We are this fair town, Gateshead, the North East. Our journeys through it give it movement and life, each part of it is given meaning because we inhabit it. Our relationships and interactions with people around us are its heart, its emotions: multifaceted and fleeting. The connections made between each of us every day give its streets, churches, parks and cafes significance.
WANDERLUST is a solitary walk and an audio video installation
Consider how you fit into the life of Gateshead by taking an invigorating walk through its streets while listening to specially commissioned audio plays that directly respond to a sense of journeying, place and wanderlust.
Follow your walk with a poetic and visual installation that, using fragments of the audio plays, touches on themes that apply to a wide range of people; the experience of a solitary journey and the emotions involved with walking.
WANDERLUST offers a multi platform project that challenges us to spend time alone, engage with Gateshead and find our own sense of belonging within it.
The writers specially commissioned for WANDERLUST are
Lee Mattison (Bush Theatre, LIVE Theatre)
Paddy Campbell (LIVE Theatre)
Chloe Daykin (Northern Stage, LIVE Theatre, BBC Radio)
Amy Mackelden (ARC, Washington Arts Centre)
Darren Carlaw (Times Literary Supplement).
We are this fair town, Gateshead, the North East. Our journeys through it give it movement and life, each part of it is given meaning because we inhabit it. Our relationships and interactions with people around us are its heart, its emotions: multifaceted and fleeting. The connections made between each of us every day give its streets, churches, parks and cafes significance.
WANDERLUST is a solitary walk and an audio video installation
Consider how you fit into the life of Gateshead by taking an invigorating walk through its streets while listening to specially commissioned audio plays that directly respond to a sense of journeying, place and wanderlust.
Follow your walk with a poetic and visual installation that, using fragments of the audio plays, touches on themes that apply to a wide range of people; the experience of a solitary journey and the emotions involved with walking.
WANDERLUST offers a multi platform project that challenges us to spend time alone, engage with Gateshead and find our own sense of belonging within it.
We are this fair town, Gateshead, the North East. Our journeys through it give it movement and life, each part of it is given meaning because we inhabit it. Our relationships and interactions with people around us are its heart, its emotions: multifaceted and fleeting. The connections made between each of us every day give its streets, churches, parks and cafes significance.
WANDERLUST is a solitary walk and an audio video installation
Consider how you fit into the life of Gateshead by taking an invigorating walk through its streets while listening to specially commissioned audio plays that directly respond to a sense of journeying, place and wanderlust.
Follow your walk with a poetic and visual installation that, using fragments of the audio plays, touches on themes that apply to a wide range of people; the experience of a solitary journey and the emotions involved with walking.
WANDERLUST offers a multi platform project that challenges us to spend time alone, engage with Gateshead and find our own sense of belonging within it.
While You Wait is a series of podcasts designed to surprise, delight and intrigue you while you wait created by artists in collaboration with academics for King’s College London.
Installed in bespoke listening stations, While You Wait, features artists Paul Clark, Victoria Melody, Chris Fittock and Stefan Kaeg Funded by Arts Council England and a Wellcome Trust Award.
While You Wait is a series of podcasts designed to surprise, delight and intrigue you while you wait created by artists in collaboration with academics for King’s College London.
Installed in bespoke listening stations, While You Wait, features artists Paul Clark, Victoria Melody, Chris Fittock and Stefan Kaeg Funded by Arts Council England and a Wellcome Trust Award.
Theatre-between is currently working on SOLITUDE, a new theatre performance.
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.” Aristotle
Inspired by the history of medieval anchorites, who requested permission to be sealed up in small cells attached to the side of churches, theatre-between is currently devising SOLITUDE, a new theatre performance. Solitude provokes immediate emotional reactions. Some find it alarming while other feel the aspiration to retire to it. Solitude can occur in very different ways. It can be something people experience in their soul, their body, or in their physical surrounding. It can be self-imposed, or imposed on someone by a situation or by others. This new theatre piece will juxtapose various forms of solitude, such as loneliness, reclusion, isolation, imprisonment and autism. A strong focus will be on the exploration of the ‘physicality’ of solitude. How do our bodies react to solitude? Does it influence our movements and how we perceive the space?
This workshop offers the opportunity to collaborate with theatre practitioner Gabriele Heller and choreographer Joelene English to explore different ideas and concepts of solitude. Starting with short text fragments, we will improvise and develop movement patterns based on physical theatre and dance exercises.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
Join the team behind GIFT to celebrate the opening of the third GIFT and to hear about the fantastic line up of events at this year’s festival.
