Pickled Republic: Existential Questions, Ridiculous Answers

Dates: Sunday 8th October
Time: Doors 6.30pm, performance 7pm
Place: The Oak Room, The Rockfield Centre
Age: 14+ (content warning: contains strong language)
Cost: £12 standard, £10 concession, Pay what you can

Live theatre | Seated

Welcome to the jar. 

Here, tragedy floats and the lonely wail of an abandoned tomato cuts through the salty atmosphere.

Come hear the lament of lives not lived, watch the chaotic energy of the search for meaning and try to find the connection between these decaying vegetables and your own existence.
Be prepared, bring a napkin, will you laugh or cry? who knows. You’ll leave all stirred up but none the wiser.

A surreal theatrical cabaret for adults with puppetry, mask, and perhaps a poem that promises more vegetables per pound than any current supermarket. So, don’t worry about inflation when there is disintegration.

About:

“[one] of Scotland’s leading visual theatre makers,” Ruxy Cantir is a Moldova-born, US-trained, Glasgow-based physical theatre maker, performer, and teacher.

Ruxy holds an MFA in Ensemble Based Physical Theatre from Dell’Arte International (California, USA), which is an acclaimed and terminal degree in the performance field in the US. She devises and performs original work for all ages ranging from spectacle-based outdoor theatre to intimate indoor work using Contemporary Devising practices, Mask, Clown and Physical and Visual Theatre.

Since moving to Scotland in 2015, Ruxy has been awarded numerous grants to develop new indoor and outdoor work, including the 2021 APA/Eden Court/Capital Theatres Early Years Christmas Performance Commission, the Inaugural SURGE Street Theatre Bursary, and the ScotRail Foundation/Foundation Scotland Cultural Arts Grant.

Ruxy has worked with the National Theatre of Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Edinburgh International Festival, Scottish Youth Theatre, National Trust for Scotland, and has performed in various events with SURGE, Imaginate, Clown Cabaret Scratch Night, Tron Theatre, manipulate Festival, and on STV’s only late night talk show The Late Show with her grotesque clown character Gregor the Mountain Conqueror. At the moment, Ruxy is touring Scotland with Adrenalism’s “The Good, the Bad and the Poultry” an outdoor family-friendly theatre piece she co-devised and performs in, which was awarded a Creative Scotland’s Touring Fund grant. In addition, Cantir and collaborator Sarah Rose Graber are getting ready to tour “Two in a Barrel” - a clown-inspired, environmentally-minded visual theatre show for young audiences - across Scotland. 

Ruxy is a member of Single End Collective, an artist-run space in Southside Studios, Glasgow, co-founded LARDS Ensemble – a collective of Scotland’s five most prominent physical comedians, is a board member with Articulation, and sat on the Council of Glasgow‘s inaugural Equity Branch as Treasurer. 

Ruxy is inspired by the Absurd, highly physical comedy and embarrassing stories. She strives to create imaginative intensity-filled original work that explores the bizarre manifestations of our fears and desires.

Pickled Republic has been awarded Creative Scotland Touring Funding for Theatre and Dance to tour in Autumn 2023.

Pickled Republic is an exciting solo show about our search for purpose and meaning. Inventive clowning, puppetry, and mask theatre combine to create a show full of “confident absurdity...., pitch-black humour and pulpy carnage”. Relish in an unearthly cross between Eugene Ionesco absurdism and David Lynch smoky mystery that explores despair in a most ungraceful way.