, great minds and risk takers which is simultaneuosly exciting and unnerving. It's a risky business and will always be an experiment. The unsentimentality and precision of surgery lends itself to the meticulous nature of puppetry. Pupperty is captivating and otherworldly and for most of us the same applies to the operating theatre.

 

The Creative Team

We have the creative team in place and will be working with Justin Dempsey, a recording artist and the frontman of The Switch, is composing music for the show; Albi Gravner, a founder member or Boileroom and an award winning composer & sound designer, will create our sound effects, and Beccy Smith, a writer, dramaturg and producer for Touched Theatre, will help stitch together Fred’s story. This is a very exciting team and we are itching to dig in.

The Battersea Arts Centre in London is supporting our initial Research and Development and we will be showing work in progress there this summer. This is a fantastic opportunity and we want to be able to provide top quality work to a top quality theatre venue.

 

Why is Fred's story relevant to you?

The Butcher & The Beast digs up the taboos of our murky history of medicine and anatomy and asks some very sticky questions.

Playing on themes of life, death, empathy & humour, the show will illustrate some of the ethically questionable activities that have been taken in the pursuit of knowledge and the consequences of these endeavours – good & bad, but never without significance. 

Fred's story starts around 1800, focusing on the Resurrection Men, surgeons and anatomists, without whom modern medicine would not have evolved to what we know today, and progresses through medical history to present day research & achievements. The progess is mind boggling but the ethics of cutting edge research are as touchy a subject now as they were at the turn of the ninteenth century! How do we justify research, progress, better understaning and processes when the means by which this knowledge is acquired is hard to stomach?

There are only two things certain in life: that we were born and that we will die. We are making a show that will allow people to think about the tricky subjects of mortality and the ethics of medical research without preaching. This show will be dark and funny and ask all the difficult questions. It is up to the audience to decide whether what Fred has been up to for the last 200 years is acceptable or not. We are simply showing what has, and still is happening now, for better or for worse!

 

What We Need

Breaking it down into detail.  We need £2000 for this project to take off and we need more to ensure it flies.

This will go towards the first stage of developing a full length production and will include: 

  • Design
  • Construction and materials for the set
  • A Larger version of Fred
  • Generating a live musical score and soundscape for the show
  • Developing and devising the story and puppetry for the show
  • Testing the show out in front of an audience and then bringing it to you.

This will be a highly visual production. The set will combine automata and found objects to create a visually intriguing world juxtaposing the visceral and the mechanical. The aesthetic is a cross between the ingenious makeshift nature of Heath Robinson’s machines and Jan Svankmajer’s surreal creations.

We hope you will agree we have made a good start and now we want to make sure this project can reach its full potential. It would be a scandal if our patient were to die in surgery. This is why we are calling for your support through Indiegogo.

 

The Impact

Every penny counts!

Under £2000

If we don't hit our target we will scale the set design down to fit the funds we do raise.

£2000

If we hit our target the initial research and development can be as ambitious in design and scope as we have planned for, including the more ambitious technical elements.

Over £2000!

If we raise more than our target it means that we can:

  • give something back to the tireless creatives who have supported this project so far for free. Without their dedication and creative drive this project would not exist.
  • start the work beyond the R & D towards the final product and the marketing and production costs to get the show out to festivals and on tour to a venue near you.

So please if you like the sound of this project and you’d like to find out more about Fred, pledge whatever you can. We have as recommended by Indiegogo put together various offerings in return for pledges as you will see in the box on the right. If you are skint please pass on our plea and help spread the word to others who you think would be interested in supporting.

Other Ways You Can Help

If you can't contribute that doesn't mean you can't help:

You can still spread the word and make some noise about our campaign by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter or emailing the link for our campaign to those you think would. The more people who know about Fred and are interested in the ideas behind the show the more buzz we can create and hopefully more funding.

Please do use the Indiegogo share tools to help spread the word about The Butcher and the Beast.  They are dead easy to use and the instructions are all there on the website.

Please help us get Fred onto the stage in The Butcher & The Beast!

Thank you for your support.

 

EekNGrr would like to thank:

Francis Ring-Davies, Revd Canon Dr Ann Nickson and all at St Mary the Virgin Church Mortlake

Our film crew Katarzyna Wojcicka, Amelia Springett & Chris Hersom

A special thanks to our fabulous editor Honey Rose

Gary Holding and Tim Martin

Marianne Maxwell and all at the National Theatre of Scotland

David Duffy, Peter Glanville & all at The Little Angel Theatre

Linda Lewis at the Puppet Centre Trust

Sam Irwin & his film crew

Richard Dufty and all at the Battersea Arts Centre

Touched Theatre for bringing us to Punched

Nikos Yiotis

&

The Butcher & the Beast Team: Albi Gravener, Justin Dempsey, Beccy Smith

 

 

 

 

 

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