Moving from moments of one-on-one intimacy to moments of ensemble storytelling, We Used To Wait explores how technological advances have affected our experiences of and relationship to each other. We Used To Wait seeks to give its audience an embodied experience through provoking what it means to be ‘live’.
We Used To Wait has been developed with support from Arts Council England, Live Theatre, ARC Stockton Arts Centre, Theatre in the Mill and INTERVAL Bristol.
‘…a very distinctive style that is mature and highly skilled, and demonstrates an exceptional understanding of ensemble performance.’
- Kate Craddock, Festival Director,
Gateshead International Festival of Theatre.
Massive Owl are a Bristol based company led by Artistic Leads: Danny Prosser, Sam Powell and five Associate Artists which includes: Adrian Spring, Jack Jago and Jenny Duffy who complete the creative team for We Used To Wait. We Used To Wait is performed by Danny Prosser, Jack Jago, Jenny Duffy and Sam Powell.
Massive Owl are supported by The Future, an artist-centred development collective - www.the-future.co.uk
Massive Owl are also Associate Artists of University College Falmouth incorporating Dartington College of Arts and members of INTERVAL Bristol, an artist led support network for Bristol based performance makers - http://www.intervalbristol.org
We Used To Wait has been developed with support from Arts Council England, Live Theatre, ARC Stockton Arts Centre, Theatre in the Mill and INTERVAL Bristol.
On any given day, we talk and talk.
Not merely in words, but also in melody, rhythm and movement.
Sudermann & Söderberg share a fascination for all those aspects of language that cannot be found in a dictionary.
The melody of a love story and the message a silence conveys.
How words of doubt adopt a rhythm, and how the body moves when we share our secrets.
Increasingly, this duo is convinced that we do not so much meet to converse, but to sing and dance with each other in an intriguing game; the composing of language.
‘’Lately, we have been very closely observing and listening to conversations – ours and other people’s.
What we have encountered is melody, gesture and rhythm.
We are more and more convinced that when we meet to talk we actually meet to sing and dance to each other, to enter into a playful game of language composition.
We zoom into music and dance and we extract the failures, the many ruptures that occur when we talk. All the things that are part of language but that you won’t find in a dictionary are what we pay attention to.’’
Sudermann and Söderberg celebrate language with childlike pleasure, constantly oscillating between sensuousness and sense-making.
Jolika Sudermann (DE) and Alma Söderberg (SE) have been working together since summer 2008.
Their collaboration started with Freedom of Speech, which they developed for the Over Het IJ Festival in Amsterdam.
It continued because the same piece was invited to festivals and theatres throughout Europe.
In 2010, Freedom of Speech won the audience prize at the 100° Berlin Festival at Sophiensaele, Berlin.
Both makers graduated from the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK): Alma from the Choreography department (SNDO) and Jolika from the Mime department.
Their common interest in the connection between language, music and dance is what brought them together and continues to fascinate them.
In 2013 Sudermann and Söderberg have started a new research together.
While You Wait is a series of podcasts designed to surprise, delight and intrigue you while you wait created by artists in collaboration with academics for King’s College London.
Installed in bespoke listening stations, While You Wait, features artists Paul Clark, Victoria Melody, Chris Fittock and Stefan Kaeg Funded by Arts Council England and a Wellcome Trust Award.
The project is made up of two parts. The first involves short interviews with willing participants, and an installation for participants to write/ hang up (on gift tags) their favourite words, anecdotes or jokes.
The second is the bringing together of all the material in the form of a short, edited film of the interviews carried out. The participants will be filmed for a period of around 30 seconds, they will be asked to choose their favourite word and write it on a gift tag, they will then be asked why they chose that word, as well as being asked to share their favourite joke/quote/anecdote. The video sequences will then be edited together to create a video which will be shown in the café in the town hall at regular intervals on the last day of the festival, therefore people can watch the video then explore the Think Tank installation.
Throughout the festival, there will be a number of opportunities for the public/audience to write their favourite or inspirational word on a ‘Gift Tag’ and hang it on small Think Tank installations that will be placed across the various GIFT locations and venues involved, these will be available throughout the day and around performance times.
The voice is a highly expressive, personal and colourful instrument. It reflects our experience, personality, dreams and desires and when used both in performance and in daily life it has the ability to really reach people.
Sam from Kindle Theatre is offering this introductory session to anyone interested in exploring their own voice in a playful way. In a small group she will guide you through some warm ups, vocal games and basic breath exercises that will encourage you to use your whole body and voice to create sound. We will also try out some vocal characters and build a choral score layered with different timbres and tones.
