Emergency 2016
Third Session: 4pm-7pm
Presented by Word of Warning, STUN + Z-arts during Emergency 2016
Artists in Alphabetical Order (subject to change)
Please note this is primarily an adult event, see Access Info below.
Amy Steel | Lifeline
The performance Lifeline hovers in a liminal space, caught between private and public. A domestic object is suspended before a moving body, out of which a threshold appears; a doorway into a new being.
Amy graduated from Goldsmiths University with a BA in Fine Art in 2015. Her work has been included in shows at Arcadia Misa Gallery, London; Fat Relic, London; White Conduit Projects, London. In 2017 her work will be shown at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
amysteel.co.uk
Ben Spatz | STAR
A participatory, durational vocal installation that can take place in any location. Visitors are free to participate or simply observe/listen. STAR was created for the Lumen Festival in New York City (2013).
Ben is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Huddersfield, and the author of What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge (Routledge 2015) as well as numerous articles and essays published in scholarly and artistic contexts. Formerly a performer with the Gardzienice Theatre Association and a Fulbright Fellow at the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, he has performed and presented work widely in New York City.
urbanresearchtheater.com
Dominique Baron-Bonarjee | Sui Generis
Sui Generis: ‘In a class of its own, not like anything else, unique’.
In our societies the needs of the individual for freedom, expression and fulfilment have to coexist with the need to belong to a group, to make ourselves recognisable to others by showing signs of this group through nationality, subcultures, religions and even gender. Groups become a ‘territory’ or home, a frame of recognition and protection. Featuring three monolithic costumes, Sui Generis develops a cycle of form and formlessness, which explores the creation of self and identity and interrogates the human form as a space for the inscription of categories, territories and realities.
Dominique is a French-Indian artist, based between Berlin and London. The primacy of the body as a framework for observing the social, personal and invisible realms of being, recurs within her work. She is a graduate of St Martin’s School of Art, London. Selected 2016 exhibitions and performances: Vacancies, Galerie Wedding, Berlin; Loitering with Intent, People’s History Museum, Manchester; Collapse at Hazard 2016, Manchester; Sui Generis at Water Tower Arts Festival, Sofia (Bulgaria).
dominiquebb.com
Hellen Burrough | Kintsukuroi: Golden seams
Kintsukuroi (Japanese: golden repair) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Gilding each of my scars in gold leaf. Transforming these flaws into glittering decoration, recognising my body’s repair as a part of my history. Body modifications, performances, surgical incisions, accidental cuts, intentional wounds. They’ve all left their mark. Acknowledging fragility, honouring resilience. Presenting my scars as armour and autobiography.
Hellen’s work centres around her body as a site for exploring the abject or transgressive female body and reimagining and subverting ideas of femininity. Informed by a background in the subcultures of body modification and fetishism she makes live pieces using body ritual, action, endurance and wounds to examine intimacy, pain and the limits of the body. She began focussing on solo practice in 2012, after a period of working as a collaborator with Polish group Suka Off. She has most recently shown work at SPILL Festival + Tempting Failure.
traumata.org
Hollie Miller | Stigmata
The foetal position holds grief of the existential exile from mother. Ultimately our relationship to our maternal body is how we measure our relationship to time. Squatting in stilettos I stand on my hands. The pain of the action pulls me from childhood to womanhood, emphasising the gradual loss and becoming of mother.
Hollie has a Fine Art Performance MA from The Royal College of Art, with prior training in dance + somatic practice from The Northern School of Contemporary Dance. She has performed her work in Europe, New York + Japan.
hollieclairemiller.com
Instant Dissidence | Dancing With Strangers…
…From Calais to England — the Residency
Between 19th May and 3rd June 2016, Instant Dissidence travelled to The Jungle refugee camp in Calais to develop the project Dancing With Strangers: From Calais to England, which premiered in Manchester at Hazard 2016. This is a (12 minute) documentary film offering an account of the company’s experience whilst in residency in Calais.
Instant Dissidence is a Bradford-based company directed by Rita Marcalo. A way of bringing different artists together, in different combinations, to realise different ideas, Instant Dissidence invents ways of offering other people art experiences. Rita’s practice began in dance/choreography but she became more interested in communicating concepts than sticking to a particular artform and today collaborates with others to create work in different media and to solve creative problems.
instantdissidence.co.uk
Jake Bowen | Plea Bargain
Excuse me, I’ve been told I need to ask about having a Duty Solicitor… erm… I’ve got a court hearing in three hours… can you help me?
An autobiographical one-to-one performance where you take the role of the solicitor. You have seven and a half minutes to interview the defendant and to use the case notes to decide whether he should plead guilty or not guilty.
Jake is a performance artist + film maker from Manchester. A graduate of Arden School of Theatre + the University of Salford, he makes autobiographically driven work exploring themes of justice, judgements and the stories we’ll tell about ourselves.
Jamil E-R Keating | Asteroid RK1
An allegorical installation-performance about outer-space and our inner-city streets. Asteroids and addictions. Meteorites and human rights. Comets in the night sky and care in the city.
Developed as a Divergency micro-commission with support from hÅb + STUN (Sustained Theatre Up North).
Jamil is an emerging theatre-maker, writer and performer. Asteroid RK1 is his fourth piece of work, the fourth step in an artistic journey of trying to find the balance between being overwhelmed by a perverse enthusiasm for the absurdity of life, and trying to say something of substance about it… simply. To date: he has made small pieces for Hazard (as Tracey Lumpkin) and Emergency; received a Works Ahead commission from hÅb + Contact; collaborated as dramaturg on a performance at The Royal Exchange; assistant directed for Contact; curated performances at Manchester Art Gallery; been an emerging artist in residence at the Whitworth.
