Cannonball Wins Best Solo Show at NZ Fringe Awards

The reviews are in! After hit seasons in Wellington and Auckland, Cannonball has won the New Zealand Fringe Best Solo Show award. The award is the second win for Cannonball having previously picked up the Tiki Tour Ready Award at the Melbourne Fringe last year.

Here’s what the NZ reviewers have been saying:

“Wonderfully twisted” – in R&R: Cannonball  by Lucy Diver, Gather and Hunt.

“Taylor gives a masterful display of the art of the one-person show” – in Theatre review: Cannonball, The Basement by Paul Simei-Barton, The New Zealand Herald, 6 Mar 2013.

“Cannonball is a one-woman wonder” – in Flawless Physical Transformations A Delight To Behold by Heidi North-Bailey, The New Zealand Performing Arts Directory, 5 Mar 2013.

“Taylor holds her audience absolutely transfixed” – in Actor’s Dexterity Anything But Run-of-the-Mill by Ewen Coleman, Dominion Post, 27 Feb 2013.

“An enormously talented comedic actress and impersonator” in Brilliantly Crafted by Caoilinn Hughes,  The New Zealand Performing Arts Directory, 26 Feb 2013.

 Cannonball plays the Melbourne Comedy Festival from 28 March – 7 April at the Victoria Hotel in Melbourne CBD.

For ticket details go to:
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/cannonball-emily-taylor

For a complete list of the 2013 NZ Fringe award winners go to:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1303/S00201/nz-fringe-awards-2013.htm

HUMAN CANNONBALL HITS NEW ZEALAND!

Media Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Pretending To Be Awake Productions presents

CANNONBALL
Written and performed by Emily Taylor.

Winner of the Tiki Tour Ready Award at the 2012 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Green Room Award winner Emily Taylor (Impro Melbourne, Is This Your Life, Hello You, Spontaneous Broadway) brings her particular brand of black comedy to New Zealand in this premiere Melbourne and Auckland co-fringe event.

Delving into the complexity of modern urban life, comedic shape-shifter Taylor uses fragmented narrative to reveal the fantastical behind the mundane and the disturbing beneath the ordinary as her myriad of characters grapple with happiness and mortality, careening together towards their fates.

From a macabre psychiatrist’s receptionist, to a faux spiritual CEO, to an evil Cabbage Patch Doll, the characters of Cannonball are deceptively everyday. You work with them. They went to your school. You met them once at a party. But you’ve never before seen them quite like this. Playful, daring and injected with a keen sense for satire, Taylor twists and transforms through a minefield of adolescent angst, mid-life disappointment and familial discontent, exploring the inner lives of characters at once recognizable and bizarre.

From this multi-award winning solo performer, Cannonball is a journey through the delightful, dark and dangerous recesses of the mind, pulling out all the stops to pack a surprising, funny and insightful punch. Powered by a unique combination of comic fervour and compelling vulnerability, Cannonball rockets irrepressibly towards the future, wreaking havoc along the way.

“Finely crafted, entertaining and incredibly engaging.” – Aussie Theatre

“Unique and hilarious…a fearless performer” – Theatre Press

CANNONBALL plays

WELLINGTON
25th Feb – 1st March, 8pm
Duration: 60 minutes
Venue: BATS Theatre, Cnr Cuba and Dixon Streets for 2013, Wellington
Tickets: Full $20, Concessions $15
Bookings: http://www.bats.co.nz or (04) 802 4175

AUCKLAND
4th – 9th March, 7pm
Duration: 60 minutes
Venue: The Basement Theatre, Lower Greys Avenue, Auckland CBD
Tickets: Full $20, Concessions $15
Bookings: iTicket – http://www.iticket.co.nz or 09 361 1000

HUMAN CANNONBALL HITS FRINGE HUB

Following the success of Green Room Award winning Hello You, Emily Taylor is back, catapulting her  audience into the strange and surprising world of Cannonball. Delving into the complexity of urban life,  comedic shape-shifter Taylor uses fragmented narrative to reveal the fantastical behind the mundane and the compelling beneath the ordinary as her myriad of characters careen together towards their final collision.

A seasoned improviser, Taylor (Spontaneous Broadway, Is This Your Life, Impro Melbourne and Melbourne Playback Theatre) uses principles of improvisation when creating new work. Cannonball embraces spontaneity, truth in comedy and the audience/performer dynamic, creating an intimacy with the audience and an investment in the world presented onstage. Winner of the Green Room Award for Innovative Use of Form, Taylor’s work seeks to experiment, to merge and mutate theatrical forms and to find new ways to excite and inspire audiences. At times in rapid fire, at others in dreamlike procession, the characters in Cannonball appear and disappear, representing voices young and old and from a variety of perspectives. A teenage misfit competes for survival. An absentee mother is born again. A cat coughs up Sigmund Freud. Scenarios familiar and bizarre, ordinary and extraordinary co-exist and intersect as one character’s story ripples out and involves everyone around her. Solo performer Taylor uses physical and vocal transformation to explore key themes of truth, fiction, reality, fantasy, desire and loss as she morphs and mutates through a minefield of adolescent angst, mid-life longing and feline discontent. Powered by a unique combination of comic fervour and compelling vulnerability, this premiere presentation of Cannonball at the Fringe Hub packs a surprising, funny and insightful
punch.