Bring along a song / piece of text or poem in your native language.
Kindle Theatre is led by Emily Ayres, Sam Fox and Olivia Winteringham, and is based in Birmingham, UK. We create performances that range from large scale theatrical banquets to sweaty rock gigs; often including innovative food, audience engagement and live music.
'The Furies' is our latest experiment into extended voice technique, using vocal expression to create an electrifying atmosphere. This show won the ACT Festival prize at BE Festival 2011 and will appear at GIFT Festival on Saturday 4th May. New shows in development are 'Lady GoGo Goch' and 'A Journey Round My Skull' which will be touring from Autumn 2013.
“The pioneering Kindle Theatre”
Lyn Gardner, Guardian
www.kindletheatre.co.uk / facebook.com/KindleBirmingham / @KindleTheatre
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
A workshop about reconnaissance and devising process in making all kinds of play in response not just to a site but to a locality. Followed on Sunday by a public sharing of findings on Gateshead in the form of a pub quiz. @tassosstevens is a co-director and an artist frequently representing www.youhavefoundconey.net.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
Join Festival Director Kate Craddock for a lively lunchtime discussion with various artists who will be performing at GIFT.
Out of Her System explores girls' experiences of education in the UK over the generations.
Parallel to these narratives is the story of Malala Yousafzai, the 14 year old Pakistani activist who was shot in the head and neck by the Taliban for campaigning against the decision to deny girls the right to go to school.
This performance has been devised using verbatim theatre approaches, where women and girls’ real stories were recorded from interviews or documentary sources. These stories range from a six year old girl who always beats the boys in times tables tests to the ninety five year old woman who was forced to leave school at the age of twelve. We invite you to consider your own experience of education and the opportunities you may never have had without it. We researched views and experiences of girls and schooling to ask about the right to education, exploring liberation and the resistance of oppression.
AT13 is made up of students from the MA Applied Theatre programme at York St John University working in collaboration with Kay Hepplewhite. Out of Her System was initially created for young people in schools, to be performed alongside drama and discussion based exploratory workshops.
It’s 2006. Everything is amazing. I am the queen of fucking everything and so is my best friend. The city is our palace. But my palace sort of starts to crumble and fall apart and in 2013, now, it’s all over the place. The bricks and mortar were weak: weakened by idiocy, infidelity and ecstasy. Mine, and that of others. Watch the truth unfurl, the bedroom secrets become the everyday. Have a drink, have a dance, and let’s try and work out what the fuck is going on.
Seen in Soft Focus is about a love of the lively. It’s a blurry truth; loud, fun, and raw. It’s about London and Belfast and Berlin and everywhere and everyone. It is about people, not place. This is about self-development and self-destruction, and men trying to pick you up in sexual health clinics. It’s about being squashed into taxis at dawn. It plays on the intimacy of universal shared experiences. It’s massive and fun and sad.
Seen in Soft Focus was developed at Battersea Arts Centre, London. It’s a response to the present day in a big city. It’s about disappointment and growing older and the harsh truth hitting you in the face like a broken bottle. It’s about our parents, and the mistakes they’ve made and how they affect us. It’s about the phone calls you don’t want to receive or to make. It’s about shouting and beer and champagne and house music. It’s about eating together. It’s about having sex and resisting having sex and the morning after the night before.
From the beginning the place become a wired and at the same moment difficult journey to indentify. Am I in a theatre place? Are they acting? These are the first questions on which we’ve worked to rich a free and honest mood into the audience and between us. We’ll go then through discussions between actors, museum’s explanations, private moments of the actor’s life. A guide will stay with all as protector and explicator of the rules to go in this play and follow a first part in which will are presented the restrictions that a culture could put in a person to arrive at the dreams that all would say about change something of his country tradition just to live better. At the end three example of real life tell from the actors and shared with absolute honesty and going far from theatre language. The wine will stay at the centre of the piece all the time and will be a continuous war against it and at the same time the full desire to reach it in our life, the wine linked with many traditions as a vehicle to talk with ourselves, God or simply with the past of our ancestors.
The project is made up of two parts. The first involves short interviews with willing participants, and an installation for participants to write/ hang up (on gift tags) their favourite words, anecdotes or jokes.
