TN2 speaks with recent Trinity graduate Aoife Leonard about her show MADE UP, which debuted on the DU Players stage in 2014. The Fast Food Collective recently brought the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival, before finishing up the summer with a performance at Electric Picnic.
Can you give us a brief synopsis of the show for someone who has never heard of it?
MADE UP combines spoken word, comedy, and physical theatre to tell the explosive tale of a night out in Dublin. It follows four different girls who are out on the same night, in the same city, but are having completely different experiences. Anna has dragged herself out to avoid FOMO, Yvonne has been stood up, Clara has dropped her first ever pill, and Aisling is allowing her ear to be nibbled by a persistent Brazilian. They are each unaware of the ways in which their lives connect until an incident on the dance floor unites them in a frenzied moment of drunken debauchery.
MADE UP first debuted in DU Players – in this (Edinburgh) Fringe production, what changes were made from the original?
I wrote MADE UP when I was 19, just after my first year of college. I was so unbelievably excited by all of the new experiences, places, and people that I’d encountered and so incredibly in love with Dublin – and I just poured all of that into the text with the force of the first drunken piss of the night.
Now we’re all a little bit older and can feel jaded by the Dublin nightlife scene (JADE UP anyone? Ha! …sorry), so it was great to return to the text and remember what it felt like to be so enthralled with it. I did some minor rewrites in an effort to age each of the characters, but tried to maintain the same sense of energy and excitement. The humor is probably a little more self-deprecating now, and the characters a little less earnest, but other than that the text hasn’t changed hugely.
It’s been great to shake up the roles and get some new cast members onboard. It’s always incredible to see the variation in approaches that different performers take to the same character, and I think this has allowed some really interesting dynamics to emerge.
What was the process of applying for the Fringe like?
The scale of the Edinburgh Fringe is like nothing else I have ever experienced. There are numerous venues, each of which have multiple premises and theatres, and curate their own program of shows. There are four really big venues – Underbelly, Pleasance, Assembly and Guilded Balloon, and each of these will have a program as big as, or bigger, than that of the Dublin Fringe. And then there are an infinite number of smaller venues and non-traditional performance spaces. Every basement of every bar has a show every hour. It’s insane.
I had been to the Edinburgh Fringe once before as a performer with Collapsing Horse, so I had some idea of how it all worked. Given that it was our first time presenting work at the festival, we’d initially thought it would be best to apply to one of the smaller venues. However, Eoghan Quinn and Matt Smyth from Collapsing Horse advised us to be as ambitious as possible, and to really push for what we wanted. I’m so glad we followed that advice, as we ended up in Underbelly – which was our first choice of venue. It took a lot of work, and required us to do a lot more fundraising, but I really think it paid off when we got there. There are so many incredible artists that present work at Underbelly and it’s so exciting to be included in the program alongside them!
How did you go about financing the show and how do you think the process might be helped by the university, if at all?
The Edinburgh Fringe takes a serious amount of financial investment. We’ve been so lucky in that everyone in the collective was willing to pay their own way in terms of flights and accommodation. We joke that this is our Sixth Year Holiday – a last blow-out after college – and we were all happy to invest in it.
We have also had tremendous support from our family and friends who contributed to our FUNDIT campaign. We were also lucky enough to be given a grant from the Trinity College Alumni Fund. We hope that in receiving this grant, we might pave the way for other shows to access similar funds in the years to come. It would be amazing if DU Players and the Alumni Trust might even be able to generate a standardized application process for such funding, which would enable Players to send a show to the Fringe every year. Many UK universities have similar schemes in place, enabling them to showcase their work on a global platform and build up a prestigious reputation at the festival.
How about promotion?
Promotion in Edinburgh is difficult, given the aforementioned scale. You need to work hard within your own venue to promote your show and support the other artists presenting work there. Outside of your venue, flyering is the main mode of informing people about your show. Whenever we’re not performing, we’ll be flyering. Even on the dance floor.
MADE UP is a wonderfully original piece. What or who were the main influences upon its writing?
When I wrote MADE UP I was immersed in Dublin’s spoken word scene. I was performing regularly with the PETTYCASH collective and was really inspired by a lot of the people who performed at their events. In particular, I was inspired by the work of Dylan Coburn Gray and Oisin McKenna, who had both managed to incorporate the intimacy and direct style of spoken word into full-scale theatre productions. I was also performing regularly with a Playback Theatre ensemble, and I think this exerted a definite influence of the dramaturgy of the piece. Playback is a form of improvisational theatre in which audiences tell stories to an ensemble of actors who turn them into spontaneous moments of theatre on the spot. There is no set, no props, and no costume. The ensemble conjure the entire story with their bodies, jumping in to play any and every character and imamate object that the story might call for. MADE UP operates in a similar non-space to most Playback Theatre – one in which the ensemble chime in to support and expand on the story of the ‘teller’.
Before and after MADE UP arrived the Edinburgh Fringe, the show spent time on the Irish festival circuit. How was it performing for audiences at Life Festival, Body & Soul and Electric Picnic?
Performing theatre at a music festival is so gas. You have people wandering in and out of your performance, heckling, chatting – you have to fight very hard for their attention. You get to perform to a lot of people who wouldn’t usually go to theatre and it’s always so lovely when they respond positively.
It teaches you a lot about performing too. You really have to work to engage each audience member individually, tuning in to how the performance is being received and responding accordingly. It becomes almost more like doing a stand-up routine. You have to be really live and really present and I think that can be very exhilarating for a performer. Then when you do the show again in a traditional theatre space, one in which everyone is sitting politely in the dark, you can bring that same energy and it just elevates the whole performance. You no longer take the audience’s engagement as a given. I think that really helped to keep MADE UP fresh, especially in an environment like the Edinburgh Fringe where everyone is seeing four or five shows a day. You have to get the audience on side from the start and not let their attention dwindle for a second.
It was great to finish up at Electric Picnic as it’s such a big festival. We felt like we’d come a long way from performing in the woods at Body&Soul two years ago – though that did certainly have it’s charm! This time we had Britney mics and a covered tent and all the audience members had seats. It was very luxurious. After the performance we all headed over to see Trinity Orchestra and I got this call from Willie White saying we’d forgotten to collect our money. We had no idea that we were supposed to be getting per diems! I ran back to the tent and he handed me this wad of cash and I tried to act chill but afterwards I just legged it back to the Fast Food Collective and was like ‘AHHHHHHHHHHHH’!! We all freaked out and danced around for a bit and then went and bought these big extravagant lunches and cocktails. It was hilarious.
