Emergency 24
Afternoon Programme, Noon-4pm
Updated 25 September 2024
First half of Emergency 24 — an Afternoon of installations, interventions, limited capacity works — presented by Word of Warning + Contact
Afternoon Artists
Saturday 28 September 2024, Noon-4pm.
Ali Wilson · Billy Gigurtsis · Diane Dwyer · Emergency Chorus · Farida Yesmin · Heather Alice White · Jennifer Ng · Ludo & Jake · Martin Hamblen · Nicola Dale · Riley Hamshaw-Mills · Robyn Greeves · Rowena Gander · The Paula Davy
Participating artists subject to change.
NB some artists will take breaks on an ad hoc basis, some works have a short duration, some have limited capacity on a first-come first-served basis, and some occur at the same time — so you will not be able to see everything. The Afternoon is followed by an Evening full of short shows to 10pm.
Afternoon Access
Age Advisory: 16+ (aimed at adults, parent/guardian/carer discretion).
Content Warnings: some works involve interaction and/or participation; specific warnings listed here.
Features: 14 Live Art & contemporary performance works with varied content.
NB works will occur in multiple spaces throughout the building and will vary in format — some roaming, some seated, some standing, some spoken word, some visual, some participatory.
Queries: please contact Contact via boxoffice@contactmcr.com
Afternoon Programme Notes
Ali Wilson · Special Delivery
Your post is in good hands. Trust Royal Mail to deliver your letters of awe & admiration. A special delivery just in the nick of time.
In an ever-competitive & hostile world, Special Delivery invites you to take a minute and admire those around you. Who’s caught your eye? Impressed you with their kindness? Left you feeling all warm & fuzzy? Write them a letter, pop it in our postbox, and Postie will ensure it’s delivered with love & care.
Ali Wilson is a Glasgow-based theatre maker & comedian. Much of her work engages with non-professional performers, exploring their lived expertise & the performativity within it. A previously Supported Artist at Royal Exchange Theatre, her two last works premiered there in 2018 & 2019. She has collaborated with Quarantine, Amy Lawrence, idontloveyouanymore & more — and as a comic, appeared regularly around the NW open-mic circuit.
Insta @haha.aliwilson · X @aliwil267
Billy Gigurtsis · Curved Lines
A durational, interdisciplinary, installation piece utilising stillness & spoken word. Curved Lines invites you to examine the architecture of deformity, and the systems that so contain it.
Billy Gigurtsis is a London-based interdisciplinary choreographer & performer whose current practice centres dance around poetry, philosophy, stillness. He has a particular interest in post-war expressive dance styles such as Tanztheater & Butoh. He has performed at Västerås Konserthus (Sweden), Siobhan Davies Studios, Riposte (London).
billygigurtsis.com/curved-lines · Insta @billygigurtsis
Diane Dwyer · Diane the American Swimmer Says, “Don’t Worry!”
A recurring persona project: a ridiculous character who thinks she can do anything, cause she’s American. Her motto is: “DON’T WORRY!”
Diane Dwyer is a Brooklyn (USA)-based interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance. Recent performances include Performance Art Open (Bergen, Norway) and The Ivory Tower & the Open Worlds (Brooklyn, NY, USA).
dianedwyer.info · Insta @diane_dwyer
Emergency Chorus · Reading and Writing
Reading too much into a simple phrase, two performers turn a few select words into a strange game of sense & nonsense. Is this a business pitch? A therapy session? An activists’ meeting?
Reading and Writing is an improvised performance in which text becomes music, and meaning is all in the mind.
Emergency Chorus is Ben Kulvichit (he/him) & Clara Potter-Sweet (they/she). Bristol-based, they make performances which straddle experimental theatre, Live Art, dance — often colliding disparate source materials to create collages of text, choreography, music, image. Recently they’ve created a dance piece which predicts the future, a choir of town criers, a scratch night for ‘old’ work.
emergencychorus.com · Insta @emergencychorus
Farida Yesmin · Blissful Sorrow (part II)
A poetic durational performance exploring personal experience of chronic pain, displacement, and the endurance of prejudices as a woman who faced modern slavery.