The second is the bringing together of all the material in the form of a short, edited film of the interviews carried out. The participants will be filmed for a period of around 30 seconds, they will be asked to choose their favourite word and write it on a gift tag, they will then be asked why they chose that word, as well as being asked to share their favourite joke/quote/anecdote. The video sequences will then be edited together to create a video which will be shown in the café in the town hall at regular intervals on the last day of the festival, therefore people can watch the video then explore the Think Tank installation.
Throughout the festival, there will be a number of opportunities for the public/audience to write their favourite or inspirational word on a ‘Gift Tag’ and hang it on small Think Tank installations that will be placed across the various GIFT locations and venues involved, these will be available throughout the day and around performance times.
An opportunity for GIFT participants to get on their soapbox and ‘tell it like it is’
Take 2 minutes to say your piece to camera – prompted by a series of questions from CradShaw relating to Performance and Politics and Training.
Extracts of these recorded texts at GIFT will form the basis for a multiple manifesto which will be published in the Training Grounds section of Theatre Dance and Performance training: Special Issue 5.2 (Summer 2014): Training, Politics and Ideology
This exploratory workshop will playfully investigate making authentic connections with an audience through animating objects using impulse, breath and objects’ inherent movement qualities. Participants will have the opportunity to develop puppetry skills and consider the visual language of objects in the context of creating visual narrative, developing ‘puppet’ characters and building immersive theatrical worlds.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
The starting point of this training is the sense of touching. The touch of air, of earth, of objects, of ourselves and other people when combined with the focus of the eye, with breathing, and the orientation of the body means we are already creating ‘theatre’. Going through a progression of simple exercises, these workshops will explore the potential for basic body language towards the construction of theatrical play.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
A workshop for Gifted participants to explore and manifest their own current concerns and future hopes for themselves, their communities, their audiences and their world. What matters? What is important? What needs to be said? This workshop will enable participants to identify, develop, articulate and disseminate their personal and collective manifestos through the construction of a platform upon which audiences will see, hear and experience the raw and GIFTED Speech Acts 2013.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
“Solo” Performance
Third Angel’s Alexander Kelly leads a workshop exploring group strategies for making solo performance work – as rarely is solo work actually made alone. Using rule-based devising exercises, the workshop will draw upon autobiographical, story telling and research-led approaches to making solo performance work. The workshop will conclude with a short group showing of some of the material generated.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
This is a two part workshop, Saturday and Sunday morning. Participants will also be asked to carry out a short (30 minute) research task between sessions.
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
A performance-encounter investigating the journeys we take and the places we find along the way. We will travel by foot, metro, train and ferry. We will remember the old places, forgotten places and lost places. We will think about the places that call to us, haunt us and remind us of who we used to be. We will re-imagine and re-discover sites, homes, landscapes and buildings. Together, we will lay down our ghosts.
Jenny Lawson is collecting and exchanging journeys through the North East stretching across Hexham, South Shields, Whitley Bay and Durham. To be part of this unique, cultural performance archive, share a journey so a stranger can revisit a special place from your past, and perhaps embark on a donated journey to an unknown destination.
A live exhibition of dance theatre curated exclusively for GIFT; Vorführung, meaning demonstration in German, is a scrapbook of work created over the past three years.
The piece draws on work such as Living Postcards, a video project created in July 2012, residency at Live Theatre in 2010 and She stands alone in the forest…the music plays currently in development for 2013.
Vorführung is a mix of live performance, objects, images and video installation, bringing together a company of actors and dancers working together to push each others’ capabilities.
“I felt more human than I ever can remember feeling.” - actor on her experience in She stands…
“We start with nothing, just ourselves and the idea of making something. I come with very small ideas; perhaps ‘bits of things’ that I think are useful, photographs, questions. These become starting points for us. I ask the performers to create responses. These can lead to anything; movements, stories or performed images which eventually combine creating work where dancers can speak and actors can move, expressing themselves however they want.”
Join Festival Director Kate Craddock for a lively lunchtime discussion with various artists who will be performing at GIFT.
Imagine this performance is about my mother.
Imagine this performance is about me.
Imagine this performance is about love.
Imagine that sometimes the love is far away and sometimes as close at it can be.
Imagine.
Emma Berentsen (NL) graduated in 2012 with her documentary styled performance ‘Ma Mere n’est pas toujours Ma Mere.’ (My mother is not always my mother). In a personal document she takes her audience into a search for her mother and the borders of love. Her mom is manic- depressive and can’t be her mom always.
‘Being stubborn is very good characteristic. And you should keep that.’
