New scratch performance- ‘Donald, oh Donald, how do I love thee.’

I will be performing a small scratch performance called ‘Donald, oh Donald, how do I love thee’ at the Battersea Arts Centre on Friday the 14th October. I will be performing at some point after 9 pm. Please book a ticket for the 9 pm slot if you are interested in coming along. It is pay what you can but they suggest a donation of £5.00.  

‘Donald, oh Donald. How do I love thee’ is one of a series of vignettes which, when finished, will make up a performance called par excellence.

par excellence takes its starting point from the following text by Michel Foucault: ‘the ship is a piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean(….)The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. ’

‘Donald, oh Donald, How do I love thee’ will be based around the life of Donald Crowhurst, an inexperienced English sailor who faced difficulties while taking part in a round the world boat race and so faked his position so that it would appear to the outside world that he was winning when in actual fact he had never left the Atlantic Ocean. His boat was later found empty and Crowhurst is suspected to have committed suicide as he fell deeper into insanity and succumbed to time madness.

For more information please see the attached flyer from BAC. You can also email me if you have any questions. 

#dawnchorus

I am currently involved in an online writing project. Please sign up or log into Twitter to view/ read this project on Monday the 16th October. More information below.

#dawnchorus  - tweeting the dawn – will be performed at dawn on Sunday 16th October 2011 (approximately 5:35am to 8am) on Twitter.  Participating writers are: Amber Massie-Bloomfield, Joanna Brown,Tiffany Charrington, Eddy Dreadnought, Sally Labern, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson and Natasha Vicars.  #dawnchorus is conceived by Natasha Vicars and developed in collaboration with Mary Paterson and the writers, as part of the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY6 programme.  For more information, please email natashavicars@gmail.com, or see us on Twitter. 

Scratch Performance of par excellence – 24th June

I will be performing a scratch of my new show par excellence on June 24th at Emerge, Leeds. For details see here.

 Friday 24th June 20.00-23.00

 Seven Arts                            

 31(a) Harrogate Rd                                                                                                                            Chapel Allerton                                                                                                                                    Leeds                                                                                                                                                      LS7 3PD

£3.00 on the door

4 theatre makers share their work in its early stages of development:

Whiteface Theatre (Gemma Head) – Terminal
Emma Decent – Beyond dreams of Aberystwyth
Pinch Dance Theatre (Isabelle Cressy) – Flog
Joanna Brown – par excellence

par excellence takes its starting point from the following text by Michel Foucault:

‘the ship is a piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean(….)The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. ’

Using myself, a cardboard boat and some bubbles I take Foucault’s text to its literal extreme and try to create the placeless place of the ship in order to form a collective dream with my audience thus bringing issues of liveness and eventfulness into play and questions of what it means to be placed and displaced in society today.

I am interested in the trip to something other to come back to the self and the romantic cliché of the boat , the yearly appearance of nautical fashion, the Sunday afternoon boat ride in the park with a lover, the boat as escapism and discovery contrasted with the harsh realities of the modern day sailor, the wonder of the ocean’s vista contrasted with the uncertainty of a no-man’s land and Foucault’s place to dream contrasted with Marco Polo’s statement that ‘the man who goes to sea is a man in despair’.

New Performance Date

I will be performing a scratch of my new show par excellence on June 24th at Emerge, Leeds. For details see here.

There is more information on par excellence on this website.

New performances dates.

I have just found out that I will be performing ‘we will mend on the highways’ on the 13th of May as part of JUNK in Liverpool.

I will also be showing a scratch of my new work- working title par excellence as part of the Emerge Festival Scratch night in Leeds on the 24th June. See http://emergeleeds.co.uk/ for more details.

I will post some more information about my new piece soon.

Call out for work- Edinburgh based artists

I am currently organising a performance event on behalf of the Edinburgh Peer Group. Please find the call-out below. I will post more information about the event once the line-up has been decided.

CALL OUT FOR WORK: You are invited to submit a piece of creative work in any art form to be shown/displayed/performed at an evening event at ‘Out of the Blue’ in Edinburgh on the 7th May 2011. The aim of the evening is to share high-quality experimental work which may provoke discussion and collaboration between artists. The event will be a good opportunity to try something new as well as to revive old pieces of work. This event is being hosted by the Edinburgh Peer Group – a group which was set up to facilitate relations between artists of all disciplines living and working in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Peer Group is funded by New Work Network. Please note this call out is specifically for Edinburgh based artists. Both solo and collaborative work is welcome. Some expenses will be covered. Please send a proposal detailing the following: Contact details including email and mobile number Concept and description of the work you are proposing to show – 500 words max Technical Requirements Biography – 300 words max Duration of work (where applicable)- Time based pieces (with the exception of durational work) should be approximately 10-30 minutes. Please also feel free to send documentation to support your application. This can be in any format. Please send proposals by email to edinburghpeergroup@gmail.com. You can also email me if you have any questions. Deadline for entries is Monday March the 28th at 6:00 pm. Thankyou, Joanna, on behalf of Edinburgh Peer Group

 

 

we will mend on the highways – performance in Brighton

I will be performing a 20 minute version of my show ‘we will mend on the highways’ at The Supper Club in Brighton on Saturday the 26th February 2011.

Basing my performance around the question ‘how do you go about finding the thing the nature of which is unknown to you?’ I demonstrate a pilgrimage for the audience, tell tales of navigation, let a whale guide me through the performance, talk of a man who walked around the world whilst in prison, explain how to measure the depth of the sea, walk the length of the whale and send a postcard from where the bottom of its right fin meets its body, stand still, send a small toy steam boat on its way, travel with a Japanese business man to his crying club, re-enact a shipwreck which took place many years before and talk of hope and mending.

With ‘we will mend on the highways’ I am attempting to explore the space in-between the beginning and the end, to find sense and completion within the unfinished journey. This performance is an exploration of what we do not know or rather ‘what we do not know we know’, of effort, attainment and perspective and our attempts to take root and place ourselves in the world around us.

SUPPER CLUB
Date: Sat 26th February
Doors: 7.30pm
Tickets: £8 (£6 concessions)

Please visit http://www.thebasement.uk.com/whatson.html for more details.