Born in Bangladesh & having migrated to the UK about 20 years ago, the artist traces her journey of self-discovery & healing by grappling with her Bangladeshi heritage, cultural expectations, and the (metaphorical & physical) wounds that she carries in her body.
The performance further explores Farida’s powerlessness in relation to the current political upheaval and the violence that her family & many others are currently experiencing in Bangladesh, with the rise of Islamic extremism.
In her ever-evolving artistic practice, Farida Yesmin (f.k.a. Kajoli Ilojak) experiments with different media (from photography & drawing to live performance) to explore issues of gender, body politics, and cross-cultural identity through a feminist lens. She engages with the cultural expectations & ideological restrictions she confronts as a woman, as an artist, and as a refugee. She negotiates language barriers while staging her ‘otherness’ using her body, voice, painting, and gestural mark-making as means of communication.
Insta @faridayesmin_liveart · Vimeo /user82719477
Heather Alice White · No Caller ID
Entering a solitary tournament on which her life depends. Deciphering willpower, genetics, and chance. Asking the questions she doesn’t want to know the answers to. Where is that call coming from? Is the realisation too late or was it futile from the start? No physical challenge, only mental strength — play the game.
A durational Live Art performance exploring hereditary addiction & cyclical futility.
Thank you to Peader Kirk for inciting this work at Works Ahead: Radiator.
Heather Alice White is a Manchester-based emerging artist whose practice is rooted in contemporary movement, poetry, film. She enjoys creating trans-media multidisciplinary performance work, and is passionate about neurodivergence & female healthcare. In 2023 she founded Weird Alice Entertainment: a working-class-led immersive theatre company.
weirdalice.com · Insta @heatheraliceartist
Jennifer Ng · Same Moon But Different Suns
Every day, I live my time thrice — now, in the past, and in the future.
A durational performance by Jennifer Ng, as a response to a dislocated form of floating existence.
Dr Jennifer Ng is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist who lives & practises art in the UK. Concepts in her work emerge through material experimentations & spatial immersion. She uses embodiment aesthetics, and practice trajectories stemming from her eclectic cultural experiences to investigate themes of ‘existence/absence’, ‘loss/lost’, ‘distance/displacement’.
Sound design: Music by Numbers
jennifernsy.com · Insta @jenniferngart
Ludo & Jake · I.D.S.T.
A detail that is not poetic. It isn’t about pretending. Every word I say is a promise. Why did you come here?
A symbiotic relationship revealed in an extra-ordinary liminal space that behaves as a playground for adults. Two performers co-exist here through games, rules, strategies, and numbers that unlock action & storytelling — coming from the true lives & memories of its inhabitants.
We don’t speak about a memory as if it were something that could be changed. If Destroyed Still True.
Created & performed by Jake Walton & Ludovica Tagariello.
Ludovica Tagariello is an Italian multifaceted artist, physical theatre performer & maker, who is involved in performative activities both in Italy with her company Alot Teatro and in the UK as an individual.
Jake Walton is a northern working-class theatre maker, producer, and actor. He has performed internationally across various locations ranging from an alleyway of a street festival to the Olivier stage at The National Theatre.
Both are recent graduates from an MA in Theatre Lab at RADA and this is their first work together.
Insta @occhio_loco & @jakewalton91
Martin Hamblen · iCriedWolves
Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Can you hear me?
A literal interpretation of a familiar fable: A boy cried wolf.
This fable reflects & resonates with our contemporary circumstances. Performing it, post-pandemic, during a cost-of-living crisis, through man-made climate change, while sifting fake news from facts, seems pertinent. Reciting a single word over & over (in multiple languages) aims to politely provoke a passing audience to consider a question: Do we share the same wolves?
