Hello everyone!
It’s really cold and windy in Manchester so it’s very hard to find any motivation to do anything except hide under blankets.
I’m slowly moving house at the moment and applying for a few grants so I may not do any BIG BLOGS alongside the listings. I do have some exciting etudes planned for the next few weeks so keep an eye out for them.
In the meantime, enjoy this weeks selections!
From Thursday 18th Feb
10 euros
The MAC stage at Mercat de les Flors becomes a "plató" and performing stage for artists and audiences to build together an artistic apparatus as they produce a peculiar television show. An experimental space, a research on the television language in relation to performing arts, a long family gathering or wild long take on the hybridization of formats and disciplines in and out of sight.
From 19th Feb
Pay What You Choose
Each year, BE FESTIVAL packages up their favourite shows from their international festival and sends them on a tour of the UK. But 2020 was different. The global pandemic meant theatres across Europe were closed so we pivoted and curated our first online Be at HOME FESTIVAL. This is your opportunity to experience two live one-to-one and experiential online performances which blur the boundaries between isolation and engagement.
Scored in Silence by Chisato Minamimura
Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st Feb
Pay What You Can
CONTENT WARNING : Depicitions of war
Using a unique blend of cutting-edge technology and choreography, Scored in Silence unpacks the hidden perspectives of Deaf people from the handful who survived the atomic bomb atrocity in Japan 1945.
On 6 August 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Three days later a second was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities were destroyed, and thousands were killed instantly. More than 317,000 people were killed directly or indirectly by the bomb’s effects. Based on Minamimura’s original research, Scored in Silence captures the true accounts of those who lived through and survived this horrendous catastrophe.
Online now
Free
CONTENT WARNING : Police Brutality, Racisim, Violence
The Shed commissioned Kamau Ware (Black Gotham Experience) to create digital audio and video tours titled Fighting Dark in dialogue with the investigation of the legacy of racial violence in the United States in the exhibition Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water. (The video will be released in early 2021.) The tours focus on Manhattan and Brooklyn’s 19th-century racial history and connect to Pindell’s investigation of touch points in that same, long history. Tracing back 100 years from the May 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, explored by Pindell in the exhibition’s Shed-commissioned film, Ware’s tours draw a line between that moment in the civil rights movement and New York City’s 1863 race riots. These riots have often been explained as a consequence of the Civil War draft, an alibi that obscures the racial violence that white New Yorkers directed at their Black neighbors during the unrest.
Within this historiography, Fighting Dark speaks to a dark side of American history as well as the dark-skinned people who have been impacted by it, especially the Black New Yorkers who fled in the dark of night during the 1863 riots and those who enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War in what was called the “Colored Troops 20th Infantry” from New York City. The tours ultimately provide a platform to draw out lessons on how Black people find resilience in the face of racial violence. Ware presents an audio and a video tour that probe this history in areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn: the audio version invites immersive, self-guided and site-specific engagements with the city, and the video version offers the chance to experience the same from wherever you call home—from Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, to anywhere in the world.
Garbage In, Garbage Out: A solo of half truths by Shelley Owen & Josh Slater
Thursday 18th Feb
Free
An online performance sharing and Q&A with Shelley Owen & Josh Slater
Performance in the Age of Precarity: Book Launch
Thursday 18th Feb
Free
To coincide with the publication of their first anthology of essays on contemporary performance, Andy Field and Maddy Costa bring together a collection of the artists they write about in the book to talk about performances they themselves have seen and loved in the past decade.
Featuring Alexandrina Hemsley, Augusto Corrieri, Ellice Stevens (Breach Theatre), Jemima Yong, Rachel Mars, Rachel Porter (Figs in Wigs), Sheila Ghelani and Tim Crouch.
This event will be not just a book launch but a celebration of the effect live performance has on us, and continues to have, even when theatres are closed.
Like the past two weeks, if you have enjoyed etude then I’d love it if you donated some of your spare cash to the wonderful 0161 Community who are providing meals for families throughout Greater Manchester. My partner Akaibi and her friends Kate and Katie have organised a raffle to raise funds. There are loads of extra brilliant prizes to be won! You can pick up a raffle ticket for £5 or two for £9 to win a prize bundle worth up to £100!
To get your raffle ticket please visit Local Hotel Parking
Thanks again for subscribing and taking the time to read through.
I’ve been getting loads of emails from readers and it really brightens my mood reading about how much you’re enjoying etude.
Please do share with your friends. We have 161 subscribers and it’d be great to get to 200 before the end of the month!
Hope you have a lovely week and talk soon!
Josh x