Wednesday, July 18, 2012

A bump in the road

It doesn't matter how psychotically organized you are for a project, there's always gonna be those few pesky things that are simply out of your control. You do everything to ignore their existence as they bubble under the surface... but then, one erupts.

I'm talking about a slight bump we're currently facing, in our otherwise perfectly laid out road to a successful Fringe Fest. The venue we had lined up for 'Lulu the dog' has fallen through, and we've been given another venue (in the same building, luckily), but - and here's the real disaster - we've had to shift our dates slightly, so we're now performing 12th-18th rather than 11th-17th. Didn't sound too bad at first. What difference does one day make? And then it hit us. The bomb. In the form of 5000 already printed leaflets, with the WRONG dates, neatly packed and waiting for our arrival in Edinburgh. Yep... 5000 leaflets that we will need to hand-correct. One by one. Just the two of us, cramped in our tiny hostel room, just us and 5000 leaflets with the WRONG dates. My hand hurts already...

Unfortunately, all that we can do right now is e-mail the 200 journalists that we had sent the WRONG press release to, with the corrected dates. And ask the Fringe to kindly correct the dates on their website and phone app. With those slightly more manageable tasks under-way, we're back on track with the rest of our preparations.

Which at the moment include endless arguments about the corrections that need to be made in order to adapt the productions themselves for a Fringe audience (one activity that makes me eternally grateful there are only two of us), building new travel-sized sets and attempting to pack the sets of two shows into one suitcase weighing no more than 20kg (yep... how's that for a challenge?), fireproofing everything with a spray that cost us around 30 euros just for delivery (nothing I love more than UK fire safety regulations...), applying for awards (you never know!) and writing and sending constant press releases to journalists.

Luckily, the "boring stuff" is now officially over. We've dealt with taxes, vat, insurance, international forms, safety forms, contracts, accommodation, flights, registrations, music licensing... and now our main job is to perform and to get people through the door EVERY DAY.

Our 'Yoga for Performers' classes are almost fully booked, so that's a great start. With the right promotion and a little bit of good luck with reviewers, we'll hopefully be in for a great year at the Fringe. Even with a few bumps in the road.

Even with 5000 leaflets... with the wrong dates....

COUNTDOWN: 13 DAYS TO FRINGE!!!!!!!



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