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 Evening Programme Notes below and see some of our artists’ images.

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

Lowri Evans · The Smallest Thing in the World

The Smallest Thing in the World will see Lowri Evans thaw her last frozen embryo. Come and give her smallest ever creation the biggest send off and contemplate life and death in the same breath. A once in a lifetime show. Literally.

Sound design by Andrew Heath.
Thanks to Professor Daniel Brison and Roshana Rubin Mayhew.

I am an artist based in Manchester. I make intimate art projects in unusual places with complete strangers. Art is my way of saying ‘sometimes I feel like this, do you?’

thelowri.com · Insta @thelowri

Isabella Victorie A. · darvo_

How much silent weight can one body carry before it breaks?
darvo_ explores covert abuse, focusing on the rarely discussed subtype of emotional neglect — a quiet, insidious form of abuse without obvious red flags that often drives the target’s nervous system into total collapse.
Subjected to silent disrespect, followed by calm excuses and blame-shifting, targets experience prolonged mental stress that can cause the same nervous system breakdown and severe physical toll as loud, overt abuse.
Through a raw physical endurance test, Isabella Victorie A. makes the unseen price of “nothing happening” impossible to ignore. How many moments of silent disrespect can a body take before it collapses?

Isabella (she/they) is a performance artist and actor from Austria, based in London. In her bold and abstract performance work, she raises awareness of complex interpersonal dynamics, with a central emphasis on different forms of emotional abuse. She’s performed at venues including the Vienna State Opera, Theaterforum Kreuzberg, Komische Oper Berlin, Battersea Arts Centre, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Underbelly Boulevard London, and Copeland Gallery. Her performance fragments.foyc was shown in Emergency 24; darvo_ marks the continuation of her ongoing series about emotional abuse.

Insta @is.vi.a_

Sap Dance & Desire Lines Dance Theatre · Unconstrued Bodies

Unconstrued Bodies is an intergenerational movement-based live art work offering alternative ways of paying attention to naked bodies. Inspired by life drawing and modelling, the work explores what happens when we unconstrue (suspend, deconstruct, challenge) our habitual ways of viewing unclothed bodies and the fresh possibilities that this then creates for performers and spectators.

Co-created & performed by Orla Collier & Nigel Stewart.
Produced by Sap Dance & Desire Lines Dance Theatre.
Supported by Lancaster Arts and Yorkshire Dance.
Special thanks to life drawing groups: Bare Canvas, Catherine MacDiarmid, Ilkley Arts, King Street Arts, Otley Life Drawing, See You Naked, ColourWheel Lancaster.

Orla Collier is a dance artist, physical theatre practitioner, and life model based in Leeds. She is the lead artist of Desire Lines Dance Theatre and has collaborated on a wide range of projects for UK companies.
Nigel Stewart is a freelance dance artist, life model, and independent dance scholar. He is Artistic Director of Sap Dance, and Emeritus Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University. He has choreographed and performed in the UK, the US, and continental Europe since 1982. He has published extensively on contemporary dance.
Sap Dance have produced short theatre pieces and full-length site-specific rural and coastal performance works and films since 2005. They last performed in Turn 2026.
Desire Lines Dance Theatre have produced works for theatres and outdoor settings since 2021, including the solo Are You Local? and the duet Twenty-first Century Love with Sap Dance.

desirelinesdancetheatre.com · Insta @desirelinesdancetheatre @orla.collier

Id Est Performance Company · Mania

Mania is an informed mess that is quietly loud with a calm chaos. Iris knows. Emma knows. She knows. They know. We know. You know?
There are twenty-eight minutes counting down on the clock, two young women on stage ready to shred, prepare, release, and grow. Exploring cycles, within us and surrounding us. Cycles are shared, connecting us internally and externally. 28 days for the moon to orbit earth, 28 days of a menstrual cycle. Our cycles create who we are. Cycles can change with time but for now we would like to keep ours. And we assure you that Mania will fall and rise again.

Id Est is a female-led performance company founded by Iris Bell & Emma Grave: together they make work that is rooted in knowledge, experience, and play. They aim to discuss and present themes, largely surrounding the female experience, with a fresh perspective, whilst deploying conceptual techniques.

Insta @idest_idest

Emily Bold · COMPUTER_GRRRL

COMPUTER_GRRRL (WIP) is literally just a girl on a laptop <3. Emily Bold is a computer_grrl from Manchester who also does theatre, art, and creative captioning. This is her first solo performance.

