Aoife & Lucy, co-artistic directors of Aimsir Theatre, tell us about their new show coming to Edinburgh Fringe.
“There is always a beginning. There isn’t always an ending. One story begins when God reaches down to make man. The other begins when a mother leaves her children on the youngest’s 18th birthday.
Really, they are the same story. A story about enemies, magpies, a dog named Bethlehem and three tins of fruit. About exits, abandonments, and judgement days. About going back to the beginning, and figuring out where it all went wrong. About trying over and over.”
Where: theSpace on Niddry Street
When: 19-24 Aug
Ticket link: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/uncanny-valley
What are you looking forward to the most at Fringe?
We are excited about having the opportunity to premier our work and to debut as a new company on an international platform!
The opportunity to make connections with international artists, and to gain new insights and creative perspectives from other international creatives are big pulls for us towards the festival!
We’ve visited before as audience members, so the feeling of now bringing a piece of our own – a piece that we’re really proud of – has this year’s fringe feeling really special.
Tell me about Uncanny Valley. It’s billed as an “absurdist drama”. Can you elaborate a bit more on what audiences might expect?
Uncanny Valley is a play about abandonment. About living in a world with an empty sky, about the stories we tell ourselves.
The show follows three sisters – Naomi, Ruth and Phoebe reeling in the sudden loss of their mother, not quite able to escape the moment she left them. Audiences can expect a piece that is deliberate.
Our wonderful actors Lauren Kelly, Juliet Arpaç and Leah Coghlan have worked really hard with us to create a language in their movement, so we’ve been able to make a unique language for the piece.
We’re also hopeful that audiences will see something of themselves – as we always are in anything we make. But we aren’t here to answer questions – the piece leaves a lot of space for the audience to see parts of themselves they maybe haven’t before.
Aimsir Theatre is a young company based in Ireland with two artistic directors. How did it all start and what kind of shows are you planning for the future?
We decided to co-direct as part of our final year project in Trinity College Dublin, where we studied Drama and Theatre.
We discovered we were interested in the same things – cycles, and women, and stories themselves. We established Aimsir Theatre in November 2023.
We are entrigued by the idea of the message as the medium. Going forward, an Aimsir production could look like anything from a more traditional theatre production, to an audio experience, to an immersive installation.
Our shows are always about ourselves – narcissistic as that might sound, we don’t think it’s possible to make stories about anything else.
What do you like about absurdist theatre, and do you engage with other types of theatre and performance as well?
There’s more of a gap between the piece and the audience in absurdist theatre – and it’s the gap that we are interested in, because that’s where the magic happens!
That’s the space where the audience can look for themselves in a work. We are interested in any art that puts accountability and active engagement onto the audience.
Anything that pushes back against passive viewership draws us in!
What’s next after Fringe?
After Fringe, we plan on continuing to make work in Dublin and building our platform as a new theatre company.
Our next work in progress is called The Answer, and it’s an immersive audio experience about climate anxiety and the commercialisation of self-help.
If there’s anything that we can clarify or any more information we can offer you, we’d be delighted to do so.