Welcome to our blog

This will be our online home for the next little bit, while our website gets upgraded. It's pretty cosy - got a nice fridge that came with it actually, which is well bonus. Stick around and have a sniff about. We'll post news and what not about our happenings when we get the chance.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Vigilantelope on NovaFM


http://www.novafm.com.au/nova919/Audio_Vigilantelope-s-Chicken-Parmy_96514

Here's the recording of the segment we did on Nova FM with Fitzy, Claire and Jules.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Vigilantelope on JJJ


Vigilantelope will be on air with Sam Simmons on Triple J this afternoon at 4.10pm Adelaide time. Tune in!

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Vigilantelope as the White Room Dancers

Vigilantelope will soon appear on Channel 7's brand new series The White Room. The series will air on Thursdays at 7.30pm. Check out the promo below and tune in on Thursday night!

Monday, February 1, 2010

Vigilantelope presents One-Off at the Toff - A fundraiser


Tuesday the 9th of February, 2010 is your last chance to see Tale of the Golden Lease in Melbourne. This one-off event will raise funds for Vigilantelope's tour to Adelaide for the 2010 Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Stick around after the show for a drink and a boogie with the Walk Tall DJs and help raise funds for local independent comedy.

Book your tickets here, at www.tinyurl.com/OneOffAtTheToff or at moshtix outlets. Tickets are selling fast.

Tickets $13 + booking fee online or $15 at the door.

Doors: 8pm, Show: 9pm, DJs: 10pm - Late

The Toff In Town: Level 2 / 252 Swanston St, Melbourne


Tickets to see 'Vigilantelope presents Tale of the Golden Lease' at the Adelaide Fringe are available here.



Thursday, January 7, 2010

Vigilantelope at the Adelaide Fringe



Vigilantelope have been invited to perform a full season of Tale of the Golden Lease at the amazing Garden of Unearthly Delights at the 2010 Adelaide Fringe Festival!
You can book your tickets here. Please spread the word - we'd love to see your South Australian friends there!



Saturday, December 19, 2009

Jokes aside, laughs won on a whim




http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/12/18/1260639280760.html

Margaret Paul
December 19, 2009
THERE is a moment in Felicity Ward's fantastic new show, Felicity Ward Reads from the Book of Moron, when the pipe-sucking stand-up opens her big book of tales and calls for her faithful dog to warm her feet. To our delight, it's none other than punk comedian David Quirk. It's a good starting point for a discussion of live comedy in 2009: comic collaboration, tick; novelty props, tick; storytelling, tick.

Back in April, during the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, whimsy was the buzz word. The blogosphere was awash with arguments over whether home-made props and flights of fancy were just a cover for a lack of jokes.

Local king of cardigan comedy, the Bedroom Philosopher, managed to literally break his funny bone in a run-in with the title character of his show, Songs from the 86 Tram. The injury meant his season reached its terminus sooner than expected, but he walked away with the Directors' Choice Award.

Whimsy didn't die; it multiplied. And in the year that Monty Python celebrated its 40th anniversary, it took on an absurdist bent.

Comedy duo The List Operators delighted crowds with both props and punch lines, often at the same time, such as the juicy Jennifer Cantelopez. They won the Golden Gibbo award for best independent comedy. Young sketch troupe Vigilantelope played to packed houses in both comedy and fringe festivals for their joyful narrative comedy romp Tale of the Golden Lease. With a hilarious pun on the master of disguise, they take out second place in the home-made props of 2009 competition.

Perhaps the best home-made props feature in the climax of Claudia O'Doherty's Monsters of the Deep 3D, the brilliant one-woman presentation on the lost underwater colony, which scored best comedy in this year's Fringe.

But there's experimentation, and there's simply not being prepared. Several stand-ups this year relied heavily on cheat sheets. This is surely the first thing a director, or loving family member, would point out.

And while there's nothing funny about the recession we almost had, the comedy festival, with 318 shows, managed modest profits in a year when many other events died like so many lame jokes about Facebook. International highlights included US duo The Pajama Men, who took out the Barry Award for Best Show, and 2008's Barry winner, the filthy ventriloquist Nina Conti. Both are returning in 2010. Festival director Susan Provan counts among her highlights the commercial success of young locals Josh Thomas and Tom Ballard, who won this year's best newcomer award.


