In Stitches was born in February, and who would have known how far we would go in just one year. Our first performance was at the Rose Bruford Symposium event. Symposium was a great success, and garnered a lot of interest in the company. We were lucky to have this opportunity to share our work with other theatre students, many of whom have remained loyal audiences ever since.
After Symposium, it was immediately apparent that we had a solid company. Thankfully, everyone in the group wanted to wanted to keep it going and so we continued rehearsal as Molly scouted out our next opportunity to perform. We began to find our footing as a company and developed our wheelhouse of games. We also started to form strong friendships with each other, which have served us well in performance and mean that our performers are always excited to go to rehearsals for social reasons as well as their love for improv.
We were thrilled to book a place in Camden Fringe Festival, performing at the Hen and Chickens theatre for two nights. It wasn't easy raising the money to get there through bake sales, especially when so few of us can actually bake! But with some generous donations, we made it to Camden and it was certainly worth it. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped us get there. We went in equipped with brand new chairs and t-shirts, and left with rave reviews and happy audiences.
In October we hosted a second round of auditions. We welcomed back Nicole Schretlen-Montes who had taken a break from improvising, and invited two new performers into the company - Izzy Cox and Gabriëlle Hofmann. With company numbers back up to the magic number 12 we were ready to power through rehearsals in the run-up to our second public performance at The Black Box Festival, hosted by the Etcetera Theatre, in November.
Our improvisers were chomping at the bit to perform again, many of us still riding on the high of Camden Fringe. Unfortunately University projects prevented many of the company from performing, but even so, we had two sell-out shows which were, once again met with great reception from the audiences.
2023 holds many more exciting shows for In Stitches as we continue to grow and develop as a company. We are celebrating our first year with the launch of our website, and hope to see you all at our upcoming shows in February at The Pen Theatre and VAULT Festival!
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