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Found this article and enjoyed these comments left below:

"Could someone explain what the deeper thoughts they have are when looking at a dead stuffed dog with a sign saying I'm dead.

What is the profound statement?"

...

""If all we wanted from an artist was that they could draw, then art would simply be a skill"
Another apology for Mediocrity."

...

"David Shrigley cannot draw
Bob Dylan cannot sing
Clint Eastwood cannot act
Kylie Minogue cannot write songs
The cast of Life of Brian cannot act
Eddie the Eagle cannot fly
JK Rowling cannot write
Eminen cannot rhyme
Teletubies cannot speak

I cannot comment"


More David Shrigley here


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Two really cool devised theatre videos form Youtube- one is a clip from Kate McIntosh's "Dark Matter", which Fiona saw in Munich and wrote about earlier this year. The other one is a great recent video about process from Forced Entertainment.
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with apologies to Howard Barker.
1.       You are probably making theatre for the wrong reasons.
2.       Few people go to the theatre to have a bad time and be improved. How will you target them in your marketing?
3.       Poetry may make nothing happen but it lacks theatre’s social aspect.
4.       Shared light is spooky, because look how hard you are working and how still the audience is.
5.    The banks have gotten pretty chummy recently, haven’t they? 
6.       Evolutionarily, it may not be in your interests to be happy.
7.       Nihilism in the elderly is disconcerting, isn’t it?
8.     Truth in the theatre is quite hard to define. 
9.       All that junk food is altering your perception of things.
10.    When the actors are having a bad time, comfort them by calling out things like “its ok! None of it is really happening!”
11.    Try getting up there and helping out. See what they do.
12.   Discussion of Facebook will not, in itself, make the work avant-garde.
13.    All this coffee is making you edgy. Have you added up what it costs you in a week?
14.    Lists can be written more quickly than novels.
15.    If you want to watch people bored at work, there are fast food places where you can do it for free. 
16.    It is more about the asking of questions than about being so presumptuous as to proffer answers, wouldn't you say?
17.     You will see all these things differently in a few years. 
18.    The news media in this country is very emotionally invested.
19.    We are doomed with or without your scholarly concern.  Stop reading those depressing books and go outside, its sunny.
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Where all your Beckett royalties go
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Off our chests 21/08/2010
 
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We were sarcastic to babies. We left jellyfish on the beach access steps, we wrapped a piece of dry ice in bread and fed it to a seagull, we crucified tuataras by the tracks in national parks. We thought our deodorant would get us laid by two girls at once- we weren’t even half right. We amputated the wrong limb- we had been drinking. We saw Jermaine in Patel’s and acted like he was our friend. We mouthed the national anthem, we pissed on the field. We paid her $150,000 on the quiet, which is almost $40,000 per vertebrae and not a bad hourly rate.  We needed constant distraction, a soundtrack, we had to be occupied all the time, we hated gaps, we had no attention span, we were never satisfied doing one thing at a time. We laughed at three legged dogs and sometimes we'd make them jump for food. We went around pouring raro into people's hot water cylinders. We declared war on God when we knew he was omnipotent. We sold pictures of the tumour to Woman’s Day. We hosted breakfast television; we were naked from the waist down. We knew 9/11 was going to happen and we could have warned people but our bed was warm and we didn’t have money on our phones. We rewrote Shakespeare with happy endings. We changed our relationship status to “it’s pointless.” We did our calculations in imperial instead of metric, four astronauts were asphyxiated. We tried to kill ourselves but messed it up, so we did the research and wrote a book called SUICIDE FOR DUMMIES- it was a bestseller, life got better. We put your toothbrush where the sun don’t shine. We put pornographic Harry potter slash fiction in the children’s library. We wrote fucking disgusting things with your magnetic poetry. We joined causes on Facebook.  Our ipods were full of pirated NZ music. We couldn’t keep conversations going, we found it difficult to read between the lines, we were borderline all sorts of things. We wore bangles to indicate to the boys what we were willing to do- green meant oral, blue was for with a condom, red without- we turned our collars down to show him we were up for it. We were small fish in a tiny pond. We’re guilty of static, of white noise, polystyrene packaging and bubble wrap, we put the huge amount of junk information in your DNA. We got into the stranger’s car- the offer was just too good. We cried when people died in movies because we couldn’t help thinking it could be you. We got our gum caught in your pubic hair. We wore Che Guevara T-shirts. We misplaced parts of the infant’s body, we buried her incomplete. We yelled at cicadas. We knew where Carmen San Diego was all along.
A selection from in-rehearsal explorations of Speak Bitterness in 2008. Written by Rachel, Claire, Simon, Ralph and Joel, after Forced Entertainment. Continues- click "read more".
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Movie Magic 20/05/2010
 
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Look! Links to the short vids we made last year for the Mashpit website:

Our Recent Status Updates
When Facebook goes bad.

1001 Things You MUST Do Before You Die
There was one of these they made us cut out, and a few I'm quite suprised they let stay...

Binge News
We never found out who this boy was, he was just a miracle which appeared

Hard Night Panda 01, 02 and 03 
Its not the drinking, its how we're drinking...
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Things To Say When You Didn’t Like The Show.

 
As you will be aware, there is in place a lengthy or indefinite moratorium on constructive criticism for any new theatre performance. In the meantime, the following remarks are allowable and may be helpful in the foyer:
 


You made that yourselves, right? It was really devised-feeling. 

