(Idée Fixe) is a performing arts company which draws from a collaboration of like-minded artists possessing a range of different backgrounds to create performances where sound, movement, image and drama are imaginatively conjoined using relevant technologies. Each work the company makes is based on a theme from daily life: a day in anyone’s life, the rooms of a block of flats, the fun and perils of travel. Objects (sound, visual) from everyday life are combined in an experimental performance context. This is done to make works particularly tangible and user-friendly. Stage designs not only act as décor, but also as sound installations triggered by movement in entertaining and challenging performances. One of the company’s key aims is to set an example and facilitate active participation in art-making on as wide a scale as possible. It stands for an artistic process based on working with people, not at or on them. This process is founded on developing devising as a working practice where individuals all contribute to and can be identified in collaborative creative work. The company encourages and facilitates a range of community-based activities, all of which are custom-made for each host taking into account group and individual needs. It seeks convergence between the arts and amongst professional and community arts contexts.
Co-directors: Leigh Landy & Evelyn Jamieson
The company and its devising practice are fully introduced in the booklet/video publication, Devising Dance and Music: Idée Fixe Experimental Sound and Movement Theatre (2000, Sunderland University Press). In the booklet “flexible framework for devising” is proposed for anyone’s use. Furthermore, the company’s ‘tools’ are introduced. These include:
- A theme from everyday life
- Found objects and found sounds / Recycling
- Surrealism
- The What?! factor (a viewer’s reaction to something totally unexpected)
- Humour
- The something new factor (this means that there is something new, ideally quite new, for all performers and the public – these things need not be the same for all)
- The ‘1% tilt’ (one way to achieve newness is to take something existent, tilt it ever so slightly and present it in a performance)
- The flexible art work (which takes performer’s and expected members of the public’s experiences into account)
A Day in the Life (1995)
A Day in the Life, Idée Fixe’s first piece (1995), takes its audience on a dynamic journey through a diverse range of experimental music. The
Fish Design (1996)
This site-specific piece was created for Hull’s Hooked Festival and was performed on the huge (redundant) Victoria Pier. Four dancers and a narrator using a
(Y)our House (1996)
(Y)our House is fully devised work which is influenced by Georges Perec’s unusual text La vie – mode d’emploi, translated as “Life – A User’s Guide”. This
Bon voyage? (1997)
“Bon voyage?” deals with the quirks of travel in a dynamic sound and movement work which takes the viewer from many a queue at the
Lottopus (1998)
HA devised piece in which the spirit of games and competition initially inspired by the social icon known as the Lottery merged with the hard
In Transit (1999)
Photo from a performance of In Transit at the Maxis Festival at the University of Leeds. This piece is about the feeling of always being too