What a pleasure to be back in this venue and to see some fantastic inspirational and emerging work.

The evening was broken up with two shows. One called ‘Age Concerns’ and ‘The Secret Life of You and Me’. Both really engaging performances and thought provoking.

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The shows both ran with similar themes and ideas – the notion of memories, age and experience.

Age Concerns was performed by Nicki Hobday and Sara Cocker with recorded interjections from a Hilda (whom we felt we knew by the end of show).

This was interesting piece inspired by the performers visits and work with older people. They used their meetings and conversations to inspire some of the material and their response to Hilda’s comments.

Very interesting as it made me wonder about the notion of aging and the question they asked Hilda ‘will I still perform when I am old?’.

Really lovely to see that an elderly women could be inspiration for a piece of work, not the usual stimuli.

I really enjoyed the notion of watching some performers represent an elderly woman’s ideas and advice through their enactment of her memories and experience.

This made me wonder if they were taken more seriously, as they are younger, and that they just represented the experiences of another.
The piece also enabled the audience to consider their relationship with the elderly – and part of me thought about how long it was since I had seen my Grandma, hmmm, Thought provoking.

The performers were both confident in their delivery and direct address the audience. Great comedy timing, focus and energy. The humour was so naturally delivered. Great piece.

The second piece was a solo performance presented by Lowri Evans and was extremely amusing and explored the notion of dementia and making memories.

Lowri was a confident performer with great vocal delivery – she had a sustained focus in her durational activities and her facial expressions towards the audience drew us into the humour.

Within the performance Lowri presented her moving scrap book and built this amusing and fun filled life. She then almost snapshotted it and traced around it.

The silhouette device I really liked. Once traced around it reminded me of the notion of a person suffering from dementia and the remnants of memories. This was quite an effective moment for me. An echo of a memory.

The Derelict 2014 project is extremely interesting to me – creating new work then showcasing to students and local audiences and professionals. What’s better than that?

The Derelict website has details about upcoming performances.

I’ll certainly be going again. 5/5 stars for the fab performance platform supporting emerging work.