The Devoted and Disgruntled Roadshow 2012

D&D Invitations

Below this Devoted and Disgruntled Roadshow Logo you’ll see a number of invitations for our annual event Devoted and Disgruntled which happened last Feb, This year was its seventh year. These invitations were created by people inspired to do so by the fact that they had already been to a D&D. Some had been every years or a few years other’s had decided to come for the first time and some had just been to our shorter themed satellite events.

If you read the invites you’ll get a great idea of what the atmosphere of D&D is like. It’s different every year and each person gets a different thing from it. Mostly because your experience of it is totally navigated by your own sense of participation.

You simply join in as much or a little as you like. You make the choices of whether you call sessions, whether you just go to other people’s or whether you use the informal structure to create your own network of off piste discussions.

Check them out if you are wondering what exactly D&D is like and whether you should come or not and join in the D&D Roadshow.

24 May 2012 ·

Sally Christopher’s invitation

Not usually one to wish the days away, I have to admit I am finding myself imagining all the more frequently the mighty York Hall….bedecked in post stick notes, breaking news and butterflies. Outside the coolcats smoke rollies by the dozen, when inside the bold and beautiful hold court over unending cups of coffee. Keyboards click, clever techies tweet whilst old friends reconnect over a 1000 bourbon biscuits. Chats, sparks, laughs and fights find voice and resolution in a room that is bound by no timetable or clock, only the sound of a tiny bell and your own two feet. Sounds mad? Or maybe like a crazy episode of Heartbreak High? No, no….this is just my version of Devoted and Disgruntled . I can’t wait to do it all over again in a week or so and I urge you to come too.

This will be my fourth, or maybe fifth, annual D and D. The first time I clung to my pal Laura’s broken arm, nervous that someone would bust me and tell me to get out for not being a real artist, or something.  I edged in and listened and slowly found a community I was pleased to join. I met elders who became mentors for a weekend and contemporaries who would become colleagues in the future.  Over the years I’ve become more of a listener, finding interest in the questions that others ask.  Apart from last year when I essentially bullied my friend Jamie to host a session on my behalf titled “My friend Sally would like a boyfriend.  Discuss…”.  

I don’t know what I will be this year.  To be honest I just like being in the room and reading breaking news, secretly pretending I’m 20 years old again sneaking outside chain smoking on the steps with the new generation of art-makers.  

It is also an opportunity to re-engage with the principles of Open Space and remind myself why I should apply this to my work, my life and relationships. Being prepared to be surprised, engaging the Law of Two Feet and realising when it’s over…it’s over.  All of this will make complete sense when you come to York Hall, ask your own questions, have a cup of coffee and share a bourbon biscuit with me and several hundred other good people. 

Artists, actors, designers, poets, punters. Musicians, dancers, circus, directors. Festivallers, eventers, producers and pozers. New, old, start up, freelance,well paid, poor. This is an opportunity and I look forward to seeing you there!

Sal

21 February 2012 ·

Alex Murdoch and the Salvos’ invitation

I am going to D&D7 and I hope you are too.

It hardly needs advertising, everyone who cares and is frustrated about theatre will be there if they can be.  

Reading through this tumblog it strikes me that there are so many of us class ourselves as people who dread ‘this sort of thing’.  As if all the other people there will be sparkly networkers palming business cards and making deals over a fag and an anecdote.  D&D is nothing of the sort.

You might find yourself at one point alone staring into space feeling over-awed by the whole thing but that’s ok. And that’s probably just because it is awe-inspiring.  You may well find yourself in a conversation with a group of people who you thought you had nothing in common with and who can help you to change your way of thinking and looking at theatre for the better.  No-one can predict what experiences they might have at D&D and that is part of the point, but one thing is for sure - you will have done something very positive for your relationship to your work and your world because you will find yourself feeling less isolated and more connected.  See you there x

20 February 2012 ·

Mhairi Grealis’s invitation

Live a Little….

Well, I’ve never been to this event before, but I’ve been to enough events where, to be frank, I’ve felt like plunging off of the nearest impossibly high bridge into the handiest deepest of deep impossibly yawning abysses. Yes. really. I can’t bear it normally, I find other practitioners either fantastically nice, and talented, which is frustrating because there are no resources for me to work with them, or profoundly anodyne and lacking in vision and intellectual rigour I hate to say. So why oh why am I doing this and even, to make matters worse, oh no! Inviting you????? Well why not. As my mother used to say, ‘there’s no pockets in a shroud’ so I say let’s throw a spanner into the ordinaryness of things and give it a go.

It might - just might -  be ok - and that’s worth a punt for twenty quid.

Aye.

19 February 2012 ·

Theatre Delicatessen’s invitation

first time for everything

I missed D&D last year - that weekend was spent desperately fighting to meet a writing deadline. At the time it seemed like a wise choice, creating the work rather than talking about it.

So I approach this weekend with trepidation. Three days is a long time to take out of any schedule, plus the thought of hour after hour of intense and earnest artistic navel-gazing is hardly a draw.

So why I am going? Simply because D&D is now de rigueur for theatre artists - not only to go, but to be seen to have gone.

And yet, I look forward to being convinced and converted as so many of my peers have been. They talk about D&D wide eyed, and skip out of the weekend with new vigour and vitality.

So often we are working so hard that we forget why. I hope that this will be a chance for me to step back and fall in love again with what I do, and the many people around me who are driven in the same way.

18 February 2012 ·