Emergency 22
Daytime Programme, Noon-5pm
Updated 5 Jan 2023
Presented by Word of Warning + Contact in the first half of Emergency 22 — a Daytime of performance installations, one-to-ones, and interventions from Noon to 5pm on Saturday 1 October.
Daytime Schedule
Noon-1.30pm Julie Burrow · Noon-1.40pm Ursula Troche · Noon-2pm Hazel Lam · Noon-2pm Tania Camara · Noon-3pm kane stonestreet · Noon-5pm Clodagh Chapman & James Varney · Noon-5pm Malandra Jacks Creative · Noon-5pm Maya Chowdhry · Noon-5pm Nicky Murmann · Noon-5pm Sweætshops® · 2.30pm-3pm Charlotte McShane · 3pm-3.20pm Ran · 3pm-5pm leon clowes · 3pm-5pm Nathan Walker
Timings and participating artists subject to change.
Daytime Programme Notes
Age Advisory: 16+ (mainly aimed at adults, parental/guardian discretion).
Content Warnings: some works may disturb, please click here.
NB some works have limited capacity on a first-come first-served basis.
Noon-1.30pm Julie Burrow · Tumbola
Roll up, roll up! Come and take a spin on the Tumbola.
Is anything more fun than a dread feeling in your stomach? A grubby man awaits you, part-music hall performer, part-village fete game with a tombola fused to his abdomen — the Tumbola. Turn the handle and win a prize.
Julie Burrow is a Manchester-based writer-performer. She makes off-the-wall, risk-taking performances sparked by her impulses to invite audiences to engage deeply and openly with the absurd and personal. She has variously played an Aperol Spritz, a big showbiz moth, and the entire city of Bruges.
julieburrow.com · Instagram · Twitter
Noon-1.40pm Ursula Troche · Reverse Osmosis
A performance — and meditative — piece in the face of our climate emergency. This is about our entanglement with plastic and pollution, and how we might transform this exccessive relationship.
Ursula Troche has worked on the fringes of performance poetry and Live Art — appearing at the Portobello Festival, South London Human Rights Festival, Walthamstow Garden Party, and has had poems published in Manifold. Current work focuses on (autobiographical) coast-lines, (sea)bodies, and her recycle-practice: stitching on throw-away items like plastic packaging, and assembling found objects.
colourcirclesite.wordpress.com · Instagram · Twitter
Noon-2pm Hazel Lam · LIGHTSHIP
Bringing together a dancer and a circus artist to build a boat, Lightship puts two distinctively contrasting body shapes in space to challenge preconceptions about circus equipment and circus bodies.
In an area full of plastic tubes, do the bodies use the tubes to help each other navigate the space? Or do they use them to handle each other?
Commissioned by Chinese Arts Now 2023.
Hazel Lam is a multi-disciplinary artist with an immense interest in collaborative work. Trained in dance, contemporary circus, and music, she creates visually and conceptually compelling performances in theatre, film, and outdoor work with artists employing different media.
hazel-lam.com · Facebook · Instagram
Noon-2pm Tania Camara · Carne Noir
Follow the map of my hair… take a seat… listen… arrive at the famous market place of my ancestral home… and experience…
A soundscape taking you through geography and generations.
A Divergency seed commission.
Tania Camara is Manchester-based interdisciplinary artist working in devised theatre, dance, Live Art, installation, and video. Current practice focuses on personal accounts of memory, collective memories & ancestral memories, uncovering cultural identity, belonging, and the black performing body. Her most recent work, Oreo, has toured widely as well as streaming online in lockdown.
taniacamara.com · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter
Noon-3pm kane stonestreet · something held
A ritual of desire and longing; a kinetic sculpture inhabited by a slim, white, non-binary body. We will wait.
stonestreet has been waiting for years already, and will wait for years more.
This is an invitation for you to wait with them, be slow, and watch the drips.
Supported by Curatorspace, Live Art Ireland, London Performance Studios, Bbeyond, Ugly Duck.
kane stonestreet is known as a cryer, a lover, and a pure spiral. Through their multidisciplinary performance practice they are interested in inhabiting alternative modes of attention; slower ways of being. Their ritual actions reach towards gestures of radical softness and forms of queer intimacy. It is a process of survival. stonestreet is slowly unearthing ways of being that belong to their “we” / to our “us”.
kanestonestreet.com · Instagram
Noon-5pm Clodagh Chapman & James Varney · The Ghost Swap
There are more ghosts among us than you might expect. We have assembled a small collection and invite you to meet and trade your own. Bring your interesting and unwanted objects, and we will adopt them and help you discover the ghosts within.
Clodagh Chapman is a Manchester-based theatre maker and filmmaker. Her work for stage includes Butterfly (VAULT Festival), plus projects with Camden People’s Theatre and Barrel Organ. Her work explores queerness, history, and authorship.
James Varney is a Manchester-based writer and theatre maker, making work about cities with, and for, the people who live in them. He has delivered work for Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester International Festival, Manchester Literature Festival, and currently for Contact’s Future Fires.
clodaghchapman.co.uk · Instagram · Twitter
jamesvarney.squadsite.uk · Instagram · Twitter
Noon-5pm Malandra Jacks Creative · Us & Our Souls
What makes us… us?
Our souls are unique to us, but what happens if part of our souls is captured and laid bare for all to see at different points around the building?
