Interview: Olivia Altair, Love’s Concordia Bar

18 Jun

Ahead of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 we’re chatting with a range of creatives who will be heading to the city over August to find out more about their shows. Today we’re chatting with Olivia Altair about their production, Love’s Concordia Bar.

Can you tell us a bit about you and your career so far.

We are a group of 5 artists from 5 different countries who all met at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University’s Drama program. We were friends first, who started to collaborate for fun—it happened completely organically, but it ended up leading to us founding the company in 2021. We have put on a number of shows since then in New York City, including “Le Bijou de Paris” off-Broadway, as well as recently produced a show in Turin, Italy, “La Linfa del Villaggio”. Though all of our shows are very different from each other in terms of story, they all incorporate the same main elements: a fantastical world, a story that explores human emotions, and big pop dance performances to original music.

What is your show about?

Imagine a Bar owned by Love Itself… the only requirement to enter the bar is to be in Love—but once you’ve entered the bar, once you’re in Love— it isn’t easy to get out…“Love’s Concordia Bar” is about such a bar. The story follows a young couple who enter the bar, who have just recently fallen in Love. As they meet a variety of extravagant characters, and experience the bar’s spectacle and chaos, they are forced to examine their relationship, and what “Love” really is…

**What was the inspiration for Love’s Concordia Bar, and what’s the development process been to get to this stage?**

Love’s Concordia Bar was originally conceived from one company member’s personal experiences with a breakup —the end of a relationship where one person could stop wanting Love, and the other person could not. This is what inspired the idea of a magical bar that you can only enter if you are in Love… But through our discussions amongst ourselves, we soon realized that Love is different for everyone— So the project began: We asked 40 different people, including ourselves, to write letters about what Love means to them, and from those letters, we created characters which represent all the different kinds of Love. For example, a letter which described Love as obsession became 2 characters who are so obsessed with each other, they are magically able to share a body. A letter which described Love as a perfect fairytale fantasy became a 9 year old girl, innocently in Love with the idea of “Love at First Sight”—who is mentored by Cinderella in a search for her very own “Prince Charming”. These are just a few of the inhabitants of Love’s Concordia Bar, but there are many others— as we found that almost everyone who wrote on the topic on Love had a different perspective. We originally workshopped the show in 2022, but have since developed it much more: re-writing the script to further develop storylines, re-arranging some of the music, etc.

**What made you want to take Love’s Concordia Bar to the Fringe?**

We believe “Love’s Concordia Bar” is a show that will connect with a lot of people due to its emotional depth, as well as its commercial potential, with its big dance numbers, crazy characters and original pop music. We wanted to bring the experience of this show to a wider audience, and what better opportunity to do that than the Fringe? Love is a universal topic to everyone, whether you choose to engage with it, or not—and we believe our show will resonate with people of all ages, and variety of life experiences. We want to keep the conversation going: What really is Love? What does Love mean to different people? How do we engage or not engage with Love?

**Apart from seeing Love’s Concordia Bar, what’s your top tip for anybody heading for Edinburgh this summer?**

There are so many incredible shows that come to Fringe—- we would try to see as many shows as we possibly can!!! It’s such an opportunity to see incredible work, don’t miss out!!!

**Why should people book Love’s Concordia Bar?**

“Love’s Concordia Bar” is a fun, comedic show with undeniably catchy music, and eye-catching performances— which also touches on real life problems. It’s a wild rollercoaster of emotions, and is sure to make any audience laugh, cry, dance, and hopefully feel immersed in the story of the bar. No matter what an audience member gets out of it, they will almost certainly be entertained.