Come to BAC, London from 20-25 feb 07 to see:

- The Premiere of ‘The Solvents Undiluted’ documentary about The Solvent’s adventures at the Edinburgh Fringe 06 by Alex Forge.
3 minute trailer on http://alexforge.net/

- *Cosmic Family*, a dark satire of a spiritual workshop, in which Monty Python humour combines with David Lynch aesthetics to create an addictive and disturbing take on modern life. “As funny as it is terrifying” *****METRO
More info on http://thesolvents.net/cosmicfamily/

20 - 25 February 8pm (Sun 6pm)
£8 / £5 Concs / £2.50 Students

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BAC Box Office: +44 (0)20 7223 2223.
Book online: http://bac.org.uk
BAC, Lavendar Hill, Battersea, London SW11 5TN
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CREDITS:

COSMIC FAMILY performers - Celine Smith, Dani d’Emilia, Dmitry Paranyushkin and Klaus Kruse

‘The Solvents Undiluted’ - Documentary filmed and edited by Alex Forge.
Features The Solvents Core Members at the Edinburgh Fringe 06, their collaborators Ula Dajerling, Irene Pomatto, the Freaks in the Box and Reggie Watts, their flatmates, their competitors, their spectators, venue organisers and plenty of festival goers.

The Solvents and film maker Alex Forge started their research and development phase of Inside Out Guesthouse, by creating a short video on the theme of Home for the Berlinale Talent Campus 07.
The video was selected to be screened at the Berlinale, and film maker Alex Forge was chosen to participate in the week long Talent Campus (350 applicants chosen out of 3650) in February 07.
Out of 200 videos on the theme of Home, the jury selected 14 to be screened as part of the main program of the Festival. They chose ‘Inside Out Home Video’, which then was censored as it was ‘too shoking’!

Alex nevertheless has participated in the Compus, meeting and working alongside directors Wim Wenders,  John Waters and getting precious advice for his documentary ‘The Solvents Undiluted’ at the Doc Clinic of the campus.

You can view the full version of Inside Out Home Video on http://alexforge.net/

‘The Berlinale talent campus is a summit of the most talented up-and-coming filmmakers. During the 57th Berlin International Film Festival they will have the opportunity to learn from world class experts and build up international networks.’

More info on http://www.berlinale-talentcampus.de/

‘Inside Out Guesthouse’ was invited to take over the ‘artists in residence’ flat of Sophiensaele during 100GRAD FESTIVAL, from 1 to 4 February 07.

The Solvents are currently devising Inside Out in their own home in Berlin. More info on http://thesolvents.net/insideout/

Alex Forge is currently editing The Solvents Undiluted - an expressionist documentary that follows The Solvents plunging into the bowels of the Edinburgh Fringe 06, the biggest theatre festival worldwide. He has collected 50 hours of tape, when he followed the company in their daily, professional and private life last August at The Fringe. The documentary portrays The Solvents in a moment of crisis, as they face the commercialization of their work, facing the reality of having to promote one show amongst 1800.

As the members of the company perform *COSMIC FAMILY* day after day for one month, we’re assisting to their slow transformation - being haunted by the imprint the Fringe ‘machine’ is making on their moods, relationships, creative processes, and bank accounts. After two weeks of performing stunts, re-designing, printing and plastering new posters, chasing reviewers, creating facsimiles of news papers, getting naked on stage and giving pills out instead of flyers - to attract more punters, they feel like headless chickens. They decide to eradicate problems of communication by cutting their tongues off and allise with the other Fringe performers The Freaks in the Box and Supercomedian Reggie Watts to take the rein over their Fringe demons, by storming venues turned into wild pigs.

You can now watch a 3 min trailer of ‘The Solvents undiluted’ online! http://alexforge.net/undiluted2.html

Documentary to be released in Winter 07. 20 minute version premiered at BAC 20-25 February, after Cosmic Family.

After thinking it over and over again, The Solvents have finally made it to MySpace.
Check out our new page at www.myspace.com/thesolventscollective and add us to your Friends list if you’ve got MySpace as well.

See the new *Cosmic Family* trailer filmed by Alex Forge at Edinburgh Fringe 2006:

The audience of the Gun Show pinched themselves awake at the nightmarish sight of six pigs storming the venue at 2:00am, in the middle of a comedy act on Thursday 24 August. Supercomedian- Reggie Watts jumped on the mic to make a live soundscape to the eerie intervention by the Solvents and The Freaks in the Box. The six performers wearing butcher’s aprons and real pigs heads on their faces proceeded into turning the venue into a deranged pig stable.

After wading through the dancefloor of the C venue, the pigs jumped on stage, took the guests’ beers out of the ice buckets and distributed them to the audience, replacing the cans with pig brains and skulls. They threw sausages to the audience, dragged people to dance, walked on all fours making pigs sounds, recreating the worst imaginable picture of “The Animal Farm”.

The audience was left aghast when the pigs disappeared and Reggie Watts continued his act as if nothing had happened.
This was the first collaboration between The Solvents, Reggie Watts and the Freaks in the Box, who met in the last week at the Fringe and fell in love with each other’s work.