HELLO YOU AT THE 2011 MELBOURNE CABARET FESTIVAL

 2010 Green Room Award Winner and hit of the Sydney Fringe and This Is Not Art festivals, Hello You is back! 

A direct descendant of an amateur life-guard, Emily wades through the murky waters of her memory to drag forth cloudy tales of misspent youth, ill forgotten heartbreaks and hazy premonitions of the future. Endearingly honest and awkwardly intimate, Hello You uses music, characterisation, and improvisation to in turn tempt, …tease and test the audience, sweeping them along on a joyride of childlike wonder, adolescent yearning and geriatric reminiscence. Taking an axe to cabaret form and then cradling the pieces, Emily creates a delightfully slippery world of miscommunication, multiple meanings and mutating memory.

 “…A brainful of fresh ideas.” – Naomi Milthorpe, BMA Magazine 

Featuring Emily Taylor and accompanied on piano by Quinn Stacpoole.

Check out the videos page to see Emily in action as ‘Gossamer Ball’, performing as part of the Spontaneous Broadway troupe for the 2011 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

What: Hello You – A Kamikaze Cabaret
When: Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 July, both shows at 6.45pm
Cost: $33 / $30
Duration: 60 minutes approx
Where: The Incubator, Auspicious Arts, 228 Bank Street, South Melbourne
More info and bookings: http://www.melbournecabaret.com/helloyou.htm

Hello You Wins Green Room Award

And the 2010 Green Room Award for Innovative Use Of Form goes to…

Emily Taylor, Hello You.

Thanks Green Roomers.

 2010 Green Room Award Nominations and Recipients

HELLO YOU – KAMIKAZE CABARET ENCORE ANNOUNCED!

As a special encore presentation Hello You will appear at The Butterfly Club for two shows only at 9pm on 26th and 27th November 2010.

Tickets $22/$17

Bookings: www.thebutterflyclub.com

Go to SHOWS for more info!

KAMIKAZE CABARET CRASHES INTO BUTTERFLY

MEDIA RELEASE
5 October 2010

Fresh from The Sydney Fringe Festival and This Is Not Art, Emily Taylor and Quinn Stacpoole of Plastic Palace Alice take time out of the band’s imminent second album release to reunite Melbourne with their show Hello You – A Kamikaze Cabaret. After debuting in December last year, Hello You returns to The Butterfly Club for four nights only, following further development under award winning director Martin White (The Suicide Show, And No More Shall We Part, The Beautiful Losers). 

Part theatre, part cabaret, part awkwardly amorous love-in, the show uses music, characterisation, and improvisation to take the audience on a joyride of childlike wonder, adolescent yearning and geriatric reminiscence. Taking an axe to cabaret form and then cradling the pieces, Emily takes her audience by the hand and walks them through a delightfully slippery world of miscommunication, multiple meanings and mutating memory, at times caressing, cajoling and consoling.”I think sometimes we all need a hand to hold when we revisit damp-cheeked memories of childhood, scratchy niggling dreams we’d rather forget. It’s like that dream you had the other night where you were interviewing me and then you turned into my mum… Can I stay at my friend’s house tonight?” 

Launching her singing career to sticky cigarette stubbed pub floors with Plastic Palace Alice in 2006, Emily has worked as an actor and performer in numerous theatrical productions over the last decade (Between Today and Tomorrow, The Girl Who Wanted to Be God, Family Running For Mr Whippy, An Air Balloon Across Antarctica, Farmyard). A teacher with Melbourne Theatre Company, First Impressions Youth Theatre and G.A.T.E.WAYS, Emily has trained as a performer under the guidance of Al Wunder, Fiona Battersby and Kirsten von Bibra, following completion of her Honours in Theatre and Film degree in 2001. An increasing interest in improvisation, exploration and the performer/audience relationship led to the belated birth of Hello You. With constant feeding and regular changes, Hello You has grown into a healthy and rather demanding child. Indifferent to that old rule, and encouraged by its parents, it clamours to be seen and heard. 

Tickets available now at www.thebutterflyclub.com
Thur 14^th Oct to Sat 16^th Oct at 9pm
Sun 17^th Oct at 8pm
$27/$22