Emergency 25
Afternoon Programme, Noon-4pm.
→ artists · afternoon · evening · entry · access · about · credits Updated 24 September 2025
Presented by Word of Warning + Contact
Emergency 25 is a day out for the curious at Contact on Saturday 27 September. Read Afternoon Programme Notes below and see some of our artists’ images.
Content Warnings: please click here.
Dongting Huang · On the White Ground – Cleansing
On the White Ground – Cleansing takes the white ground as its vessel, traces as its language, and the body as its instrument of expression. It is a performance unfolding around the making and erasing of marks: as the artist and audience step into the space, cleaning and staining emerge within the same gesture, while repair and disruption intertwine in an endless cycle.
Concept, Direction & Lead Performance: Dongting Huang · Co-Performer & Composer: Juice Cui · Onsite Producer: Anyuan Wang · Videography (Documentation): Wantong Ren
Dongting (b. 1999) is a London-based visual artist and multidisciplinary creator whose practice spans moving images, performance, and installation. Navigating the absurdities, contradictions, and surreal distortions of modern life, Dong explores themes of social anxiety, identity, and the complexities of human existence. Fascinated by the tensions between fragility and resilience, their work often reflects on the body as both a vessel of memory and a site of transformation.
dongtingart.com · Insta @dong.dongwinter
ClusterFlux Collective · just in case, god forbid, you get run over…
…someone new can come in and take over
In a society where progress is measured by productivity, where minutes are monetised, and our value amounts to our utility — what happens when we let the mind wander?
Our show is set in an office, your bog-standard office — printers, filing cabinets and complimentary fruit bowls. It’s not where we pictured we would be, when we were just little sprogs and the world was wide and weird and anything could and would (eventually) happen. As we toil our way through the working day, we’re distracted by our childhood dreams and the futures we imagined for ourselves keep disrupting the present we never chose.
Supported by ArtsDepot, Theatre Deli, and London Performance Studios.
ClusterFlux is a London-based collective of international artists making slick multimedia theatre that responds to the now with a light touch, bright lights, and music you can move to.
clusterflux.co.uk · Insta @clusterfluxcollective · X @flux_cluster
GOWD · Mass
Raw and fully transparent, bare. Gagged, a multitude of tiny jaws biting my skin as 50 skin-fold calipers are used on my body, clinging on for dear life like leaches. The performance is a response to my own personal issues with my own body image, growing up queer in a sports environment and the inevitability of placing value on my worth as a person and as an artist.
Created by BoNJ · Creative/Performance Collaborator: Riley Hamshaw-Mills · Producer: GOWD · Special thanks to Lexy Cooper.
BoNJ (they/them) is an experimental performance artist and dual-citizen (Canada/Scotland). Their performance practice draws from many performance styles, including live art, site specific, neo-burlesque, and devised theatre. Their work explores mental health, family dynamics, and religion through an auto-biographical lens.
Insta @bonj.theatre
Leon Clowes · The Alcoholic’s Tarot
A funny, moving, and interactive experience based on Leon’s lived experience of alcoholism. Each unique performance is shaped by one-to-one, ‘alcoholic misfortune tellings’ with audience members. The work challenges stigma, questions society’s normalisation of drinking, and gently opens space for honest, humorous conversations about addiction. Whether you’re affected personally, know someone who is, or think it doesn’t touch your life (spoiler: it probably does) — The Alcoholic’s Tarot is a curious, compassionate invitation to look again.
Leon’s arts work spans installation, performance, sound design, and socially curious projects. He has shown work across the UK and internationally, including SPILL Festival, Cafe Oto, Frieze Art Fair, Snape Maltings, SUPERNORMAL Festival, WORM Rotterdam, and has been commissioned by and selected for projects nationally and internationally.
leonclowes.com · Insta @leonclowes · X @ClowesLeon
Lisa Ford · Heirloom
She takes thread, some yours, some hers, some found in streets and in libraries. Often the threads are words and images or conversations with people. She weaves these to create theatrical pieces, that wrap audiences in collective feeling.
Heirloom is a piece for one performer and one audience member. The soundscape is made from stories of invisible work in women’s lives. It is an invitation to sit, sew, and share — and to add your thread to the repair.
Lisa is a theatre director, performer, producer, maker, facilitator. Engaging communities, telling stories, connecting disparate ideas, to a shared creative goal. Working reactively, with multidisciplinary techniques, shaping work with found stimulus.
