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):

The Cosmic Family continues to bewilder Edinburgh Fringe audiences and to expand the borders of sanity and reality. This Sunday at the last Spank! naked promo The Cosmic Family shat on stage to conclude their most sacred and powerful cleansing ritual.

Freddy Grifter, The Cosmic Family host says: “We all have our problems and we all know how straining the Fringe may be, especially if you’re trying to offer people something different, like we do. So, we decided to let go of all problems, and shit them all out.”

The Cosmic Family is a performance devised by the award-winning international collective The Solvents. They devise interdisciplinary and experimental events playing with a variety of forms: live acts, dance, theatre, live music, internet projects, video, and objects. In
their work they draw upon, and shamelessly mix Schiller and Shakesperian ways of working with approaches of Open Theatre, Butoh and contemporary dance, Post-modern collage and Fragmentation.

For the Fringe 2006 Festival, The Solvents
- perform The Cosmic Family workshop-seminar, a dark satire on new
age spirituality and corporate sell,
- walk-about with raining umbrellas pouring cleansing liquid on the heads of Edinburgh crowds,
- publish the alternative newspaper “FourGeeks” for Fringe misfits,
- appear in the naked Spank! promos,
- create the *Cosmic* pills available through the major Edinburgh drug dealers.

All this is part of the campaign to turn Fringe audience into Cosmic Family converts.

The Cosmic Family show, hailed “weird, terrifying” (Three Weeks), “shameless” (Scotsman) “hilarious” (Sunday Times), and “enlightening” (Four Geeks), is the most controversial show of the Festival, and can be seen every day at 2pm at Underbelly (entrances on Cowgate and Victoria st).

More information, high-resolution photos, press-pack, and videos are available on http://thesolvents.net/press

The Solvents are proud to announce that the first issue of FourGeeks was published for Edinburgh Fringe Festival. FourGeeks is the one and the only guide for Fringe misfits.
It is available at all major venues, and it’s free! Treat yourself with the latest reviews, news, and other stuff. You can download the PDF (Adobe Acrobat) version on our website now.

The Solvents also present the experimental and controversial piece The *Cosmic Family* at 2pm until 27 August in Underbelly - Belly Laugh. Book now!

The Cosmic Family spiritual group hijacks the Spank! comedy night at Underbelly and gets naked on stage to sing their hit Positive Energy song. Entranced followers also took their clothes off and people sang and laughed along in an explosion of positive energy. After the song, the Spank! hosts had to literally drag the frozen Cosmic Family members off the stage.

The Cosmic Family would do anything to attract more followers to its Positive Cult, and this action was a part of their Fringe campaign hailed “Eurotrash”, “Weird”, and “Truly Terrifying”. The Cosmic Family was also compared to “Mary Poppins on acid”: you might have seen them pilgriming through the streets of Edinburgh with umbrellas spreading spiritual rain.

You can join The Cosmic Family cult if you visit their workshop that takes place every day at 2pm in Underbelly, Belly Laugh.

Video (c) 2006 by Alex Smith

The Cosmic Family floods the streets of Edinburgh with spiritual rain. In their attempts to convert more Fringe goers into followers, The Cosmic Family members are walking around the city inviting passers-by to join them under the umbrellas, which pour the sacred liquids of She the Holy ™ on their heads.

The famous Edinburgh photographer Than compared the whole thing to “Mary Poppins on acid”, and the workshop itself was described as a “weird” and “truly terrifying” experience, “certainly not to everybody’s taste” (Three Weeks).
Of course! The Cosmic Family is only for those who are ready to take within their being She the Holy and to purchase The Universal Smoothie, which is still offered for £95 every day at 2pm in Underbelly Belly Laugh.