The Stage

Chotto Ookii’s ‘sparkling ideas’ clinch Total Theatre award

Published Monday 4 September 2006 at 10:30 by Michael Quinn

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Six companies have scooped this year’s Total Theatre Awards, which are given to the best physical and visual performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Leeds-based Chotto Ookii won the Best Newcomers Award for And Even My Goldfish, a show judges described as “bubbling over with sparkling ideas, surreal humour and seductive choreography”.

The Innovation Award went to musician Chris Branch and surprise 2004 Perrier Award-winner Will Adamsdale for The Receipt, which also picked up a Fringe First Award.

Other winners included Hoipolloi’s Floating, New International Encounter’s Past Half Remembered, Farm in The Cave’s Sclavi/Song of An Emigrant and Hysteria, a devised collaboration between Stamping Ground Theatre and the artists’ collective, Inspector Sands.

A special award for Significant Contribution to Physical/Visual Theatre was presented to London’s Battersea Arts Centre.

The awards, now in their seventh year and co-sponsored by the Central School of Speech and Drama and the University of Winchester, are organised by the Total Theatre Network.