Aug 6-7, 9-14, 16-21, 23-27 8.05pm
Multi award-winning poet Dominic Berry (seen poeting on BBC and Channel 4) returns after touring Canada and USA with his unforgettable new show about love, loss, and his quest for a cheat to quick-start tranquillity. A hilarious, but deeply moving spoken word show about what happens when you turn to video games to solve the problems you have in the real world. Dominic examines failure, escapism, and love, through poetry, comedy and music.
What was the inspiration for this performance?
My inspiration for this show was being unhappy with my previous show!
Last year I did a full month run of Up Your Game: The Downfall of a Noob, a performance poetry show about video gaming that had some good bits well received by audiences and a whole load of stuff which didn't work.
I was lucky enough to get an arts council england grants for the arts award to employ a director to reshape it into something better.
I was just really honest in my application - I said I had done a whole run at ed fringe (and tour, I had some venues book it after august) of a thing that had big flaws and I wanted to address these flaws.
How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I had worked with Kevin Dyer, the director, before on a children's poetry show I toured called When Trolls Try To Eat Your Goldfish.
I met Kevin through someone else who I met at a networking event.
Many artists see networking as a dirty word, but all it means is having a nice chat with other people into the arts, and maybe finding people who like the same stuff as you do.
Kevin and I had really clocked making Trolls, he had worked me really hard, kept encouraging me to redraft and remake, so I knew he would do the same with this show too.
Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Kevin and I got rid of about two thirds of the last show and just kept the stuff that was connecting with crowds. We looked at why we thought that stuff was working and how we could build on that to make something that was in its entirety of engaging interest to audiences.
Looking for the human themes that for me the video gaming angle represented was intense. As writers we can sometimes assume everyone has the same reference points as we do and sometimes we need to realise some stuff needs to be more explicit and other stuff more subtle but all with something really concrete that can drive the emotive force forwards.
We kept adding and taking away poems from the show and have ended up with twelve solid pieces I am really proud of.
We have already done one national tour, and also taken the poems across ten cities across south Canada, so I am in a very different position now to where I was at last year for 2015 edinburgh fringe. I feel really confident in this show and really excited to be sharing it this summer.
What do you hope that the audience will experience?
all the feels!
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