Come Watch Scott Sparrow’s Performers Travel Guide
Nov 30th, 2010 by Johan
I am doing my show called The Performers Guide at the Intimate Theatre. This is the programme note just to give you a sense of what the show may be about, or at least describing what a Performers Travel Guide is.
A Performers Travel Guide is a name given to a shopkeeper, road-side seller, or travelling merchant that supplies the lost performer (these include: actors, dancers, jugglers, tight-rope walkers, balloon blowers, strippers, fire spitters, hip hoppers, fire dancers, screaming clowns…and the like) with a destination that will remedy their woes. For example, Drew Macdormat, the tap dancer who lost both of his legs trying to tap dance on actual taps, was sent to a secret cove off the coast of India where the dwellers of said secret cove found it the finest entertainment to watch someone tap dance on their knees.
A Performers Travel Guide shop is often mobile, as a Performers Travel Guide must always be on the move as the lost and injured will not necessarily come to him, he must seek them out, in fact he hunts them out like a tracker. The shop is usually identified as a small caravan where the source of mobility is never seen. The Performers Travel Guide himself is never to be trusted: they are often dressed in shiny clothes, smart shoes, tall hats and fancy ties so as to attract their prey. Their cologne is also irresistible.
Although they started off in the early 13th century as do-gooders, their intentions are now sinister. Lost actors are easy prey and a guide will get a huge bonus for every destination sold. (Of course they provide other services too, like: the purchasing of shows, purchasing of audience and hair dressing).
In fact at the turn of the 18th century the intention of a Performers Travel Guide was to get rid of actors, sending them to perilous destinations. It was once recorded that an opera singer was sent to an abandoned glass factory wherein she died a horrible death of raining glass. She kept singing though, her song was all she had.
And that is the basic idea of a Performers Travel Guide. Actors, dancers, clowns whoever you may be, take this as some consolidation; a guide has not been seen for years. The last guide, the most creatively sinister, Jacques Decroux, was slaughtered and buried with his maps many years ago…many….years.
Where: Intimate Theater Hiddingh Campus 37 Orange Steet
Date & Time: 7 -10 December @ 08:00 pm
