Introducing Amanda Monfrooe

Amanda Monfrooe
Emerging Artist Attachment Programme 2011
Supported by Bank of Scotland
Pioneering Partnership

Producing any new project involves raising funds to pay collaborators, purchase materials, and organise press and social media material to rally interest in the project.  The pressure and the enormity of this task can seem discouraging.

Early in the spring of this year I was offered an attachment to the National Theatre of Scotland as a Bank of Scotland supported Emerging Artist. When I discussed the attachment with my National Theatre of Scotland contacts they encouraged me to treat the time and resources it afforded me as a way of incubating my talents and ideas. Instead of launching immediately into another project, I was being given permission to step back from the demanding process of production. Instead I was suddenly able to spend time and money, even in short supply normally, simply enriching myself creatively and intellectually. By relaxing the financial pressures that frequently keep me from prioritising my artistic work, the attachment came at exactly the right moment.

Amanda Monfrooe (photo by Andy Buchanan)

Since starting the attachment I have begun shaping a new performance project. I say “shaping” because it is not a matter of simply writing a script. My projects are like plays in that there is spoken dialogue, monologues, and the lights and sounds of conventional theatre. But in most other ways they are disruptive of normal theatrical logic. Therefore, I first collect material from diverse sources – everything from American popular culture to 20th century Russian history to the social criticisms of comedian Stewart Lee – and I slowly digest the ideas, images and visual impressions this research yields.

In the meantime, I have and will continue to experiment on a smaller scale, enjoying various appearances throughout the autumn. Earlier this month, I prepared a piece for Bungofest, a live performance festival on Glasgow’s south side. This brief spoken word piece piece called The FarmVille Crisis, a satirical reportage about a fictional natural disaster.  Although I hope it’s humorous, I intended for the piece to resonate with the realities the real victims of natural disasters have to face and what we can do in anticipation of more cataclysmic events in the future. This piece and others premiering this fall are evidence of creative percolating, as they reflect ideas, questions, and inspiration that I have not previously had time to develop in my work.

In other words, these small projects and the new performance piece result from a stewing process only made possible by my attachment.

For more information on Amanda’s work go to pony-pie.com