Insta @lisaf0rd
Luke McDonnell · Slow News Day
On 18th April 1930, the BBC News Broadcast script simply read ‘There is no news’ and played piano music for 10 minutes. Hard to imagine that happening today, but if it did? What story would you write to fill the gap? Will you tell a feel good fluff piece or a highly political rant, will you celebrate a local hero or simply tell a pack of lies? Join Luke in this one-to-one performance to do exactly that. This a performance where the audience brings the story! You won’t need to prepare anything beforehand, Luke will guide you through to discover what’s important to you in the moment.
Luke is a performance artist and theatre maker living and making work in Manchester for almost 10 years. His work explores big issues through conversation and play. He has previously worked with Daniel Bye, Emma Geraghty, Jake Walton, Andy Smith, and been commissioned by New Adelphi Theatre and The Dukes.
lukemcdonnell.co.uk · Insta @Luke__McDonnell
Miss Freda Wallace · Brutal Ephemeral
My mother was a seamstress, and my family were mill workers in some of the buildings around the north west that are now fancy apartments and retail units. I am interested in the complex yet delicate nature of history and how social determinants shape us. Being both brutal and ephemeral, delicate and jarring, the work hopes to reflect the evolution of women’s work and how it became the engine of the industrial world and how we protest against it while being complicit in its mechanisms.
Freda is a visceral performance artist using machines, spoken word, noise, and body movement to create a jarring experience that is a sensory attack while remaining tender and sensitive in creating a description of the incongruity of living in a fragmented, insecure world.
fredamedia.net · Insta @miss.freda.wallace
Luca Federici · Specimen
A durational performance exploring themes of power, surveillance, and bodily discipline. The performer enacts a cycle of endurance, involving cutting, piercing, and controlled suffocation — inviting the audience to witness the tensions between control and submission. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’, Specimen uses mirrors to blur the line between watcher and watched, highlighting how power is internalised and enacted through the body.
Content Warnings: suitable only for 18+; elements may be distressing, please consider them before viewing this work, click here.
Luca is a performance artist working at the intersection of BDSM and performance art.
Insta @luca.federici
Madeleina Kay · The “Hate Dress”
A feminist garment and performative artwork made from real online abuse, making a visceral statement against online violence. The artist exposes the weight of digital misogyny and reclaims power through visibility by re-speaking the troll comments featured on the garment and responding to the abuse through expressive song. The repeated destruction and reconstruction of the dress, transforms hate into liberation in a ritual participatory performance, symbolising collective resistance to the policing of women’s bodies and voices, whilst emphasising the cyclic nature of trauma and recovery.
Madeleina is an artist, activist, and MA Fine Art graduate (Central Saint Martins). She was awarded a ‘Democracy Needs Imagination’ grant from the European Cultural Foundation, Young European of the Year, and the European Charlemagne Youth Prize by the European Parliament. She has written, illustrated, and self-published nine books, and contributed writing to the German National Library’s House of Europe book. She has performed at events across Europe, including the National Justice Museum, Glastonbury Festival, the European Parliament, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
madeleinakayart.com · Insta @madeleina_kay · X @MadeleinaKay
Faye Yan · Lullaby
A performance of endurance, cultural memory, and the politics of obedience. By transforming the traditional Chinese gesture of 叩头 (kowtow, meaning to knock one’s head on the ground) into an act of action painting with the performer’s hair, this work turns a ritual of reverence into a visceral meditation on violence and the generational inheritance of pain.
Developed in residence at Arteles Creative Center, Finland.
Faye is a performance and visual artist born in Beijing, has lived in LA and London, and is currently based in Manchester. Her work combines durational art with theatre and painting with dance, exploring endurance, femininity, heritage, and rebellion by seeing the personal as political.
fayeyan.com · Insta @fayeyanart
The Paula Davy · One Night Stand
A celebration of the countless dysfunctional relationships that Paula The Slut has become entangled in throughout the course of her bizarre existence. Finally she has a chance to experience a relationship on her terms, safe in the knowledge that she has taken all possible precautions to protect herself from the harmful effects of dating.
Paula is a solo live artist from a background of political activism and 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.
Kris Canavan · Urolagnia
Black, cold, and wet. The quiet embrace of the finality denied as life finds a way. To endure in the face of adversity — the only way out is through. Dissident, unapologetic, and vulnerable at your feet. Violent and tender, the contradictions are intentional.
NB this work lasts up to 60 minutes, limited capacity, no latecomers, no readmission.
Kris was born in County Down in the North of Ireland in 1980 and graduated from The University of The West of England (UWE) Bristol in 2004; they have been presenting artwork at an international level since the early 2000s. They now live and work in Blackpool and define themselves as being the ‘BUMBOY’ of Boris Johnson’s nightmares.
kris-canavan.com · Insta @kristina_canavan_