Preview: Southville Unexplained Club, Tobacco Factory Theatres

Tobacco Factory Theatres’ artist residency scheme Platform showcases three very different, very absorbing new shows this month.

Platform has evolved following a varied series of artist residencies which ran at Tobacco Factory Theatres over the last year.  Following an open call out, eight artists were provided with rehearsal and research space for up to two weeks, alongside producing and technical support, to enable each of them to develop an idea for a new piece of performative or installation work.  Three of these artists – Rosa Eaton, The Bishop Sisters and Tom Marshman – perform their finished pieces at TFT’s new studio space, the Spielman Theatre this month.

We begin with Rosa Eaton’s Southville Unexplained Club. Here’s Rosa to tell us more.

“Ghosts, psychic visions, government conspiracies and tragic local history… Southville Unexplained Club reveals the oddness just below the surface of the suburbs.

“When I was growing up in Hotwells, as an eight-year-old I woke up in the middle of the night, looked out of my door from my bed – and saw the ghost of a young teenager in antiquated nightwear, holding a candle stick.

“As a child you could not convince me that I did not see this – but in the 21 years since, I have doubted myself and this memory did not sit well with my understanding of the world. I decided to undertake this project to resolve this dissonance.

“My hypothesis was that there was a sizeable amount of people walking round with similar events that they could not explain and didn’t know what to do with the memory of, that the world might be a stranger place than we let on to each other for fear of ridicule. During my residency with the Tobacco Factory Theatres I put up posters inviting people to submit their stories to ‘Southville Unexplained Club’ of which I was the founder and solo member. Sadly the only respondent was BBC Radio Bristol, twice (which led to a phone-in on Halloween on John Derbyshire’s programme about this topic).

South Bristol Swimming Baths is built on top of Dean Lane Pit, where there was a mining disaster. One of the ghostly manifestations here is reports of wet footprints when the pool is unlocked each day…

“Luckily, though, putting up the posters was a mechanism for talking to local people, getting stories from local residents in shops, cab offices, at the market, in the street and – primarily – in local pubs. Over the course of a week of interviews and some rather heavy nights I spoke to 30 people who had experiences they could not explain and gathered 50 stories of strange occurrences. These have been condensed into a survey of the strange in this area.

“This show illustrates the changing character of Southville, especially the fact that Southville itself is a relatively new guise, and that at its heart it will always be Bedminster. In talking to people who have lived in the area all their lives and who frequent the kind of pubs theatregoers are often afraid of going in, through the medium of strange phenomena, Southville Unexplained Club shines a light on gentrification and brings the stories of people who are otherwise not likely to cross the threshold of a theatre, into the Tobacco Factory Theatres.

The Tap and Barrel, opposite the swimming baths, is said to suffer from prodigious poltergeist activity

“I am hosting two meetings of the Southville Unexplained Club on November 27 and 28 November where I will talk through my findings over rather nice chocolate biscuits, with the aid of PowerPoint and the portraits that I took of the contributors. A night of stories of local people who do not necessarily believe but have seen things. We range from local mining disasters, to military cover-ups, phone calls from the dead, to the reason Bedminster taxi drivers won’t go to Dundry after dark. This funny and unsettling show promises to leave you afraid on your walk home.”

Southville Unexplained Club meets at Tobacco Factory Theatres on November 27 & 28. For more information, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/southville-unexplained-club
For more info on all three Platform shows, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/project/artists-and-companies/artist-development/platform

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