The piece is a combination of movement and voice along with truthful and honest text that has been developed through the use of stimuli and generated by the group of artists. Set on a train, it revolves around five characters that have no choice but to communicate with one another due to a technical fault.
It explores the challenges people face in situations brought on by circumstance rather than choice. What happens when one person doesn’t want to talk but the other won’t stop?
The simple set of five chairs is used throughout the piece by the performers to visually create the stories that are being told- allowing a world of memories to be build around the performers and in front of the audience as the stories unfold on stage.
The acting is beautifully realistic and natural, containing moments of high comedy and times of highly emotive and tender text. This piece of contemporary theatre is a study of human behaviour and the relationships that people form when in unexpected circumstances. It is visually and verbally stimulating and accessible for all audiences.
On Regret, Longing and Other Matters Concerning Life and Love in the 21st Century is a performance dedicated to all the chances in life that have passed us by: from the things not said in the heat of an argument, the buses and trains we could have caught, to the lovers that got away, and the lovers that could have been but never were.
The performance addresses subjects such as the city and the urban experience and desire – human desires for things and for other people, the desires that we can never hope to attain, and the ones that we are ashamed to admit we harbour. Underlying this is an exploration of gender, of the relationship and between archetypes of male and female, and the reality of our bodies and the extent of their distance from/proximity to these archetypes.
Devised through the assemblage of autobiographical and pre-existing material, the performance is fast-paced and fragmentary, continually swinging between the comic and the tragic and making use of material ranging from personal ads and self-help books to verbatim Facebook dialogues. Using a performance language that incorporates imagery, movement, objects and text, we seek to expose the emotional core of these artefacts and the longing, hope, disappointment and frustration they contain.
“We step out of our solar system, into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship...” So says the message from the human race on the Voyager spacecraft. But is there, y'know, anyone out there? Alex really wanted to know so he went to speak to an astrophysicist to find out. This is what he learned: Stellar Wobble. Light Clocks. The Mirror Test. The Distance Ladder. And murderous dolphins.
Written and performed by Alexander Kelly, in collaboration with Dr Simon Goodwin, 600 People is a solo performance charting the way a morning’s conversation can change the way you understand the universe.
Alex is co-artistic director of Sheffield based, internationally acclaimed theatre company, Third Angel; the company makes a range of work connecting the territories of theatre, live art, installation, film, video, photography and digital & online media, which tours throughout Britain, mainland Europe and beyond. 600 People continues Third Angel’s collaborations with scientists. “Heavenly work” The Guardian
Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKelly. www.thirdangel.co.uk
Originally commissioned for Northern Elements, a development programme funded by Arts Council England and managed by ARC, Stockton Arts Centre.
And why John Cage? is a dramatic study on sound and meaning in a given speech. The power of the sound of words; sound as structure, as a travelling dynamic. Sensorial rather than meaningful speech. We don’t want to be meaningful; on the contrary, we want to be meaningless in order to penetrate the realms of the senses, of relationships, of perceptions and materialisations. The speech itself can be anything. What we say isn’t important, but how we say it, what musical and choreographic tools we use to break down the text and dive into the performance, insinuating and surfing on the waves of the imagination.
BREAK A LEG, SHAKE A LEG, BAKE A LEG, BAKE AN EGG, TAKE A LEG, PEG A LAKE, LEAP IN A LAKE, LEAP IN BED , LEAP AHEAD, HEAD FOR A BREAK, MAKE A MATE, TAKE A BITE, BITE A MATE, BITE MY FACE, MAKE A BREAK, TAKE A BREAK, TAKE A NAP!
Hello, Welcome, You look very nice. We’re Big Hits and we’re on a mission. You’ll learn SELF-IMPROVEMENT here with us tonight and you will COMPLETELY improve yourself. That way you can be better in the world. Are you ready? Because if you’re not you’re running out of TIME. We’re going to blast our hearts RIGHT OUT for you right here for you. How do you feel? Do you feel FREE? This one’s for you.
Big Hits rises up in the space between live art and theatre, relentlessly looking for a good time – and staring hard at censorship, propriety, and the violence that can erupt when noise is stifled. An Unruly Voice is at large, the music’s turned up high.
“super-smart…and a willingness to push its terms to an extra level…this is a show that shouts itself hoarse and shows us up as sell-outs in a scabrous society. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.” Matt Trueman, Culture Wars
“Funny, sexy, frightening, essential. I urge you to see it…a genuine groundbreaker.”
