Kabosh newsletter September 2020

Kabosh newsletter September 2020

The show must go on

All things considered we have had a great summer and are proud that we brought live theatre back to Belfast with two sell-out shows below

We were delighted to stage a new play, The King Of East Belfast, written by and starring Stephen Beggs, as part of the Eastside Arts Festival. With thirteen sold-out performances between the 7th – 16th August, the audience were in masks sat a metre apart in a disused bank in Connswater shopping centre, not the strangest place we have performed in by far, but possibly to the strangest looking audience.

 ” Wonderful to see a performance like this in the community in East Belfast. Thanks for staging a play physically during Covid. So much more powerful. “ Audience member.

Quartered, A Belfast Love Story by Dominic Montage has returned, thank you to The Dark Horse and The Sunflower for helping to bring back the show. Again, we were delighted that we could make the show work whilst keeping in-line with all the regulations.

Gary Crossan leading a group on Quartered, A Belfast Love Story

Quartered will now run every third Saturday of the month and you can get your tickets here!

Audience Survey results

 We recently asked those of you on our mailing list as well as our followers on social media to take part in our biannual survey.

Thank you to those who responded, it really does help us to review the work that we are creating. 

We thought we’d share just a few interesting statistics and comments that came out of the survey below:

The majority of our respondants:

  • are frequent arts attendees going to over 13 events a year
  • thought that Kabosh was a company who “perform in non-traditional theatre spaces”
  • attended a Kabosh show due their love of theatre and the reputation of Kabosh.

Some of the experiences our audience members shared: 

” I love being able to have my 17 year old son feel a real understanding of what it was like for me growing up in Belfast as a lesbian/part of the gay community. I feel your performances address so many issues and depth of feeling in a way talking about them doesn’t.” 

“I loved seeing Green and Blue in the Riddel Warehouse. There were people from all over the world huddling together- it was raining inside. The play was very moving and I felt the venue really added to that “
 
” I attended blue and green in Newry. I expected it to have a one sided perspective. It didn’t, well constructed and very powerful, even though the set was simple. I was almost moved to tears and found over the following days I kept reflecting on the play.”

Thank you again and for coming to all our shows and supporting our work!

Additional Information:  
  • If you are an artist and on Facebook we would encourage you to join the Freelancers NI Surviving Corona it is filled with plenty of useful support information and register with artistsni.com to receive updates.  
  • You can now support Kabosh and the work that we produce through our crowdfunding campaign found here.
    If you are in a position to offer much-needed financial support to local practitioners  via the Bread And Butter Fund  please donate  
  • Theatre NI & Dance Resource Base have merged to form Theatre & Dance NI. Their new email address is projects@theatreanddanceni.org if you need to any advice get in touch.  
  • Our friends at Three’s Theatre Company have released audio tracks from their previous productions so  listen to some Theatre On Your Sofa