Emily (she/they) is an interdisciplinary performer and artist from Manchester. Their work has been best described via a YouTube comment: “viscerally unpleasant. good stuff.”
Current other projects include Bad Science, a theatre piece exploring the political abuse of psychiatry in the context of big data and surveillance, and Deviant Diners, a solo mixed-media project on neuroqueer experiences with food, shown as part of A Modest Show, the official collateral programme to the BAS9. Emily also works as a creative captioner and began their career creating disabled-led work across the North West. They regularly collaborate with emerging artists from stand-up, poetry, and music, and have performed at HOME, Unity Theatre, Royal Exchange Theatre, Lowry, Pleasance Courtyard at EdFringe, and the National Student Drama Festival. Emily was also a part of the BEYOND Conference’s 2025 Emerging Innovators, and has recently been a part of the University of Salford x Lowry CreaTech Artist CoLab.

Insta @emily_bold_

Chris Jenkins · Huel Days

“Did they change the Huel Black formula for Strawberry Banana? I ordered a variety pack from the website and the strawberry banana in it was thick like gaviscon. The chocolat RTD crate from Costco was thick. The new strawberry banana is liquid. It has the consistency of water or Yakult. Is that normal?” — DanceswithTurtles9. Reddit. 28/07/26.
Does a man make Huel? Or does Huel make a man? And also… what is Huel?
Chris Jenkins can’t answer these questions, but he has ordered a ‘Grab & Go Starter Bundle’ and will attempt to make it. During this time he will say words constructed from the fragments of poems, lost sentences, and past lives. Grief, work, parenthood, capitalism — it’s all in the mix (in the BPA-free, Huel shaker).

Chris is a spoken word and performance artist working across comedy, live art, and theatre. His work moves between humour and sincerity, often drawing on the autobiographical and the everyday to explore the proximity of the profound to the mundane.
He has performed multiple times at the Edinburgh Fringe and was the Liverpool Echo Comedian of the Year, performing as ‘Top Joe’. He has performed in saunas, warehouses, comedy clubs, cabarets, and shopping centres. He has developed new work for Word of Warning’s Works Ahead and performed at Contact, Unity Theatre, Liverpool Everyman, Metal, Latitude, and Leicester Comedy Festival.

crjjenkins.co.uk · Insta @crjjenkins

Lee Fletcher · Grow Up!

Grow Up! The classic expression everyone tells you when you’re younger. Be better than you were before, more mature, more older, more wiser. But that isn’t what Lee thinks, or what Little Lee thinks. What you dreamt of when you were younger is still there, and what you were afraid of. The only difference: that jumper you used to love just might not fit anymore… and that’s okay.
So, look back at Lee’s memories, dreams, and fears, and see what his family has to say about all that too. Just don’t tell him he’s about to turn 21!

Lee is a theatre maker and actor from Hull, now based in Manchester, who specialises in autobiographical work that blends comedy with honesty, inviting the audience into his life in order to allow them to reflect on their own. After recently graduating from the Arden School of Theatre, he is incredibly excited to kickstart his career and see where his creative potential can take him.

Insta @leepy_fletch

Alex Billingham · Lost in the moment

Out beyond the stars and time lies a moment almost forgotten to time. Travel with the artist to the edge of memory.
Pulling from lived experience of memory loss / disability and more, join the artist as she attempts to navigate the black hole using desire lines and water divination.

Developed with support from BOARC, Summerhall Arts, Hospitalfield, and Stryx.

Alex is an international artist. Residencies at The Herbert, Hospitalfield, Summerhall Arts; performed for Tate St Ives, Ugly Duck London, and far more. Currently on the 26/27 Syllabus Cohort with a residency and solo show at Stryx Birmingham. Her work is part of The New Art Galleries permanent collection.

alexbillingham.co.uk · Insta @billingham_alex

Reckless Sleepers & UoS Performance · MOB

We’ve been thinking about people. About lots of people, about groups of people, about people on the move, and what they move through. We’ve been thinking about the crowd and the pack and the gang and the mass and the flock and the group and the troop and the crew and the herd and the host and the horde and the swarm and the throng.
And we’ve been thinking about space. About making space, and claiming space, about filling space and taking space, about the space for everyone, and the big dark void beyond.
MOB taps into the dynamics of human action and interaction, in this room and this world, whilst also paying homage to some of the greatest choreographers, artists, and movers of the 20th Century.

A co-commission with Reckless Sleepers; a new collaboration made by artists Mole Wetherell, Teresa Brayshaw, and Hannah Butterfield.

Reckless Sleepers is an international company that has presented theatre performances for over 30 years.

reckless-sleepers.eu · Insta @recklesssleepers & @uos_performance

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