Maya Chowdhry | Peas on Earth
The domestication of the pea took place 11,000 years ago in the Near East. Which East is near depends on whether you called the wind trade-winds or hava. Using the humble pea as a symbol of our relationship to food, a portion of poetry and a pair of gardening gloves, Peas on Earth is a table-top of interactive theatre that gently augments our reality to allow us to experience the politics of eating, growing and sustaining ourselves.
Age advisory: 14+ (parental/guardian discretion).
You will need headphones and a smartphone or mobile device that can download the Zappar free app — please do this before the performance (you can use our wifi); if you don’t have a mobile device or headphones then please let us know when signing-up.
Maya Chowdhry — Writer and Transmedia artist
Niki Woods — Performance mentor
Caro C — Sound Engineer
Developed as a Divergency micro-commission with support from hÅb + STUN (Sustained Theatre Up North). Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Maya is an inTer-aCtive artist, theatre-maker and Transmedia writer. Her writing is infused and influenced through her work for radio, film, live art and theatre. Her current practice uses interactive theatre-making and digital storytelling to create immersive and democratic experiences for audiences. Maya’s recent work includes What is Lunch for?, a scratch performance at Camden People’s Theatre, and a live-action-animation for a Telling Tales: Scratch with Coney at HOME, Manchester.
interactiveartist.org | carocsound.com
Natalie Ramus | 16000:3
A fascination with the materiality of the body has led Natalie to question its edges and boundaries. 16000 is a long term project which began at Tempting Failure CIC 2016, 16000:3 will be the third performance and sees her make use of a stack of paper equalling her height. This stack will be used to explore and document the body through a series of performances until the stack has been reworked fully; the traces of which will be captured to create an archive of time, memory and body.
Natalie is a Fine Art graduate and holds an MFA from Cardiff School of Art and Design. She has exhibited and performed both in Wales and in London and has been selected for New Art West Midlands which will see her work displayed in Birmingham in 2017. | Image credit: Julia Bauer
natalieramus.com
Ross McCaffrey | Come Be Sad With Me
I think we need to have a chat. But we don’t have to. We can just sit. Or we can lie down. It’s up to you. I’m just inviting you to Come be Sad with Me.
A one-to-one performance that explores the themes and severity of mental health conditions and tries to spread some joy through sadness. Performances are about 15 minutes long and are however you want them to be.
Through Contact Young Company Ross has worked with Artists and Directors such as Montse Gili, Stacy Makishi + Nathaniel Hall and was performer in the show Under the Covers which toured various arts festivals throughout 2015. He is a member of Powder Keg, a theatre company blending pop culture and politics to create work that tries to make sense of the political landscape that surrounds us; current work is supported by Theatre Delicatessen in Sheffield and the company is recipient of the Hodgkiss Award from the Royal Exchange Theatre.
Rowland Hill + Jack Sheen | I have never been anywhere so long
Beginning life as a four-minute audio-visual work entitled Hand Film, I have never been anywhere so long is a performance-installation choreographed from archive footage of women’s work in the Lancashire cotton mills. A meditation on variation within stasis, Hand Film mapped a series of lost hand gestures used by the workers to operate the mill’s machinery onto a cycle of repeated musical phrases. I have never been anywhere so long extrapolates these ideas within an extended time frame in an exploration of manual labour, the discipline of repetition, and corporeal memory.
Created by Rowland Hill + Jack Sheen. Original movement choreographed with Hannah Buckley. Music performed by Harry Fausing Smith.
Rowland Hill is an artist and curator currently based in Manchester. With a background in devised theatre and performing arts, her creative practice centres on the relationship between moving image, sound and live performance.
Jack is the co-founder and director of ddmmyy, a concert/events series dedicated to commissioning and contextualising experimental and contemporary classical music, alongside dance, audio-visual installations and film.
rowland-hill.com | jacksheen.com
Toni-Dee Paul | My Father’s Kitchen
Exploring home-cooked food and family trees, whilst delving into the stories that unfold in her father’s kitchen, the show examines the relationship between an 8-year-old girl and her estranged father, and the journey that follows 12 years on, whilst reflecting on hundreds of years of Jamaican history through memory & poetry.
Developed as a Divergency micro-commission with support from hÅb + STUN (Sustained Theatre Up North).
Toni-Dee is a theatre maker, collaborator, writer and performance artist from Leeds. Her practice explores identity politics, memory and culture using auto-biography as stimulus for her work thus far. Toni-Dee has previously been commissioned by Fuel and has toured her mono-dialogue Rum Punch around the North of England; she has also worked with artists such as Andy Smith + Selina Thompson.
Venue + Booking Details
Date: Saturday 1 October 2016, 4-7pm (full event runs 12noon-11pm)
Venue: Z-arts, 335 Stretford Road, Manchester, M15 5ZA
Tickets: FREE, no booking required, come + go as you please.
N.B. Some limited capacity shows may have sign-up sheets on the day, others operate on a first-come, first-served basis.
Venue (Z-arts) Tel: 0161 232 6089
Access Information
Emergency 2016 is primarily an adult-focussed event and some works may not be suitable for younger viewers (i.e. under 18s). It takes place in a number of different spaces and formats — some seated, some standing, some spoken word, some visual, some limited capacity, some participatory. We apologise but some of the work may not be wheelchair accessible. For specific age and access information please email info@habarts.org or call 0161 232 6086.
Credits
Emergency 2016 is produced by hÅb; supported using public funding by Arts Council England + Manchester City Council. | Image: Hellen Burrough by Julia Bauer