Award-winning Organic Theatre returns to Edinburgh Fringe for a digital world premiere of their new pandemic-inspired show Flanker Origami, which finds the founders stranded on Zoom, streaming for one week only from today (23 August 2021).
An artistic couple expose their daily rituals and lockdown coping routines, digitally unleashing two eccentric performance personas bent on transforming their Edinburgh home into a glittery alternative reality.
Through dressing up, dancing, disembodied animations, forced karaoke, and improbable ASMR storytelling, they are on a quest to enhance their own wellbeing, and yours! Stranded on Zoom, their relationship reveals a tender and funny, if slightly disturbing, world of online intimacy on the edge of misunderstanding and manipulation.
Organic Theatre is an intercultural performance laboratory created by Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean in 2002. They make, play, disrupt and make again. They sleep on it, dream of what comes next, they are dissatisfied, and they continue being curious. They are collectors of creative intuitions coming from their lives and times. They learn from their own processes, from others, they network, they pass it on.
For John and Bianca, Flanker Origami is a way to test the ground for this year’s hybrid Fringe model; with live productions in physical spaces coming back but with a good number of online shows programmed as well, encountering audiences through the digital medium, it is a bit of an anthropological experiment for them.
Flanker Origami
The pair commented:
“The challenge for us is to be devising work which is so close to who we are – a couple of performers forced to create in digital captivity from their own home – and spectacularising our domestic environment, as the private and the public are so blurred at this moment.
“It’s a bit fuzzy at times, but at least it forces us to tidy up the house regularly! We hope we can talk about our experience of creativity in a post-pandemic world in a way that brings a smile as well as a recognition of the human cracks which we have all suffered, despite being brave and resilient in the face of adversity.
“It is a bit of our own story but heightened into a tender, funny, intimate and slightly disturbing interaction between Flanker and Origami, our performance personas.”
Flanker Origami is created and performed by Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean, with artwork and 2D animation by Cristiana Messina, film consultancy by Massimo Ali Mohammed, and digital technical management by Chiara Menozzi.
Flanker Origami
More about Organic Theatre
Organic Theatre‘s work is rooted in ongoing training and research for innovative interdisciplinary practice and pedagogy. The focus is on process-led collaborative creation and audience participation, both live and digital.
A culturally diverse company, for Organic, their differences are their strengths. As individual creatives, they are committed to promoting equality and diversity through their work and engagement with audiences. They have a pool of longstanding collaborators and seek creative partners on a project-by-project basis. We welcome requests for placements from people with a creative background interested in learning about what we do and how we do it.
Flanker Origami
Organic have performed throughout the UK and Europe, in theatres, art galleries, museums, streets, barns, village halls and festivals including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Brighton Fringe Festival, Brighton Science Festival, Festival d’Automne à Paris (France), E45 – Napoli TeatroFestival Italia (Naples, Italy) amongst others.
Professional collaborations and training projects have included the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre Studio, Shakespeare’s Globe, Gate Theatre (London, UK), Shakespeare Institute (Stratford, UK), Nottingham Playhouse (UK), Theatr Clwyd (Mold, UK), Teatro Sancarluccio di Pina Cipriani e Franco Nico (Naples, Italy), Odin Teatret (Holstebro, Denmark), Gardzienice Theatre Association (Gardzienice, Poland), Milòn Mèla (Bengal, India), Asian Arts Agency, Theatre Bristol and Tobacco Factory (Bristol, UK).
Show trailer