Mark Ravenhill
Credits:
Conceived and devised by the company
Director: Hester Chillingworth
Performers: Lucy McCormick, Jennifer Pick and Craig Hamblyn (collaborator)
www.getinthebackofthevan.com
GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN is a 2012/13 Artsadmin Associate Artist
Co-production partners: Big Hits is a production of Belluard Bollwerk International, made possible thanks to a contribution of the Canton of Fribourg to culture.
In co-production with PACT Zollverein (Essen), Bora Bora (Denmark) and
Colchester Arts Centre (UK). Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and by the Royal Victoria Hall Foundation.
Keep the GIFT atmosphere alive by heading down to The Blue Room at The Central for some late night music to get you moving.
In Spain, most bullfights start 'a las cinco de la tarde' - at five o'clock in the afternoon.
In 1934 the famous Spanish bull fighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was gored to death by a bull shortly after five o'clock in the afternoon at Plaza of Manzanares, La Mancha - His story was told by Federico Garcia Lorca in his epic poem "Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías"
"At five o'clock in the afternoon.
It was exactly five o'clock in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five o'clock in the afternoon.
A trail of lime ready prepared
at five o'clock in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone."
In Gateshead at five o'clock in the afternoon on May 4th 2013 Theatre director Alan Lyddiard will create a one off event at Gateshead Bus & Metro Interchange especially commissioned by GIFT - It will be beautiful and tender but it won't last long
The two events are somehow connected
Ruach* (*pronounced ROO-ACH with ACH as in ACHTUNG (except not exactly)
Join Brian for an interactive dance lesson that tours the highs and lows childhood religiosity. Using his extensive experience as a certified Israeli folk dance instructor and camp counsellor, Brian will lead you in a celebration of Ruach (meaning spirit), but be warned he may have you questioning your faith. Oh! And be prepared to dance. If you don't, Brian will probably think you're anti-Semitic.
Developed with support from Arts Council England.
Petrification tells the story of two brothers, Simon and Sean. At 11 years old Simon got into the local private school on a scholarship and Sean got kissed by the prettiest girl in their primary school. Sean basked in the attention of hoards of girls at the local comp, Simon lavished all his on things that died hundreds of years ago, his love of fossils replacing any human contact. Now they are both approaching 30, Simon is a sophisticated academic living in London and is only reluctantly up in Gateshead for their granddad’s birthday. Sean is still living in Gateshead, working for the same ship builders their dad and their granddad did. Simon thinks that Sean’s life has fossilized, into the exact same shape as what he considers an unchanging city, Sean thinks Simon is a ponce from London who would do well to keep his mouth shut if he doesn’t want to get a kicking. There isn’t really much to bond the two together, apart from a long since petrified ritual around getting smashed, so they have come out tonight to do just that.
However, there is a third person at the table invited by Sean, whose presence slowly breaks the ritual up, and reveals how the relationship between the two will have to change, and how Gateshead already has.
A ten minute extract from Auricular, a dance performance commissioned by Dance City and created by Surface Area Dance Theatre with Newcastle music collective, :zoviet*france:, that will be performed this summer at BALTIC 39.
A Pillow Over Your Ears is a solo by Nicole Vivien Watson inspired by British Sign Language and the ability of facial expressions to communicate emotions to people everywhere. Made with deaf and hearing audiences in mind, A Pillow Over Your Ears portrays the dancer’s emotions and experiences through movement.
Three dancers worked with film makers to translate their own reactions to movies into a new film work, and subsequently into the choreography of this piece.
Wire magazine called Surface Area’s 2011 site specific show, Reparation, “… intensely considered work… compelling”. Surface Area Dance Theatre work internationally and with artists across genres, particularly with electronic music and film and in New York City and Tokyo; Nicole is inspired by art and emotion and having first trained at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, her practice is now heavily informed by butoh and time spent in Japan.
I walk slowly
Because I come from far away
I walk slowly
Because I came from far away
I walk slowly
Because I am basha posh,
A girl who used to be a boy
DANCE PLAY
Is a play about movement, life and immigration. The play tells the story of a girl who comes from Afghanistan to Germany, passing through Iran, Turkey and Greece. She walks slowly, because she comes from far away. And she has to run all the time. When she is not running, she dances. She dances with movement, she dances with life. To dance is her life.
The performance unfolds as a poem, in which she uses a pair of Nike shoes to tell the story of her relationship with her man, the movement that she follows all through the journey, but also the hope. Nike is the name of the God of fortune in Greece. The fortune that we no longer have in Europe, but that keeps attracting immigrants from all over the world. They have the hope of Nike, the hope of capitalism. And they run all the time.