Other local standouts include Celia Pacquola's solo debut, Am I Strange?, a hilariously honest voyage inside her mind, which performed to sell-out crowds and received the Age Critics' Choice award, and Felicity Ward's savagely self-deprecating Ugly as a Child Variety Hour.
Outside of festival time, rooms such as The Last Tuesday Society and weekly stalwart Local Laughs encourage the comic cross-pollination that allows for such strong festivals. The new monthly topical forum, Political Asylum, has been attracting great crowds. With elections due in 2010, expect this event to continue.

The family represented well overseas, too; The List Operators, Pacquola and Ward were among a delegation to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Back home at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, the comedy contingent keeps growing. This year's comedy program featured 84 shows, up from 56 in 2008. Comedy doyenne Janet A Macleod says one of her 2009 highlights was the rise of collaborations between independent comedians, from comedian-director combinations to sharing the stage.

Think Judith Lucy and Denise Scott co-hosting annual fund-raiser Short and Girly, or new sketch group The Anarchist Guild Social Committee, featuring Andrew McClelland and Pacquola.
Macleod puts this down to the level of trust. ''It has been said that in other cities, comedy is a business,'' she says. ''In Melbourne, comedy is a giant dysfunctional family.''

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Vigilantelope awarded a HotHouse Month in the Country Residency


We are really thrilled to have been awarded a Hothouse Residency in which to write our new show 'Prophecy of the Quantum Child' which will debut at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in March. The residency is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria, Arts NSW, Albury City, Hothouse Theatre and the Australian Government.

The next round of applications for the Month in the Country program close on February the 15th. You can find out more about how to apply here.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Bright young things steal limelight at Fringe

The Age
Liza Power
October 10, 2009
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/10/09/1255019610581.html

EMILY Sexton has a simple philosophy when it comes to offering Melburnians a taste of art - ''if the work is fantastic, people will find it''. As the curtain falls this weekend on the flourish of ingenuity that was this year's Fringe Festival, its creative director, buoyed by a 20 per cent increase in ticket sales, has proved the theory holds.

In its 27th year, the festival held a record 310 acts in 145 venues. From established genres such as comedy, circus, visual arts and cabaret, to less conventional ''shows'' - love letter text messages, MP3 tours of city laneways, musical performances in CBD elevators - Fringe demonstrated, for Sexton, that not only is Melbourne riding a particularly vibrant artistic wave at the moment but local audiences are happy to ride it with them.

For Sexton, the festival's ''open access'' format is crucial to its success. Unlike many other festivals, which are curated by individual directors, Fringe is open to anyone with an idea and the motivation to get it up and running. ''Artists really have to put themselves on the line, take a risk and offer something new, different, and unexpected,'' says Sexton.

Of course, for those Melburnians without the time or the fancy to seek out Fringe, it invariably found them. Last Friday, the city's veins turned a curious shade of blue when close to 100 performers dressed as Japanese artist Yasuko Kurono took part in a live art event called TOYS (Take Off Your Skin project). Even lazier Melburnians could simply register their mobile phones to receive daily love letters by text thanks to Letters to Isaac.

While big comedy names such as Arj Barker, Philip Escoffey, Daniel Kitson and Josh Thomas drew predictably large crowds, Sexton says she gained the greatest pleasure from the success of ''new kids on the block''. They included Indian stand-up Shiva at St Martins Theatre, the Ray Charles tribute Genius at the Collins Street Baptist Church and Vigilantelope's playful sketch comedy and dance hybrid, Tale of the Golden Lease.

Beyond the city limits, dance troupe Reverb extended the Fringe's reach to Bendigo in a regional foray Sexton hopes will gain momentum next year. ''We dipped our toes in this year and the hope is that we'll have a lot more regional artists pitching for Fringe 2010.''

This year's festival also saw the return of the Store Room as a venue for the first time since 2005, while the Trades Hall extended its program and Footscray drew cross-town traffic thanks to the quirky, small-scale appeal of the Dog Theatre. While the act of dispersing its audience over so many venues meant for some critics the festival lacked a certain ''buzz'' around its main North Melbourne hub, Sexton argues finding new performance nooks, which this year included a Brunswick backyard and numerous inner city bars, is part of Fringe's appeal.

She says the significant increase in ticket sales is all the more rewarding given the difficult economic climate. ''It's an interesting reflection of where we are with people engaging with culture. The ticket price is the same as you'd pay to see a Hollywood film, but instead people have taken the chance to see work from predominantly local artists, hopefully knowing that 80 per cent of the box office takings goes straight back to the artists themselves. That's a lot more money going into artists' pockets than at most other festivals.''

