Double Tour Wrap-Up

On the road and Back Again with The Double

Viktor in the green room in Kingston

We've finally wrapped up our Double Ontario Theatre Connects tour and many thanks to the presenters, audiences and new friends we made along the way.

We've been a little slack in Blog posts but as you can image being on the road, writing grants, finding time to sleep and prepare to pitch the Double at the PuSh Festival took up our precious blogging time.

To mitigate this here's a quick list of great tour moments in our last three stops. Enjoy!

Arif reading at our local cafe in Kingston

sign outside the Grand Theatre

Kingston

sleeping in bunk beds in our Air BnB lodgings on Princess St. As Arif put it vis a vis our less than 5 Star accomodations, "You can't beat the location."
eating the costco box of Miss Vickies salt n vinegar chips that was neatly hidden in the closet of our air BnB
playing to a sold-out house of grade 7 & 8's. Their teacher was a little disappointed in some of the 'sexual' content (I guess they meant Viktor dressed as a double bass playing my crotch with his bow??) but the students loved it and were captivated
the fire alarm going off just seconds after the intermission music came on - this could have been a disaster as the house lights are automatically connected to fire alarm and would have ruined the show had it happened any earlier
giving a lecture to 200 students at Queen's University. Their passion and great questions made for a great talk on theatre, youth and creativity.

Stage Manager extraordinaire Jiv Parasram

The Sauna in North Bay with Adam and Viktor

North Bay

a great Italian meal in a seemingly terrible restaurant at the hotel
the Sauna experience with Arif and Viktor
record shopping on Main St.
rubbing elbows with the hundreds of cops staying at the hotel for a police conference
the freezing cold

Milton

being close enough to home to have friends and family attend the show
standing ovation from a packed house
having the car break down at 1am on the way home!

Adam's Touring Tips

This will be the last of my advice for touring, but take a look back here in April when we go on the road to Ottawa.

To finish, here's Margaret from Bemused Network who wrote us with a question:

"How do you “give legs” to those new audience connections found on the road?"

Thanks for a great question Margaret.

I think that the best way to 'give legs' to these audiences is treat them with respect, give them a great performance and then stay as much in touch as possible following the show. We did our best to encourage people to use social media, especially twitter and instagram, to post about the show. This not only promotes the work but allows us to identify and follow those who liked us and want to stay in touch. In turn we can follow what they're up to.

Joining our mailing list also helps people stay in touch. You can do that by visiting our CONTACT page.

Other than that we try and maintain a good relationship with the venue in the hopes that they will bring us back. In reality you're only in people's minds when you're there, with them. So, we hope to visit these communities again and build upon the relationship we've started with this tour.

Thanks to everyone who made this all possible, especially my amazing artistic team and the Ontario Arts Council.

Adieu and until the next time.

Adam