Dance play is performed in English, with some parts in German, and tries to establish a connection between male/female, English/German as two identities that derive from each other.
Using a mixed media approach to urban social analysis, Platform 1 reflects through its site specific ethos to revealing ironies and absurdities particular to Gateshead and developed through a week’s engagements with varied players in the urban culture scene, these engagements being planned situation like performative conversations.
Supported by Swallows Foundation UK
THE FURIES smashes together rock, metal and soul songs with text and poetry to drastically retell the Greek tragedy of Clytemnestra.
Told through the eyes of Clytemnestra's band of 'Furies', this is the ultimate tale of envy, rage and revenge. The band is fronted by three very different women; Vivienne Vengence (curvaceous and operatic), Alexa Envy (a luscious snakelike blond), and Bobbi Rage (an androgynous Bowie-esque creature with a deep voice).
The Furies is a theatrical gig by Kindle Theatre. This show hits you in the gut; it is loud, beautiful, unforgiving and passionate. The music is all original and the effect is a knowingly dramatic, liberating and uninhibited theatrical event for anyone who loves to let it all out.
www.kindletheatre.co.uk | @KindleTheatre | KindleBirmingham
Suitable for ages 14+
This is a standing show
Commissioned by mac Birmingham. From an idea developed at China Plate’s The Darkroom.
Supported by Arts Council England
We are this fair town, Gateshead, the North East. Our journeys through it give it movement and life, each part of it is given meaning because we inhabit it. Our relationships and interactions with people around us are its heart, its emotions: multifaceted and fleeting. The connections made between each of us every day give its streets, churches, parks and cafes significance.
WANDERLUST is a solitary walk and an audio video installation
Consider how you fit into the life of Gateshead by taking an invigorating walk through its streets while listening to specially commissioned audio plays that directly respond to a sense of journeying, place and wanderlust.
Follow your walk with a poetic and visual installation that, using fragments of the audio plays, touches on themes that apply to a wide range of people; the experience of a solitary journey and the emotions involved with walking.
WANDERLUST offers a multi platform project that challenges us to spend time alone, engage with Gateshead and find our own sense of belonging within it.
While You Wait is a series of podcasts designed to surprise, delight and intrigue you while you wait created by artists in collaboration with academics for King’s College London.
Installed in bespoke listening stations, While You Wait, features artists Paul Clark, Victoria Melody, Chris Fittock and Stefan Kaeg Funded by Arts Council England and a Wellcome Trust Award.
The starting point of this training is the sense of touching. The touch of air, of earth, of objects, of ourselves and other people when combined with the focus of the eye, with breathing, and the orientation of the body means we are already creating ‘theatre’. Going through a progression of simple exercises, these workshops will explore the potential for basic body language towards the construction of theatrical play.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
A workshop for Gifted participants to explore and manifest their own current concerns and future hopes for themselves, their communities, their audiences and their world. What matters? What is important? What needs to be said? This workshop will enable participants to identify, develop, articulate and disseminate their personal and collective manifestos through the construction of a platform upon which audiences will see, hear and experience the raw and GIFTED Speech Acts 2013.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
“Solo” Performance
Third Angel’s Alexander Kelly leads a workshop exploring group strategies for making solo performance work – as rarely is solo work actually made alone. Using rule-based devising exercises, the workshop will draw upon autobiographical, story telling and research-led approaches to making solo performance work. The workshop will conclude with a short group showing of some of the material generated.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
This is a two part workshop, Saturday and Sunday morning. Participants will also be asked to carry out a short (30 minute) research task between sessions.
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
Lorne Campbell, the new Artistic Director of Northern Stage will lead a workshop examining some key areas of his practice in relation to audience interactive work. Through his work with Greyscale Lorne has created a number of interactive pieces working closely with Writers, Actors, Designers and Audiences to create structured yet unpredictable theatrical experiences. This workshop will look at how writers, actors, directors and designers can create forms of work that directly interact with an audience. We will look at a range of existing texts and approaches to existing with an audience in a structured and rehearsed while unpredictable aesthetic relationship.
Please note, workshops have limited availability. In order to participate in any of the workshops, please sign up by emailing info@giftfestival.co.uk and state which workshop(s) you want to book for and quote your reference purchase number from when you bought your festival pass
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
I like to write to Members of Parliament. I like to write to them because through this I exercise my democratic muscle, muscle that can sometimes get wasted away despairing and complaining about the things that are happening around me. I like to write to them because it reminds me, and them, that elected persons are responsible to the people who live here and not the other way around.
