Emergency 26

→ artists · afternoon · evening · entry · access · about · credits  Updated 24 September 2026

Presented by Word of Warning + Contact

Emergency 26 is a day out for the curious at Contact on Saturday 26 September. Read Afternoon Programme Notes below and see some of our artists’ images.

Content Warnings: some works involve interaction and/or participation; please read specific warnings here.

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Bait · The Rewilding Of Uncle Dad

Slip on the headphones and enter a world where live sound, surreal encounters, and a retiring office worker on the brink make the ordinary strange and extraordinary, uncovering beauty, loss, and wildness within the architecture of everyday life.

Made with support from artists Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Silvia Mercuriali, and institutions Arts Council England, La Fabrique Autonome des Acteurs, London Fieldworks, and ZKU Berlin.

Writers & performers: Michelle Madsen & Lizzy Shakespeare · Field recording & sound mentor: Kate Carr · Live sound: Thomas Mayer · Outside eye Berlin: Shai Cohen · Outside eye UK: Rachel Gay · Costume: Lena Boeckmann · Dramaturgy: Maria Hüber

Bait is a critically-acclaimed performance company working out of the UK and Berlin. Since 2017 they have performed their work at festivals and venues across the UK and Europe. Founders and co-artistic directors Michelle Madsen & Lizzy Margereson both studied Lecoq’s physical theatrical pedagogy and now make work which takes the principles of play and the poetic body and applies them to a genre-busting body of award-winning work.

baittheatre.com · Insta @baitmatetheatre

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Ben Hodge · Can I Join You?

A tender one to one encounter — can you provide care when others don’t want you to? In a society and existence where caring for your body can be seen as a radical act, artist Ben Hodge invites you into this safe and respectful one to one encounter, to connect with yourself and find joy in the vessel that carries you through life.
This 5-7 minute performance draws on Ben’s own experience of being a fat, queer person in a society that seeks to diminish his body and identity.

Ben is 100% transfats. A comedian, host, performer, and facilitator — his work explores his identity and community in relation to being a fat, transmasculine queer person.

tinyurl.com/transfatsbh · Insta @benhodgeee

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chris brown · Trickle Down

Trickle Down is a provocative dance and monologue piece exposing the failures of trickle-down economics. Blending butoh-inspired falls, verbatim text, and original writing, it dissects austerity politics and the neoliberal capitalist model through raw, physical storytelling.
In an oversized suit, the performer stumbles down an endless staircase, verbally unraveling the absurdities of an economic system that perpetuates inequality. Oscillating between dark humor and unsettling truth, the work lays bare the human cost of policies designed to keep people poor. A biting, cyclical descent into systemic failure.

chris is an interdisciplinary artist based in Manchester. Through movement, performance, writing, and video, they interrogate the relationships between body, land, and perception, exploring the inner transformation systems that shape human existence within the biosphere.
Technology and audiovisual media serve as sensory tools in their practice, fostering modes of listening, translation, and dialogue between human and more than human worlds. Collaboration lies at the heart of their work. As a movement director, facilitator, poet, and artist, chris engages with performers, directors, community groups, academics, and creative teams to develop live and digital projects. These emerge through dialogue, improvisation, and embodied practice, with an approach that prioritizes listening, adaptability, and care. Their work translates conceptual, emotional, and ecological frameworks into performances, interventions, and beyond.

Digital Portfolio · Insta @christopher.p.brown

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Emergency Chorus · Both/And

Artist duo Emergency Chorus present a short text-based performance, taking a simple sentence for a walk, and turning words into a precise musical study. Everyday language unravels a catalogue of contradictions, a repository of hidden desires and unspoken truths, images from inner lives — but whose exactly?

Emergency Chorus is the collaboration between Ben Kulvichit (he/ him) & Clara Potter-Sweet (they/them). Since 2017, they have been working across theatre, live art, and dance, creating collage-like performances of text, choreography, music, and image (“Beguiling and enchanting work”, The Guardian).
Their work deals with states of crisis and emergency, the relationships between ecology, capitalism, and technology, and ways of approaching the future; with complexity, strangeness, playfulness, intimacy, and ambiguity.
They have created and performed work at venues and organisations including Battersea Arts Centre, Cambridge Junction, Fierce Festival, Warwick Arts Centre, Old Diorama Arts Centre, Bristol Old Vic, and Chisenhale Dance Space.
Ben & Clara live in Bristol and are proud members of artist collective, Interval.

emergencychorus.com · Insta @emergencychorus

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Emma Geraghty · BSIDES

More fat and less girl and more singing, but also I’ll probably cry?
In this durational performance, Emma will remake their 2016 solo show Fat Girl Singing over and over again until it makes sense for the person they are now in 2026. BSIDES uses live music, movement, writing, and watching to reimagine autobiography.
It’s a rehearsal room. It’s a tiny desk concert. It’s live at the royal albert hall. It’s a disco. It’s probably going to be fun.

