About

Edinburgh 2011 was our last year at Bristo Hall, a long, wild, frequently defiant and occasionally joyous goodbye to the space we had so raggedly occupied over the last five years. Earlier in the year the Forest Café’s landlords had gone into administration and by August they and we were locked in a valiant but eventually futile attempt to raise enough money to buy the building outright to avoid it being sold on to somebody else.

During Forest Fringe this campaign manifested itself in a series of extraordinary events that filled the space, including a special all-night storytelling performance by Daniel Kitson that started at midnight and went on until 5 in the morning, a raucous gig by Amanda Palmer, and a vast, building-wide version of Stoke Newington International Airport’s Live Art Speed Dating featuring an epic live band made up of members of Little Bulb and Australian company The Suitcase Royale.

Elsewhere the programme featured Tania El Khoury’s award-winning intimate performance Maybe if you choreograph me, you will feel better, Gary McNair’s Crunch, which involved audience members shredding their own money live on stage, Action Hero’s daredevil stunt spectacular Watch Me Fall and a six-hour durational storymap created by Third Angel. The final show we ever presented at Bristo Hall was, fittingly, Dan Canham’s delicate solo dance theatre piece 30 Cecil Street, a summoning of the ghosts of an abandoned theatre in Limerick and a paean to the role a theatre places in sustaining the life of a community.

Dan danced a goodbye, and then we left, and the very next day, the café had to dismantle everything and move out of the building.

Dates

15/08/2011 – 27/08/2011

Programme

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Associated Artists

• Action Hero
• Andy Field
• Ant Hampton
• Chris Thorpe
• Dan Canham
• Deborah Pearson
• Ira Brand
• Kieran Hurley
• Tania El Khoury
• Tim Etchells