EDINBURGH 2017: A Day At The Fringe- Familia de la Noche

Familia de la Noche blog for BWW to give us an insight into a typical day for them at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Up at 8am and consume as much butter as possible - Clowns are fuelled by butter - not everyone knows this. It is the only way we can get in enough calories to stand up to our average Edinburgh day with stairs, hills, slopes, more stairs - this time balancing 500 flyers under our arms, street performing on the mile and finally carrying a full 1970s office up some more stairs in the Underbelly.

This is followed by our highly seriously warm-up routine; The Front Room Disco. This involves an accumulative company playlist of favourite dancing songs, only we have some very different musical interests. So far we have had a strange combination of 80's power ballads, death metal and drum and bass and it is shaping up nicely for the last day of fringe when we have our annual kitchen shindig.

Then it's off to the mile. Our clowns are in make-up around 5-10 hours a day depending on the schedule and it's very important that we spend as much time on the mile as possible. The company has a strong street performing tradition and we regularly busk alongside our main shows, which means getting our pass in the morning street performer draw at 10am.

The shows start at 2.50pm which usually means we duck into the Underbelly around 2pm. Just to push ourselves that little bit harder this year, we have decided to install a full scale 1970's office into the Underbelly's Iron Belly; complete with industrial size printer, two desks, filling cabinet and a wall sized computer. And we have decided to bring two shows instead of one; we like an easy life. .

Shows done. We head back to our flat. We are still in the early days of the run, so at the moment in the evening as we indulge in some serious last minute crafting and shouting at Q-lab. The Familia HQ is still currently covered in Hankerchief bunting we are feverishly drawing stick men on, and there is a makeshift shadow puppetry and filming studio in the bedroom. All fuelled by wine squash - a bit of wine with a lot of fizzy water, makes you feel like you are having a drink but you can still legally be in charge of a glue gun.

As the month progresses we will be able to escape the exciting world of cutting boards and glass paints and venture out into the festival. We will be making a beeline for lots of the other clowning shows at the fringe this year, alongside some of the great shows we have been waiting to see all year.

Timings and ticket information for Beadledom are available on the edfringe website.

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