The Fringe closes tomorrow.


Thursday, October 8, 2009

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Aww, we love you

We found this at http://silence-without.blogspot.com/2009/09/roarin-forties-care-far-too-much.html It's pretty bloody nice. Warm thanks to the author.


MELBOURNE. PAY ATTENTION.

The Fringe Festival is imminent and YOU MUST SEE VIGILANTELOPE'SSHOW "THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN LEASE", and no, that is not a recommendation, it is a fucking ORDER the damn world will END IF YOU DO NOT SEE THIS SHOW and do you really want that on your conscience NO YOU DO NOT. 

We saw this at the Comedy Festival last April. It was a last minute 'what the hell' ticket buy, based on a passing recommendation. I think we saw around five comedy shows all up, Danny Bhoy and Jason Byrne included, and this was the best show of the whole festival, by miles and miles. In fact, it remains the best show I've been to all year. It was spectacularly funny, clever, absurd, with dancing and singing and tomfoolery and, and, you know I am not capable of the lyrical waxing necessary to do these guys justice. It was that fucking OARSUM. Quotes have stayed with us and randomly tossing them out is enough to reduce us to tears STILL.

Tickets are cheap. Opening night is 2 for 1. 2 for 1! Take your friends. Take your cat. Just do something in character and go. Do something out of character and go. 

Friday, September 25, 2009

World's Funniest Island


We are lucky enough to have been invited to perform at the inaugural World's Funniest Island Festival in Sydney. The line-up is incredible - featuring The Goodies, Alexei Sayle, Felicity Warde, Sammy J - really cracker list. You can see the whole program here.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Sammy J on Vigilantelope

Props to Sammy J for his mention:

"Final special mention goes to Vigilantelope, a bunch of ridiculously fun dudes from the local revue scene, whose show also scored a Gibbo Nomination and had people in high places saying all sorts of awesome things. I think I actually slapped my thigh whilst watching their show - piss funny wouldn’t begin to describe it. Stay tuned for a return season from these guys."

What a great dude. This year, he and Heath McIvor are spending a great deal of time touring the acclaimed "Sammy J in the Forest of Dreams" through Australia and the UK. Check out the upcoming dates for this show, as well as his sell out MICF Smash Hit "1999" here.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Collaterly_Sisters on Vigilantelope

Just found this really lovely post about Vigilantelope by Collaterly_Sisters at www.messandnoise.com

Really lovely to stumble across such kind words from a stranger. Thanks for your support!

Collaterly_Sisters  said about 1 month ago:

Wow. Busy month. Did anyone else happen to catch a young troupe at Trades called Vigilantelope? I went in knowing nothing and was preparing myself for the possibility it could be patchy and undergraduate. I came out thinking this could well have been the best show of the festival (that I'd seen anyway). And I caught the Barry winners (The Pajama Men) on the first night of the fest and was convinced there was no way anything could top them this year. I think I was proven wrong on the final night. Astonishing, face-hurtingly hilarious, utterly ridiculous (while still maintaining a coherent story - a problem that so many other acts with absurdist leanings struggle with), amazing writing and even better formation dancing. Where the hell did these kids come from? It's probably not a big call to predict they'll have their own ABC/SBS show within two years, which is slightly jealousy-inducing.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Bye Bye Comedy Festival








So, the comedy festival is well and truly over, and we would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your ongoing support for the group, the show, and independent comedy.

This was our first comedy festival, and we never anticipated that it would go so well. A sold out season, a Golden Gibbo Award nomination, great reviews, and wonderful audiences made this an absolute dream run. Without you, it would have just been a run. A long, strenuous run with a niggling ankle injury along an uninspiring suburban route. So thankyou. You are the best.

Vigilantelope is now gearing up for a few exciting projects. Expect to hear more from us in the coming weeks about upcoming Vigilantelope appearances.

We are also excited to announce that we are planning an encore season of "Tale of the Golden Lease" for the Melbourne Fringe Festival this year. So if you, your mum, or any of your friends missed out, this will be your last chance to see the show that for one reviewer "…ultimately restored [his] faith in the art of comedy, theatre and performance." (The Pun) Details about the Fringe run of the show will be posted here as they become available.