Emma is (they/she) is a writer and theatremaker from Manchester, now based in London. They write plays about working class queerness and make performance things with music about the fat queer body. They were one quarter of award-winning theatre company Powder Keg, and their solo show Fat Girl Singing was described in The Guardian as “charming yet unabashedly, infectiously angry”, a description that they have used on dating profiles in the past.

emmageraghty.co.uk · Insta @giraffety91

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Joss Affleck · The Skin Show

Our skin renews itself every twenty-seven days, yet it still carries traces of the lives we have lived. What if we could shed those skins and step inside them once more?
Our phones have become a kind of second skin, carrying photographs, conversations, memories and digital ghosts, an archive of who we are and all the people we have been.
The Skin Show is a digital séance that rummages through the wardrobe of our former selves, where old voices linger, identities refuse to stay still, and the boundary between who we were and who we are becoming begins to blur. Unlike most performances, your phone should remain switched on. You may need it to contact the spirit realm.

Created & performed by Joss Affleck · Sound collaboration by Martin Viktorov
Developed through a residency at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio.

Joss (they/them) is a Bristol-based multidisciplinary artist, performer, and filmmaker. Their work combines participation, projection, sound, folklore, and digital technologies to create live experiences exploring queer identity, transformation, ritual, and collective imagination. Formerly an art director within a BAFTA Award-winning animation and design team, they are now a resident at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio.

theskinshow.xyz · misterllaneousstudio.com · Insta @mister_llaneous

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Kellie Colbert & Deborah Newton · What We Carry

What We Carry is a two-hour durational performance exploring the invisible labour of care, endurance, and expectation placed upon women. Through repeated cycles of carrying leaking salt, relentless running, fragile rituals with eggs and flowers, and sustained acts of holding one another, the work transforms from quiet beauty into physical exhaustion and unsettling excess. As materials and fatigue accumulate, the performers ask: how long can women keep holding everything together before the image of strength finally breaks?

Kellie is a Greater Manchester-based performance maker and facilitator. She describes herself as an autobiographical artist, creating work that is honest, relatable and, at times, self-critical. Through spoken word, symbolism and storytelling, Kellie explores memories and lived experiences, often focusing on themes of mental health, identity and feminism. Her work aims to create performances that are both deeply personal and widely accessible, encouraging audiences to reflect, connect and recognise elements of their own experiences.
Alongside her creative practice, Kellie works as a freelance theatre practitioner, collaborating with a range of organisations to facilitate, coordinate and manage educational and community arts projects. She also performs in immersive family theatre and live events across the UK. Kellie has been commissioned by organisations including NIAMOS, Breakdown Bolton, Factory International, and hÅb to develop her debut solo show, Dedicated To The One I Love, which premiered at Contact in 2025.

Deborah is the Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Theatre + Creative Performance at The Arden School of Theatre. Alongside her academic role, she is an experienced performance practitioner and facilitator specialising in contemporary performance, with a strong commitment to making the arts accessible, inclusive and meaningful for diverse communities. Her creative practice is rooted in autobiographical performance, exploring themes of relationships, identity and mental health through honest and engaging storytelling. Deborah has performed extensively at both national and international festivals and has collaborated with a wide range of organisations, creating immersive family theatre, participatory arts experiences and puppetry projects. Her collaborators include The Laughter Specialists, supporting children and families at Manchester Children’s Hospital, as well as Partridge Lakes Events, Global Grooves, Casaba Carnival Arts, Rentadinosaur and the National Justice Museum. Through both her artistic practice and teaching, Deborah champions performance as a powerful tool for connection, creativity and social engagement.

Kellie & Deborah have worked together for the past six years, creating contemporary and durational performance works that explore friendship, womanhood, care, and autobiography. What began as a tutor–student relationship has evolved into a close friendship and enduring creative partnership, built on trust, honesty, and a shared commitment to making personal work. Together, they draw on their own lived experiences to create performances that examine the complexities of human connection, everyday labour, and the stories we carry as women, inviting audiences into intimate and thought-provoking shared experiences.

Insta @kellie.colbert.theatre & @deborahnewtonartist

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Lisa Ford · Four Rows Back

Lisa takes threads, 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. Her previous work explores herstory, invisible work, and biography. In this new work, Four Rows Back, she is going to post a letter. Carrying a night full of memories in her bag. It is an invitation to join her on the train journey.