In a world where we constantly capture ourselves on video, what defines us as us, and them as digital?
Malandra Jacks is a theatre and creative company from North Manchester; they use theatre and digital arts to amplify community voice and tell stories.
malandrajacks.com · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter
Noon-5pm Maya Chowdhry · You Sound Thirsty
Ever wondered what tone a lime makes when it’s being sliced? Or the melody of a mint plant when its leaves are plucked?
A sensory soundscape of cocktail ingredients; an encounter mediated by the water footprint of your favourite mixer. Prepare to be enlightened and entertained by this sonic commingling created in a time of planetary limits.
A Divergency seed commission.
Maya Chowdhry is a multidisciplinary artist creating with Live Art and installation — utilising projection, interactive audio, and sensors to invite audiences to respond to, and create their own journey through, an artwork. Recent work includes a touring Live Art dining experience exploring food justice commissioned by Lancaster Arts, and interactive pieces exploring climate change for Botanic and the British Council/Digital Art Studios residency.
interactiveartist.org · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter
Noon-5pm Nicky Murmann · INNER CHILD
In a coloured children’s playhouse you are invited to share with me — and I with you — about our childhood, through memories, through one or a few chosen subjects, printed on cards.
To thank you to share your stories or to listen to mine, you will receive a party bag when you leave. (You may stay for up to 20 minutes.)
Nicky Murmann is a Leeds-based artist working individually and collaboratively on projects (DISrupt; Queerology collectives). They create safe environments in private, public, or art spaces in order to facilitate conversations and storytelling. Their working process combines a variety of media (including text, sound, visual material) to produce performances, sound pieces, or videos.
Noon-5pm Sweætshops® · ♕D·E·FÆ·REG·ID♛
Dei Ejectus Færie Regina ID is an ongoing series of data-gathering encounters between the September and March equinoxes, interpreting our manipulation by algorithms and machine-learning as modern variants of the færieworld of folklore — duplicitous realms of both ambivalent and malicious feedback loops we are all engaging in but don’t understand.
As the Færie Queen of the Secret Commonwealth (as documented from the book of the same whose author Robert Kirk died mysteriously) the figure[head] invites participants to provide and track their emotional feedback in a handshake and photograph. Follow the trip on Instagram.
Supported by Creative Scotland’s Create:Inclusion fund and a //BUZZCUT// travel bursary.
Sweætshops® (alternatively stylised as swextshops) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and multi-instrumentalist. A self-described “multipersonality conglomerate” creating mystery-shopper plays, ceremonial muzak, and public disruptions out of the waste of consumerism and pop culture. A portmanteau of sweatshops/sweetshops representing the contradictory social lottery (exploitation and indulgence) of the 21st century.
swextshops.io · Facebook · Instagram
2.30pm-3pm Charlotte McShane · Grin and Bare It
When it comes to harassment, Charlotte has been told continuously to ‘take it on the chin’ and ‘just ignore it’, so she is finally going to try to take that advice. Through a looping durational performance, she’s going to test just how much she can take and still have a grin on her face — after all, what’s a little bum slap?
First workshopped at the Dr. Carnesky’s Radical Cabaret School in collaboration with Tramshed.
Charlotte McShane is a performance artist working across theatre, cabaret, Live Art, and stand up. She has performed on stages, at conferences, and in cupboards. In fact, she last performed at Emergency in the toilets. Her work explores what we don’t talk about enough in society, and shines a spotlight on the awkward stuff — particularly through the lens of gender and feminism. Previous shows include Make A Scene, Beauty Is A Beast, The Forgotten One, Tell Me Lies.
3pm-3.20pm Ran · Orders of magnitude
Making use of a DIY metal plate speaker, Ran performs improvised breathing routines that traverse the intimate and the public. The work is only ever performed live and never practised, making each iteration unique.
Ran is a sound-maker and performance artist who makes work concerned with devising conditions and making ephemeral performance pieces within them.
ranfaig.com · Facebook · Instagram
3pm-5pm leon clowes · Peter
leon discovered his father’s identity on his mother’s death bed…
This exploration of lived trauma aims to take away the sting of a shocking family trauma by reducing it to the point of tedium. A four-minute story looped to infinity — feel free to drop in or stay for the full duration.
Created by leon clowes with film by Kelly O’Brien & Gerry McNeed (AKA Itchy Ear). Recorded at Britten Pears Arts residency.
leon clowes is a London-based older queer working-class transdisciplinary artist, traversing trauma in a self-compassionate way. He trickily treads the line between humour and horror, upturning the duality of the banal and tragic in search of meaningful exchange.
leonclowes.com · Instagram · Twitter
3pm-5pm Nathan Walker · Clench
Due to illness Nathan Walker is unable to perform Gulp.
In place we are showing Clench (2020) — Single Channel performance for camera where the artist attempts to speak around/through/with a hand inside their mouth. The hand creates a block or stopper that reshapes the voice, forming and transforming within the task of keeping the hand inside.
Commissioned by Slant.
Nathan Walker is an artist and writer from West Cumbria; they work across and between performance art and poetry, exploring both the body and the page as sites for vocal exploration, and the manipulation of sound and speech. Performances often take place over extended durations, during which they construct spaces of intense listening and attention. They have performed at international festivals and galleries including Finland, Germany, Italy, UK, USA.
nathan-walker.co.uk · Instagram · Twitter