See the video (filmed by Alex Forge http://www.alexforge.net):

More info about the artists involved:
http://www.freaksinthebox.com
http://www.reggiewatts.com
http://www.thesolvents.net

After the remake of Schneeman’s 70’s performance at Spank!, the Cosmic Family is into performance art. For the Gun show, Sunday 20 August, they devised a new act involving Freddy and Erika making a speech on the downfalls of miscommunication in world politics, and the resulting violence and terror.

‘While there is a lot og things that we can do such as participating in debates, signing petitions, demonstrating, etc’… Freddy said ‘this is only cutting the branches of the problem.’ He announced that the Cosmic Family has devised a special method that will eradicate communication problems from the root.

The solution was demonstrated live at the Gun Show, in Edinburgh. In pictures and video below.

The Solvents volunteers demonstrated how to ‘get rid of the root of our problems of communication’.

Freddy then proceeded to sell the freshly cut tongues of his volunteers: a Polish tongue ‘to polish the floor’, a Russian tongue ‘like Russian roulette - you never know what you get!’.

Erika walked through the audience and proposed people to expand their knowledge by buying her mother tongue, while the volunteers (Ula Dajerling and Dimitri Paranyushkin) held sticks with tongues hanging from them above the audience, who either screamed in disgust or reached up to try and catch a tongue.

The space turned into a market for a moment, until Freddy promised to present more solutions to today’s torments in the *Cosmic Family* workshop-seminar.

The Tongue Act was the first of a series of ‘Cosmic Family demonstrates…’ acts. You can see more acts on http://www.thesolvents.net/cosmicfamily/trailer.html

This act was devised by The Solvents in collaboration with Ula Dajerling.
Photos and Video by Alex Forge (www.alexforge.net)
The hosting venue was The Gun Show (www.thegunshow.co.uk)

Cosmic family appeared for the 3rd time at Spank! Naked Promo on Saturday night. What could they possibly do after the famous ‘anema’ of last week? Cosmic Family hostess Erika and Rob the handyman decided to speak honest with the greedy public of Spank!

They walked naked on stage and explained to an attentive audience all the ways their company had explored to promote themselves until now. They listed:

1/ The Cosmic Family first created this colourfull flyer

2/ and did stunts in the streets holding raining umbrellas and distributing the colourfull flyers.

3/ The Cosmic Family then noticed that most news papers were writing about spirituality and theatre, and the List featured a photo of a stand up comedian playing Jesus, on the cover. The title was ‘Jesus came to save the fringe’ The Cosmic Family soon plastered all over Edinburgh spoof covers of the List: the Fist - featuring the Cosmic Family on the cover and saying ‘the Cosmic Family came to save YOU from the fringe’!

After being told off for plastering by the police,
4/ The Cosmic Family then received two star reviews from the Scotsman and Three Weeks, who hailed their show ‘weird’, ’shameless’ and ‘terrifying’. The Cosmic Family then decided to adopt this new identity and redesigned their flyers so they look as ‘weird’ and ’shameless’ as the bad reviews plastered on them.

5/ the Cosmic Family noticed all other posters had tons of awards so they got nice palm crowns from the internet and decorated their awards with palms. They also invented new awards ‘Best tasting smoothie’ / ‘Eurotrash’

6/ the Cosmic Family also thought they should get some attention somehow so they went with their impulses and drew a phallus onto the cow shaped logo of the venue they perform in.

However the Cosmic Family phallus was censored as soon as the first poster was plastered in the venue. Freddy asked ‘Why is a phallus more shocking than an udder?’ but nobody could answer.
7/ The Cosmic Family then appeared at Spank naked and defecated on stage! A symbolic way to shit on the Fringe that the paranoids members of the cult thought was shitting on them.

8/ The bad reviews inspired the Cosmic Family to design, publish and distribute their own review paper. The Spoof of Three Weeks was born: called ‘Four Geeks’ (see below)

8/ Distributing something else than flyers seemed to generate more positive responses and the crowd interested in the piece seemed to more young, alternative and curious than most punters so the Cosmic Family created Cosmic Pills (coated with eatable plastic) to distribute in parties and cool bars.

9/ Then our documentarist Alex Forge, suddenly got inspired and used the photos of Kate Mount to design a new Black and White Poster and Flyer, which represents the show in a new more objective way.

10/ With new flyers and 2 weeks experience of talking about the show, Cosmic Family learnt to speak the magic keywords, and the right kind of audiences started coming!!!
Then something happened that made the Cosmic Family finally understand what the Fringe is all about!

After declaring this, in Spank! Erika and Rob turned to each other, sexy music played, and they started to kiss. The audience applauded and cheered as the couple caressed, then they gasped as Rob came down on Erika, and went to look for something into her folds. He found a roll of paper, which he unrolled to reveal 5*****stars.

Rob and Erika feasted the five stars they were given with an explosion of cosmic love. Unfortunately no more reviewers came to see the show since then. Rob and Erika are perplex. They send out an open call. If needed, they are ready to share the Cosmic Love with reviewers to get more stars to shoot in their direction. Any takers?

Andrzej Lukowski can now get the Universal Smoothie for free whenever he likes. In his Metro article on 16.08.2006 he gives The *Cosmic Family* 5 stars and writes that it’s a “monstrous devil-child abomination that should have been mercilessly smothered at birth”, that “it’s brilliant”, and that it’s “as funny as it is terrifying.” You can read the full review below (just click on the image):