This is a kind of dance, a choreography that re-routes powers with new actions. It’s a movement in and of itself, and it produces new waves of motion. It’s a dance that I could try alone, but that I’d rather do with others. You are invited to join me. I will be waiting, ready to talk about what is important to us, and ready to make moves by writing to those who might be choreographing our worlds in ways we want to rethink.
An opportunity for workshop participants to share some of the work they have been doing in the workshops in front of an audience.
Spanning a lifetime of Kate Bush, two performers explore their own mortality in three parts. Part 1 is childhood: embarrassment, mothers and wild dance moves. Part 2 is an adulthood we are still trying to come to terms with: immediate pleasures, the ridiculous and the responsibility that comes with it. Part 3 is old age, the furthest from our reach: reflection, acceptance and celebration. Homage en Trois explores three aspects of life in three parts & spaces, at three different times and with varying degrees of intimacy. It involves a sparkly playsuit, a ridiculous wig, a mouthful of fresh parsley & a pair of fur coats. We want you to be embarrassed by us, we want you to drink sparkling wine with us, join us for a bite to eat. We would love for you to be warmed by our stories & pockets full of sweets. We invite you to pay homage, if only temporarily, to life and to the ever immortal and differing sounds of Kate Bush.
‘I’ve been dreaming of this since I was a boy’ is a solo performance, both personal and political, that takes place within a circle of chairs.
Deeply rooted in the three months I spent living and volunteering at Occupy St Paul’s in London, the performance is a way for me to begin to answer the questions I found myself asking about activism, protest and our current political situation.
Whilst at Occupy I met some of the most interesting, kind and intelligent people I have ever met, this performance is about those people and their stories. It is also about the importance of community, the role of activism and my growing up as a policeman’s daughter.
A performance that asks more questions than it answers, this piece is very honest and direct and whilst totally bound up in politics, it doesn’t try to preach. It will tell you about a side of Occupy you don’t often read about in the press, and I will look you in the eye and tell you about experiences that made me laugh and experiences that made me cry.
Ruach* (*pronounced ROO-ACH with ACH as in ACHTUNG (except not exactly)
Join Brian for an interactive dance lesson that tours the highs and lows childhood religiosity. Using his extensive experience as a certified Israeli folk dance instructor and camp counsellor, Brian will lead you in a celebration of Ruach (meaning spirit), but be warned he may have you questioning your faith. Oh! And be prepared to dance. If you don't, Brian will probably think you're anti-Semitic.
Developed with support from Arts Council England.
Firm Drip is a dance solo exploring movement in stillness and stillness in movement.
The performer presents the body as a fluid statue and as collapsing, transformable architecture. She navigates a play through the ranges and terrain in between and on the edges of these poles. She moves into and around structures that harness feminine presence and then abstract form and finds points where physical ideas collide, overlap and exist at the same time.
Join Bandicoot as they reveal the short film they have been creating over the festival period starring...you!
What would you do if you were asked to be a father in an email? If your Dad thought it was dance school that turned you gay? If you'd never seen the man behind the mask? A daring leap across oceans and decades, led by three performers whose far-away fathers might just make an appearance.
'Our Fathers' takes inspiration from stand-up comedy, contemporary dance, video installation and The Sopranos to create a moving, unforgiving tribute to fathers everywhere who tried to do their best.
Babakas is an international theatre group based in Birmingham, UK. They combine experimentation with entertainment and combine multiple languages to explore the universal.
Commissioned by China Plate, mac birmingham, Warwick Arts Centre and Warwick Centre for the History of Medicine. Supported by Arts Council England and Kinitiras Studio, Athens.
T.Hanks is about those people that we regard above all others.
Those people who,
Touch us
Educate us
And bring us to a new realisation of truth and beauty.
They are the most important people in the whole world.
They are…
Movie Stars.
This dance/performance work sees the collision of the differing practices of Oliver Bray and Rachel Krische.
It is a performance about experts.
It is a performance about beautiful dreams and making a Splash.
It is a performance about the most important thing of all…
…a charity single.
Thank you, thank you all so much.
God Bless The Movie
T.Hanks was first performed at the B-Motion festival in Bassano, Italy.
Using a mixed media approach to urban social analysis, Platform 1 reflects through its site specific ethos to revealing ironies and absurdities particular to Gateshead and developed through a week’s engagements with varied players in the urban culture scene, these engagements being planned situation like performative conversations.
Supported by Swallows Foundation UK