www.fermynwoods.co.uk/current-programme/open-online-three/curious/

Tickets are on sale through Theatre Royal Norwich 01603 63 0000 and online through

Live Art Collective East 

We'll work with these stories to conjure a cabaret performance with live songs, excursions and cocktails to lure you to oblivion and back. Hugo will take photographic portraits of World's End residents to be shown in the foyer at Chelsea Theatre from Thursday 12th July.

Book tickets NOW through Chelsea Theatre.

Slipstreaming
an evening cruise on the Avon aboard The Lotus. Audiences are taken on a memorable journey through past and future, fate, fact and fiction. Unmoored and adrift on the river, the Captain steers a route awash with siren songs, mythical yarns and misguided tour guiding. With a hypnotic soundtrack by Graeme Miller this is a boat trip with a difference, and where a very important choice has to be made…

made as part of Curious's residency at the RSC, summer 2011.

the moment I saw you I knew I could love you is the current touring performance by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris made in collaboration with film-maker Andrew Kötting, composer and sound designer Graeme Miller and performers Claudia Barton and Joseph Young. The piece is about ‘gut feelings’; fight, flight and freeze reactions; impulse, love and undefended moments. Designed for life-raft sized groups of audience members at a time, the performance is set in the belly of a whale.

"There are a thousand beautiful moments: my favourites include a film of a woman floating adrift at sea projected onto a tiny Sealegs packet and a harrowing story of a childhood terrorised by a sword-swallower’s accident. It’s a rich and rewarding experience being immersed in this watery world." Total Theatre

"Film and live performance, soundscape and installation combine in this love story to offer glimpses of an endless horizon as well as intimate close-ups.... There is something immensely wistful about a piece that demonstrates that we are merely chemical compounds, and yet also shows us how to discover equilibrium." The Guardian (4 stars)

6 August - 2 October
Swan Room
Open Daily from 9am (10am on Sunday)

Sea Swallow'd has also been selected for inclusion at Hors Pistes, to be presented in the movie theatre of the Pompidou Center, 29 Janvier 7pm.

Sea Swallow’d charts the choppy waters of gut feelings, capturing the flotsam and jetsam of impulse, desire and fights to the death. A film by Andrew Kötting and Curious shot as a series of lapping and flowing, irregular chapters, which borrow their titles from Moby Dick.

The film is image and urge driven, giving the viewer the feeling of beach-combing for different fragments of treasure on the shoreline. A highly experiential journey mixing 16mm B&W footage shot by filmmaker Ben Rivers with video and archival footage and a soudscore by Graeme Miller.

• full length documentation of the performance the moment I saw you I knew I could love you;
• the film Sea Swallow'd by Curious and Andrew Kotting;
• interviews on 'Autobiology' workshops - in which Curious worked with 56 artists across the UK using 'gut feelings' to generate text, performance, video and installation work;
• and a special bonus track on the creative process in making the performance and film.

Curious and Live Art Development Agency, 2010, PAL-DVD, 93 minutes. £10.00

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Bristol, Contemporary, Multi-Visual, Stage, Theatre, Theatre Review

May 15, 2010, Arnolfini

Up until now I have never had cause to climb aboard a life raft, a fact for which I am exceedingly grateful. But sitting in one to watch this latest production from London theatre company Curious only added to the show’s quiet magic.

‘The Moment I Saw You…’ is about love, and whether you should stay and stick it out or give up and run. Skillfully blending intimate live action with vintage-looking film and a gorgeously evocative soundtrack, Curious weave together wonderful stories about imperfect characters: a lady cast adrift on a lilo, a woman trying to hold back the sea, a man standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to jump whilst being watched by a calmly philosophical whale.

There are some compelling performances. Claudia Barton has a voice as richly seductive as ladlefuls of melted chocolate, while company founders Leslie Hill and Helen Paris sure know how to spin a yarn, whether that means holding court with a mic or whispering right there in the life raft with you.

Granted, the life raft is a bit cramped and not enormously comfortable (my bum is still a bit numb). But discomfort is easily dispelled by the ending, a moment of pure joy that celebrates love and says yes to staying and sticking it out. I urge you to see this, but be sure to take someone you hold dear (and maybe a cushion).
Clare Ogden

Until I saw this exquisitely delicate show, created by Curious, staged here as part of Scotland's National Review of Live Art, I had never considered that when you are cast adrift on a lilo, you are, in effect, floating on nothing but your own breath. If your breath gives out as you float out to sea, you will certainly sink and drown. You might be swallowed by a whale and find yourself sitting in its belly and bleached white by its gastric juices, like the sailor who tumbled overboard from his ship and was found by his crew inside the whale's stomach: white, frozen with fear but still breathing.

The lure of the sea is strong in this beautiful, watery show where the spectators becomes immersed, too. You have to find your sea legs in a performance that places the audience in jelly-like structures recreating the experience of sea sickness or that lurch in the stomach that comes with sudden love or terrible fear. This is all about gut feelings.

Film and live performance, soundscape and installation combine in this love story to offer glimpses of an endless horizon as well as intimate close-ups. A pack of sea sickness pills becomes a miniature movie screen; we pry into the stomach of a member of the audience to find a surprising place where boats lurch on storm-tossed gastric oceans.

There is something immensely wistful about a piece that demonstrates that we are merely chemical compounds, and yet also shows us how to discover equilibrium. At the end, we are paired up and dance, an apple balanced between our foreheads. Like every second of this show, it is fragile and intangible.