Edinblog Day 1

Here we are again!

Today was Tech run for ETHOS, finding out my room for the show this year is downstairs in this gorgeous monster of a building, and meeting the flyering team.

Tech run is where you go into a room to meet the people who will do lights and sound for your show; who will be very bored watching it every night, and patch you up if any disasters happen.

Tech for ETHOS is very simple from the perspective of the tech guys, unless my rig fails in which case it will become insanely complicated very quickly. This happened in Melbourne, but I have so many backup systems in place now that I’m hoping it won’t happen here. The power for the building went out midway through my tech run so that was an exciting moment, but apparently it was a whole-quadrant of Edinburgh that went down, not just the hall, so that’s a relief.

The stage is a thrust stage (semi-circle with seats to the left and right, as well as in front), and the venue doesn’t have a table I can use to put my robot rig on. I ponder logistics and figure I can give ETHOS two faces and worst comes to worst the flat I’m staying in has an ironing board I could probably borrow. GLAMOUR.

I bump into Tom Walker, Demi Lardner and Jamali Maddix, who are all buying props for their shows, as I grab some gaffer tape for Important Slick Seamless Show Purposes, which makes me feel very much like Edinburgh is about to happen.

Meeting the flyering team is a bit daunting; I meet Alex Hall (who is organising promo) and she ushers me into a classroom with a bunch of fresh faced young people and tells me to talk about my show. This is the kind of sales pitch I’m awful at. How do I elevator pitch this thing? I don’t know. I fumble around with words like “clever, but also silly” and they look at me sceptically. I genuinely get stammer-y, which usually only happens when I’m angry. Then I wave and run. At least Laura Davis is there too.

We get out and go to Poundland to buy the things our flat is not equipped with; a laundry basket, some hooks for coats to hang off the door, a couple of canvases for ETHOS. I have somehow dropped my credit card somewhere in the streets of Edinburgh, so I freeze it on the app and reorder. Technology is great. Annoying but not fatal as the bank I’m with over here is very quick, and says they’ll deliver it in two days.

Now I’m settling in to re-record some voice cues and trim some of the fluff from the show. Every time I do this I somehow end up adding more things in, so wish me luck in that process of overthinking and overkneading.

I open tomorrow. Haven’t checked ticket sales because really, why would you? Control the things I can, I guess. Gaffer tape is a comforting thing to have.