Commissioned by hÅb and Contact for Works Ahead 2026.

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. Intertwining herstory, biography, and ideas.

Insta @lisaf0rd

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Mimosa Art House & Rosie Fielding · Worktown Stories

Worktown Stories is a live digital performance set inside a miniature gallery where constantly changing scenes — from museum to bedroom to boat at sea — reimagine stories from mythology and literature. Seen only through their hands, the performers build miniature worlds and invite the audience to interact, shape the narrative, and play games with them.

Performed by Cemil Yildiz, Erhan Cemil Sagir, and Rosalind Fielding (Mimosa Art House) · Videography by Esad Akdag · Music by Erhan Cemil Sagir · Concept by Rosalind Fielding.

Rosie is a British artist with a PhD in contemporary performances of Shakespeare in Japan. She has worked with many different arts and education organisations in Europe and Japan, including Saitama Arts Theatre, the Comedie Francaise, the New National Theatre Tokyo, and Shakespeare’s Globe.

Insta @mimosarthouse & @rosie_jf

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Pablo Pakula · ellipsis

Something omitted. Withheld. Left out. Unsaid. A deliberate gap. A meaningful absence.
The strategy of omitting one or more elements from a sequence, narrative, statement, action, or image; implying something could have been present but deliberately isn’t. This absence is perceptible and meaningful. What’s missing isn’t necessarily unknown or unknowable but can be inferred or understood through what remains.
This work was created in June 2025 for a research event at University of Birmingham. I wanted to address (…) by using a (…) at the centre of the piece. However, particular bureaucratic challenges meant I was unable to do so. Using a white piece of fabric instead, a kind of visual/conceptual ellipsis, began as a simple workaround yet became a core strategy that hands agency to the audience, inviting them to fill the gap and complete the work.

Pablo is a live artist teaching at Central Saint Martins and University of Birmingham. He’s drawn to musicalisation and materiality to bypass discursive language and rational thought. Whilst socially engaged, his practice rejects a ‘message’, tackling complex subjects in poetic ways that playfully straddle the solemn and the carnivalesque, the holy and the profane, genuine emotion and irreverent irony.

pablopakula.com · Insta @pablopakula

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Parastu Mohafezatkar · Can You FEEL Me?

“It doesn’t matter what that word is called in your language; its meaning is the same for all of us. Like a shared feeling.”
Can You FEEL Me? is a remote participatory performance with empathy and responsibility at its heart. The audience enters a one-to-one encounter where they are no longer simply watching, but gradually become part of the world they are witnessing. Through a first-person perspective and an encounter that slowly unfolds, the boundary between observer and participant begins to disappear.
The question is: can we recognise something of ourselves in another person, even when we come from different places and do not share the same language or culture?
Can we understand another human being without sharing the same words or the same world?
And if we are given the opportunity to respond, what do we choose?

Writer & Director: Parastu Mohafezatkar · Concept: Shahrokh Rad · Cast: Parastu Mohafezatkar & Sina Tavakoli · Music: Hasan Moinfar & Hosein Moinfar · Assistant Director: Ghazal Bakhtiary

Parastu began her artistic journey at the age of 14 through journalism and reporting, later becoming a news program host. She was introduced to theatre through acting classes and stage practice, gradually turning her initial interest into a professional pursuit. Over the years, she trained in voice, expression, and performance, combining practical experience with academic studies in acting and theatre in Tehran. Her work spans short films, television series, small-town theatre productions, and university performances, which gradually evolved into professional stage and screen work. She has participated in several prestigious national and international festivals, earning awards, and continues to pursue deeper artistic growth and meaningful connections within the theatre community.

Insta @parastumohafezatkar5 with @shahrokh_rad7 @ghazal_bakhtiary @hasan_moinfar @thisiscnaelnino

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PHØBIA · I am sixteen and stupid

When I was in a paediatric psych ward I would often dance and lip sync to songs to cheer up the other patients. Music was a key part of my recovery and the main reason I’m here today. Without drag, I don’t believe I would be here.
For Emergency 26 I have prepared a playlist of all the songs I wish I could have performed back in my adolescence, and I will be performing them back to back on a shuffled playlist.
This is a love letter to music and performance. It is also a cry for help.

Their work includes Hyde N Seek Goes On Holiday (Haphazard 2026 at Z-arts) and Mistoffelees (a developing solo show), alongside drag work around Manchester and the North of England.

