Help Launch Build a Rocket...to Edinburgh!
Donation protected
Hey Up!
Shannon and Jordan here. Thanks for taking a look at our GoFundMe :D
We are two creatives from Scarborough doing all we can to get our show of Build a Rocket by Christopher York to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August!
We're so excited to have been offered a week's run at Just the Tonic, right in the heart of Edinburgh. We are very passionate about our production but here's the snag,
taking a show to Edinburgh is expensive, really flipping expensive. And for working-class artists like ourselves, it becomes almost impossible. So being determined not to let a little thing like money stand in our way, here we are, asking for your help.
Why we want to go to the fringe?
We first worked on the piece in 2022 for director Jordan Langford's MA in Directing at Rose Bruford College. We fell in love with it and feel it is a truly special piece of writing. Having a fully-fledged one-woman show ready to go we found ourselves itching to share this story with as many audiences as we can. So much so that we took to producing it ourselves, having never produced anything before (we don't like to make things easy...)
We're both from Scarborough, just like the wonderful writer of this play, Christopher York. Working on something that's set in your hometown has been truly special. We've felt so connected to the characters and the story, we know the streets, the people, and the quirks of our beautiful hometown. We also resonate with the struggles of the play. Yasmin (the central character of Build a Rocket) is defiant to triumph over adversity!
We want to take our bit of Scarborough to as many places as we can. Our long-term aim is to have a production company on board so we can take a community production of Build a Rocket around Yorkshire and the UK. To achieve that aim, we need to get our Build a Rocket on the map, get people seeing it, talking about it, and excited about it. Where better than the biggest fringe festival in the world?
It is also a career-changing opportunity for us. Jordan graduated in October 2022 as a director and having a production up in Edinburgh in the first year of graduating would help his career go from strength to strength. Shannon has been acting since she graduated from Drama Studio London nine years ago but has never had the chance to perform a one-woman play, let alone one that is set in her hometown and lets her use her own voice. This would be an incredible opportunity for us.
What is the show about?
Build a Rocket is a one-woman play following the defiant and inspiring story of Yasmin, a teenager from Scarborough whose life is not sandcastles, arcades, and donkey rides as she finds herself pregnant and alone in the world. We follow her story for eighteen years until her son is coming of age.
A unique and bold production, Build a Rocket tells an inspiring, whirlwind story while challenging commonly held perceptions of young motherhood.
Christopher York comments, "Teenage pregnancy is so demonized and we’re quick to blame teenagers. There was a girl I was at school with who had a child at 15. I was astounded at her resilience and that she went on to pass her GCSEs, go to college and university, get married, and raise a wonderful human being. She is a phenomenal person. We are still conservative about these topics. If we were more open and Scandinavian about how we tackled sex and sexual health, especially with young people, we may not have the statistics we do."
What will you use the money for?
So far the project has been self-funded with anything we could scrape together, which hasn't been much. All our set/costumes/props we have got from charity shops, have been gifted to us or we have painted/created ourselves.
Arts Council funding isn't something you can get for Edinburgh Fringe performances unfortunately so fundraising is our only hope. Below is a breakdown of where the money will go for our week in Edinburgh:
Venue Fees
Festival Registration Fees
Brochure fees
Advertising and Marketing
Accommodation
Travel
PRS License
Accessibility
Per Diems (basically, a posh way of saying money for the day, so we can eat whilst we’re there!)
We currently won’t be giving ourselves a fee. If we are lucky enough to get to the fringe and happen to make any profit on the tickets we will split that equally as a fee but we're not in this for the money, it's pure passion that is fuelling our drive to get to Edinburgh and beyond.
We know it is not an easy time financially at the moment but if you find yourself able to donate just a few pounds or share our page it would mean the world to us.
Lots of love,
Shannon and Jordan xxx
You can follow our progress on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/build.a.rocket_uk/
Find out more about us
Organizer
Shannon Rewcroft
Organizer
England