International Touring
Where Next?
The Little Mermaid Tour 2006
TIBA, International Festival, Belgrade
8th-9th June 2006
The Little Mermaid Tour 2005
Galway Arts Festival 2005
13th-14th July 2005
Taipei Children's Festival 2005, Taiwan
26th July - 7th August 2005
Hans Christian Andersen Bicentenary Anniversary Festival, Denmark
23rd August - 6th September 2005
Fish
Prithvi Theatre Festival, India
In March 2000, Big Telly received an email from Bombay-born actress Sheeba Chadha. Sheeba had been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship administered by the British Council in India to attend workshops at RADA and complete a placement with a British company. We expressed our interest in Sheeba coming to spend her placement with us. Sheeba arrived on 6th August with a week to acclimatise before the company went into development for its production of Fish. By the time the company of performers, designers, director and choreographer had assembled, Sheeba was already talking about its suitability for an Indian audience. She put us in touch with Sanjna Kapoor, Director of the Prithvi Theatre Festival and things began to happen...
The show opened to a packed house on 6th October at the Riverside Theatre in Coleraine and went on to take in performances at the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Belfast Festival at Queen's. While still in rehearsal the company got news that the Irish Embassy in Delhi was prepared to fund the company's local expenses in India, including per diems, accommodation and local transport costs. A little later, came the news that Air India had agreed to sponsor the company's return flights from London to Bombay and up to 500k of cargo, and then on October 16th, confirmation of the British Council grant.
From then on in, it was frantic phone calls with packers and handling agents, conversations about the size of plane doors and volumetric as opposed to cubic weight, the feasibility of taking a bubble machine to India, what would fit through the x-ray machine and what constituted an airway bill and what, with around a tonne of set, we could do without. On the night of Saturday 11th November, just before midnight on board the HMS Caroline in Belfast Harbour, the Fish set came down for the last time on its Irish tour, and was packed into a van, next stop Bombay.
Miraculously, after a fair bit of repacking, reweighing and recalculating, the load of assorted tricks, illusions, props, sound equipment and costumes came in at 485 kilos. The rest of the company flew in from Belfast. Four actors and three stage crew boarded an Air India Boeing 747 bound for Bombay.
After some delay, the company received a rapturous welcome at Bombay airport at 3.30am from Sheeba and a group of volunteers from the Festival and were escorted to their hotel. The first workshop was scheduled for 2pm that day! Further workshops then took place on the following three days, with the first performance scheduled for the fourth day, Sunday 19th. The set arrived on Saturday 18th, just 24 hours before the first show!
However, the set was swiftly assembled and the performances received a phenomenal audience response. All in all it was an exceptionally successful tour.