Martin Hamblen’s practice is an antisyzygy — a union of opposites — that includes collecting multiples (nine) of the same thing and performing phrases, literal interpretations of language. Before studying Fine Art, he studied Psychology. His work has been funded by both Arts Council England & Creative Scotland. He lives in SW Scotland.
Insta @needsgone · X @uistkunstist
Nicola Dale · Director
Working in the crevice between performance & sculpture, Nicola Dale asks what it is to be an object, or be treated as one.
Through this focus on ‘objecthood’, she thinks about how we occupy space & how often we are merely a vessel for someone else’s story, a guest in someone else’s space, beholden to someone else’s (unspoken) criteria.
Exploring objecthood provides an opportunity to take some power back — and offer it to others. An object that can be held, worn, or entered into is a sign that space can be opened up, rather than dominated.
Nicola Dale is a Stockport-based visual artist. She has undertaken extensive exhibitions, commissions, residencies, and performances in the UK & internationally. She has recently shown with the Aesthetica Art Prize (longlist), Saatchi Gallery & Bobinska Brownlee (London), Pabst Gallery (Florida), The Hepworth Wakefield, The Grundy (Blackpool).
nicoladale.com · Insta @nicola_dale_
Riley Hamshaw-Mills · Flang
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Riley Hamshaw-Mills is a Lowestoft-based working-class artist involved in producing experimental work from all different aspects of performance, including Live Art, immersive/site specific, and autobiographical theatre. His work looks to blend the mundane aspects of living with surreal ideas & feelings, with satire and small town working-class attitudes being a through point in a lot of his work.
rileyhamshawmills.com · Insta @rambunccc
Robyn Greeves · the sin of being
It’ll always be there, pulling at you. But you should know that it’s damned.
By the sons & daughters it’ll produce. By the lovers who will depend on it. By your doctors & employers. By the creator of the universe.
You are woven into the sin itself. If it were anyone else, it’d be called divine madness.
But it’s not him, it’s you. And it’s your cross to bear.
Smile! Repent & cleanse yourself. Your purity will be your life force, and your condemnation is the most natural thing in the world.
You’re a woman now. Happy 12th birthday.
Exploring secrecy & shame around fertility & sexuality, how it manifests in the body, and how to reclaim what can’t be purified.
Robyn Greeves is a contemporary performance artist, physical performer, and textile artist with a focus on creating postmodern performance work to explore & deconstruct politics & human behaviour. She has developed an interest in psychology, feminism, disability, social behaviour, communication, the sensory experience. She makes work through the mediums of movement-based practices & durational performance.
Insta @robyngreeves
Rowena Gander · Bed Death
Exploring the ‘death’ of an intimate relationship, throughout the durational work, the lesbian performance artist, Rowena Gander, aggressively destroys a bed to signify the emotions one might experience when two people in a relationship are no longer compatible. The audience are invited to join the artist in bed to briefly share their experiences of their incompatible relationships.
Dr Rowena Gander is an academic / international performance artist who creates thought-provoking solo performance works that question & negotiate themes of sexuality, power, and objectification in women. Rowena has relentlessly pursued themes of lesbian sexuality in her physical performance work and has created an acclaimed body of work that is powerful, empowering, challenging, and at times, uncomfortable.
rowenagander.com · Insta @rowenagander
The Paula Davy · I Scream
On entering the water, resist the urge to swim until the cold(shock) has passed.
You are invited to visit Paula The Disappointment at her traditional Ice Cream Cart and exchange your inner most hopes & fears for something more useful.
Paula Davy is a solo live artist from a background of political activism & protest. Influenced by personal histories, biography, her own feelings of displacement, and strained family relationships, her practice could be described as Live Art happenings. Most of her works are informed by a biographical trilogy — Paula The Slut, Paula The Disappointment, Paula The Depressive — each celebrating a negative aspect of her history.