Gig 16: Magical Animals @ Sandbar, Manchester – 10th October 2011

October 11, 2011 6 Comments

This is a picture I took of comedian Ken Dodd ...

Image via Wikipedia

The last two weeks have seen me perform the following gigs: my first ever gong show, a wrestling double act, straight stand-up and character comedy as Gary Barlow.  To keep the random sequence going, last night I performed at Magical Animals – the spoken word\poetry\comedy night, where I’m categorised as genreless weirdness (perhaps the nicest thing ever said about me).

To be honest, if I’d have had to learn a brand new 10-minute set for the gig, then my brain would have melted. Luckily, being spoken-word, it’s perfectly acceptable to read stuff out and each act only gets 4 minutes, so it’s low pressure. I’d already decided following the last M.A. that this time I’d try reading a couple of my short stories and see what I could make of them.

I didn’t really do any preparation, mainly because I was a bit spent following Saturday’s gig and because I knew I could get away with it (well, I hoped that I could). I only decided for sure which stories I was going to do after I’d got home from work on the evening of the gig (and they were both lifted directly from The World of Sherby57).  I was happy with one of the choices but not entirely sure about the other. Part of me wondered whether this could actually count as a gig at all due to my somewhat lackadaisical approach and my lack of concern about whether or not I would get any laughs.

As it turns out, I totally counted is as a gig and loved the performance.  It felt totally right for me to be doing that type of material. The story that I was least sure about might actually have gone better than the one I was sure about, beforehand. The beauty of this kind of night is being able to try different kinds of things without the pressure of having to get loads of laughs. As it happens, the stories did seem to get enough laughs to justify trying them in a stand up set.  All in all, the gig just reaffirmed my desire to do the kind of material that interests me and makes me laugh, rather than trying to fit in with some standard idea of what stand-up should be.

(Hopefully, that last sentence doesn’t make me sound like a complete wanker).

To top things off, I won the Catholic Ethos (or something) Award. I don’t entirely know what it was for.  Nor did anybody else. The main thing that you should concentrate on is that I won an award, OK?  The night was an electic mix of weirdness and, like a Ken Dodd concert, was a marathon session, lasting from half past eight until quarter to twelve.  It was a great night and I look forward to deciding what nonsense I can spout next month.

 

Related articles

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 13: The Occasional Cabaret @ The Yard Theatre, Hulme – 1st October 2011

October 3, 2011 3 Comments

If you were to read through my gig diary posts, you should be able to glean two things about my performances:

1) They don’t always go very well.

2) I have an almost masochistic tendency to try new and different things.

So, it’s with this in mind that I tell you about Saturday night when I appeared in a wrestling double-act (Sheee Beast Vs Masked McGee) at a clowning cabaret.  Oh, yes, you really did read that right.

My friend Vic is well into clowning and has been on several courses run by Clown Lab.  I don’t know what clowning is, to the extent that just thinking about it makes me feel confused and angry.  Vic was working on a wrestling character – Sheee Beast – for Clown Lab’s second anniversary show, The Occasional Cabaret, and following some mucking around (a professional term for workshopping an idea), I ended up joining her as Masked McGee (an idiot in a mask).

This was my first creative collaboration, so whatever the outcome, it was going to be an interesting process.  We came up with the basis of the material by improvising in character and then picking out the bits that seemed to work, before threading it together into a story.  The concept was based on Sheee Beast, a successful female wrestler, performing a promo in which she announces her retirement.  In classic wrestling style, she is interrupted by her nemesis, the buffoon that is Masked McGee.  We then trace their complicated personal relationship before the inevitable physical confrontation.

I didn’t find collaborating particularly easy, basically because I don’t like having to compromise.  There’s something comforting about the idea of succeeding or failing on your own ideas alone.   However, the fact that it wasn’t particularly easy is what makes it something worth pursuing.

So, to the performance.  It was quite a difficult one to judge.  We both noticed quite a few uninterested faces in the audience (which is understandably quite off-putting), but we also got quite a few laughs.   I was a bit baffled by the blank faces especially when I entered, because I thought I’d get more of a reaction just for the weirdness of it.

There were things in my performance that I’d definitely work on.  For example, when I entered the room,I didn’t know what kind of energy to have or quite how to play it.  I thought it would come out naturally as soon as I stepped out, but it was probably a bit confused.  I was also conscious of wondering quite how to perform on stage.  It was the first “acted” piece that I’ve done, but there was also the element of directly addressing the audience- as with stand up – so it was hard to find the balance between the two aspects.
We both have ideas on how to improve and tweak the material and the relationship between the two characters, so I think it’s something that we need to perform again to see how it can develop.  A video of the performance exists but I’ve not had the balls to watch it yet.  I think it might be more than a little disturbing.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 589 other followers