Insta @thatcreaturephobia

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Rachel Gomme · Relay

Can we repair the unrepairable? What happens if we try?
This delicate, quietly absurd performance explores what value there is in the action of mending, even when it does not bring back what was lost, and how joy might arise out of destruction.

Rachel works across performance, drawing, and installation. Her work interrogates the action of time and memory in the body, and explores the nature of shared embodiment, among humans and with the more-than-human world. She works primarily in durational, site-specific, and one-to-one performance, and has performed, presented work, and exhibited throughout the UK and internationally since 1998.

rachelgomme.com · Insta @rachelgommelive

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Rowena Gander · Diluting Lesbian

Diluting Lesbian is a four-hour durational performance in a small shower cubicle, where the performer repeatedly speaks the word “lesbian” as a ritualistic mantra.
Audiences are invited to say the word aloud, which is echoed back in their tone, exposing, reflecting, and amplifying how it is socially held. Constant running water threatens to wash the word away, yet it persists, resisting dilution and reclaiming its defining power. Confronting the lingering stigma surrounding “lesbian,” the work transforms shame into endurance, ritual, and specificity. Through repetition, exhaustion, and audience exchange, the performance continually evolves in texture, resonance, and meaning.

Dr Rowena Gander is a Liverpool-based performance artist, choreographer, and educator known for bold solo works and publications that explore power, lesbian sexuality, and female objectification. Her acclaimed pieces Barely Visible and Woman | Women have toured nationally, confronting lesbian invisibility through raw physicality.
Rowena has previously reperformed the timeless work of Marina Abramović in her Solo Retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts and is currently part of the world touring cast for Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic.
Alongside making and performing her own and others’ work, Rowena has choreographed numerous musical theatre productions, as well as movement directing / support on small and large scale physical theatre and cabaret productions.
Rowena has been in receipt of grant awards from Arts Council England, Liverpool Improvisation Festival, Leap Dance Festival, Word of Warning, Metal Culture UK, Physical Fest, and Unity Theatre’s Open Call. Rowena has worked with celebrated directors and choreographers, including Blenard Azijaz, Izzie Major, Elinor Randle, Jenny Rees, Jen Hale, Jo Fong, Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmus, Dawn Schultz, and Pauline Brooks.

rowenagander.com · Insta @rowenagander @lesbianperformance

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Ruby Antonowicz-Behnan & Yui Yamamoto · Requiem in Progress

Requiem in Progress is an ongoing sonic performance project. Two people explore memory, grief, and new forms of relationships with the absent through various activation points: voice, movement, found sounds, and a record collection left behind.
Requiem in Progress is a response to loss where grief is not resolved but held open as an embodied and communal experience.

Ruby Antonowicz-Behnan and Yui Yamamoto’s work interweaves voice, movement, and analogue and digital audio practices through theatre and sonic composition. We aim to open new perspectives on death, care, and memory, exploring how these experiences are voiced, shared, and understood. As a duo we have also organised a live art and performance weekender under the name Present Voices.

Insta @rubyantonowiczbehnan @ugly_society_lover @present_voices

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Sweætshops® · imperson - imprint

𓇒 𓎟 𓇜 𓅐 𓎟 𓈐 𓁹 imperson - imprint is an ongoing performance and sound project. Structured as a series of contemporary mystery plays, it examines the world’s most impersonated figure (Elvis Presley) through the lens of the ancient Egyptian Memphite conception of the afterlife and iconisation.
Within the Memphite belief system, the continued replication of a person’s image in the world of the living ensured their existence in the afterlife. When their likeness ceased to be reproduced, they ceased to exist entirely. imperson - imprint approaches this as a form of proto-celebrity culture, where a shallow immortality is sustained through continued acts of representation.
“The image is one thing and the human being is another.” — Elvis Presley

Supported with seed funding from the Creative Scotland project fund.

Sweætshops® (@sweXtshops) is a multi-personality enterprise from the birthplace of the industrial revolution. As above, so below: reappropriating the relentless flow of pop culture, mass-produced goods, and digital trends through various esoteric frameworks to create allegories for hidden systems of power, social contradictions, and the emerging conditions of 21st-century life.

swextshops.io · Insta @swextshops

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Terri Jade Donovan · Take Off Tiffany

Tiffany is attempting to be in the commercial world, but over the course of one phone call, it becomes apparent that she’s starting to be stretched too far.
The world is a tight place to be sometimes.

Terri is a disabled, hard of hearing, and neurodivergent actor and writer from Stockport. In 2025, their play DOG DOG DOG won the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting’s Special Commendation award.

Spotlight · Insta @terri_donovan5

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