I liked you in it.

 I liked that you were in it. 

I really liked the bit where (mention intensely specific action). It was quite an interesting stage image.

You guys were all obviously really, really committed. 

You used the space. 

Great energy! I could tell you were all having a lot of fun. 

We were meant to be bored, that was part of it, eh? 

I liked how there were no (name something absent, like swastikas, or dead babies, etc) in it.

I’ve never seen you act before (no follow-up.)

You know what? It reminded me of (talk about something else). 

I’m not really a theatre person, you know, so I guess a lot of it just went over my head.

You looked really pretty. 

That costume looked great on you. 

Who did the design? 

I like how it didn't have to mean anything. 

So are your parents coming to see this? 

Do you get paid for this? No? Yeah that makes sense. 

Oh hey! Hey! I've got to get a bus!

This is really cool, what you’ve done to the foyer.  
 

REMINDER: You must, by no means, tell the performers what you actually think. Who do you think they make this stuff for?
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On Exponential Curves

We started a bit early tonight.    

We started at one o’clock. We felt normal.   

Two. Lightheaded by this point. We were able to make plans. We could still do tongue twisters.  

At three o’clock we got that mild feeling of floatation, or gliding. Vodafone told us to make the most of now.  

Four. We knocked over objects, we spilled drinks. Cosmopolitan declared it the Summer of You.  We played truth or dare.   

We got to five. We were unusually confident. We got bolder, more flirtatious. In sports cars, green became the new red. Someone suggested strip poker.  

Six. Our speech got pretty slurred. MacDonalds used climate change to sell us coffee. People’s first names became interchangeable. Bad hangovers became likely. Nostalgia. Nationalism. Spin the bottle.  

Seven. We saw lines of large trucks filling Lambton quay. We had sex with randoms.  Ex partners received incoherent text messages. Somewhere around here we reached a sort of point of no return.   

Eight. We hit a spike. The gulf turned to shit. We had breakdowns on the footpath outside Shooters. We gave up on empathy.

At nine o’clock we basically said fuck it, lets make a night of it.
 

By Ralph (with a nod to Don Patterson). This was written for Wellington theatre collective Binge Culture’s last show, Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish, but wasn’t in the final version. 
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1001 Things You MUST Do Before You Die (Abridged)

Carry this list with you, and as you complete each action, tick the corresponding box.
 
…Watch the launch of the space shuttle. c 
Roll in the snow with a really beautiful boy. c
 Eat an endangered animal (e.g tuatara or hector’s dolphin). c 
Tell someone the story of your life, sparing no details. c
Make love on a forest floor. c 
Make love on a train.c 
Make love on the kitchen floor. c 
Kill something with your hands. c 
Learn to take a compliment and perform a selfless act. c 
Learn to rollerblade. c
Perform standup comedy. c 
Send a message in a bottle. c 
Ride a camel into the desert. c 
Fight in a just war. c 
Learn to ballroom dance properly. c 
Commit a heinous crime and get away with it! c 
Write the novel you have inside you. c 
Shower with a loved one. c 
Shower in a waterfall. c 
Receive a golden shower. c 
Receive a golden handshake. c 
Get passionate about a cause and spend time helping it, instead of just thinking about it. c 
Write your will. c 
Sleep under the stars. c
Teach someone illiterate to read. c 
Really beat the shit out of someone. c  
Forgive your parents. c 
Learn to juggle with three balls. c 
Give a speech in public. c 
Experience weightlessness. c
 
(continues)
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Feedback the Judges have given us:

  “I wish you’d sing something about my problems.” 

    “I’d like you to do that again, on fire.” 

  “I’d like to see you do that again, but with some tigers.” 

  “Are you aware of the snipers on the upper balcony?”

“You have a luminous soul. You are a voice in a billion. Fix your breasts.” 

  “We don’t have time for another version of Memory. For god’s sake, the ice caps are melting.” 

  “You need to relax, be proud of who you are. Just act natural.” 

  “I don’t think you know who you are. I don’t know who you are. Who are you? How did you get in here? Security!” 

  “Je ne parle pas anglais.” 
 
“You’re good, but there are far too many famous people.” 

  “Do you have an eating disorder, because you should consider getting one.” 

   “You need to believe in yourself.” 

  “You believe in yourself too much.”  

“I’ll give $1000,000 to the audience member who brings me your head in a bag.”  

“I think that you are what this competition is all about.”
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In Defence of Humanity

 Without coming across all defensive, we thought we should remind readers that there are, despite what people have been saying, some pretty clear differences between humans and animals. 

Including:   


  a) We will not tricked by basic traps- ie flowers that look like other bees so that they mate with them, or eyes on butterflies that look like predators.

b) We are (usually) less hairy. We wear eyeliner. 

c) Time, clocks and watches. We understand about death, and that the sun is a very, very long way away. 

 d) We make tools, like hammers and water blasters. 

 e) We outthink our instincts. We tell lies. 

f) Art. No apes make art and if they do it looks like a Jackson Pollock, which doesn’t count. 

 g) We went to the moon. And no, the dogs and apes that went into space first don’t really count because who put them in the rockets in the first place? 

  h) Shakespeare. And especially Hamlet, though I haven’t read it.

i) We fall in actual love and only kill when there are wars or a good reason. 
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