A beautiful thing

The story is about the conception and birth of an object. It involves the lives of the people who make it, somehow connected to the form and meaning of the one Beautiful Thing. It will be born of skill, danger and risk, under the looming storm of failure. Once finished, you will be left with not just a memory of a story, but the product of the characters in it. The Beautiful Thing will be crafted using a fascinating mix of age-old skills and the very latest production technology. Raw materials will be transformed into a something with its own logic and beauty - much more than the sum of its parts. The show will leave something behind - a physically changed space and an object so fine the audience covet it. One member of the audience will leave with it under their arm.

On arrival the audience will be introduced to some of the raw materials, an oak beam from an historic house or ship, for example, imbuing The Beautiful Thing with a past. They will witness its creation in a series of episodes as its parts are found, honed and assembled. The evolution of the object will not be obvious. It may take a back turn, have setbacks, transforming an accident into a feature, picking up and reincorporating previously discarded things. The audience will have seen it from the inside out, yet when finished, it holds mystery and wonder.

Why

All my art has focused on the structures, music and form of society with conflict and cataclysm as the clouds hanging over our fragile normality. The Beautiful Thing continues to mine this rich vein of investigation, as a way to consider the complexity of beauty, skill and precariousness in our daily lives.

During 24 years of working as a professional I have always found the process of sensitising myself to the material the same whether devising theatre, creating furniture or designing objects.

Barnaby Stone
Jan 2010

'A Little Bit Of A Beautiful Thing' at the BAC 'One on One festival

From the 6th to the 18th July I'm performing 'A Little Bit Of A Beautiful Thing' a short show that forms part of the development of my larger show 'A Beautiful Thing'.

Here's the link to the BAC programme. I'm on the fourth page.