Hey everyone.
How are you? Hope you’re doing well.
This month hasn’t been to great for me. I’m been ill pretty much all this month with only a few days I’ve been okay. It’s a thing which will probably stick with me forever now and I think my mind is processing that. I’ve been slow with etude over the padt few months and I think my body being how it is has caused this slowness but that’s okay. It’s just a weird adjusting and acceptence process I’m going through as it’s something I’ve never had to deal with before. I’m okay though, don’t worry about me. I just wanted to share, as an act of reassurance that I’m still doing etude things. But just a bit slower.
Being ill has also made me loose my apetite for theatre a bit. My finger isn’t on the pulse as much at the moment becuase I’m in recovery mode. If I’ve missed anything major then I’ve either just flat out missed it or just happily ignored it. A blissful ignorance of something you enjoy can be nice at times as I know returning to somehting you love is a great feeling.
There’s some cool stuff in this weeks etude that offer a nice mixture of things and i hope you find something you enjoy.
free
available now
“Solastalgia” is a neologism originating from consolation (sōlācium, solace) and -algia (pain, sorrow, grief) with echoes of the word “nostalgia”. According to Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia is “…a form of homesickness
one gets when one is still at home.” The word describes the melancholic feeling of people whose environment changes so much due to global warming, that it is hardly recognizable as home.
In the installation SOLASTALGIA, visitors encounter a desert-like landscape of calcium carbonate, which provides fertile ground for associations of a post-apocalyptic earth or a lunar landscape. Here SOLASTALGIA turns into a game: “Welcome to the end of your world”. A simulation in which three avatars act out the farewell to the world as we humans know it – and imagine a world after human beings. Game supervisor “Nature” guides them through various levels, from resistance to acceptance, always ranging between the hope of still being able to do something and the temptation to indulge in a cheerfully nihilistic “Let’s enjoy our endings together”. Searching for insights, exit strategies and comforting narratives, the three avatars finally face the metamorphosis. The audience is invited to observe.
The Wind Catcher by Wenjing Liu
free
available now
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
— Ecclesiastes 1:14
The Wind Catcher is a sound performance that interprets the absurdity of human’s efforts to find meanings in seemingly insignificant matters through defining goals, setting rules and executing tasks. It asks that what really matters to us if everything we do is just a chasing after the wind. While using wind as a metaphor, it explores the acoustic affordance of air movement through the intervention of found objects and audio feedbacks.
Menopausal Gentleman by Peggy Shaw
free
available now
Menopausal Gentleman is Peggy Shaw’s bluesy, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness lounge act about a butch lesbian going through “the change.” Shaw riffs on the hormonal effects of menopause complete with hot flashes, cold sweats, humor and tears. She is a tough-speaking film-noir soul performed in Shaw's trademark drag patois (a self-conscious and artificially low New Yorkese), or to put it simply: a tough guy in a swell suit!
Peggy thought of the name of the performance when she was in a bar with some students and wrote the title on a bar napkin. I always believed that like shows, titles needed a cadence. With Menopausal Gentleman, she became more confident as a solo performer and incorporated more of the Split Britches methods of irony and appropriation with her own performance style. Talking about what she was going through and translating it to a poetic framework helped Peggy work through personal struggles. She embraced her suit wearing masculinity and worked on the ways her physicality could be poetic with choreographer Stormy Brandenburger and director Rebecca Taichman.
Born 1000 Times by Liliana Padilla
free
available now
What has grown, died, and transformed in my community? How do we share wisdom and grief?
Playwright & NYTW Artistic Instigator Liliana Padilla brings us into conversations with some of their dearest friends. Born 1000 Times is woven with visual artist Mojdeh Rezaeipour into a collage of questions and space that we can hold in our hands to mark and ask where we are.
Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children) by Stanley Schtinter
free
available now
Track list: Manifesto of Equals by Sylvain Maréchal (Girl, 9, Brent) / Realist Manifesto by Gustave Courbet (Boy, 9, West Midlands) / The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (Girl, 10, Salford)
"Schtinter runs with wolves." (Sukhdev Sandhu)
Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children) ran from May 2021 until May 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery in London, with a monthly instalment on Montez Press Radio. Schtinter recently premiered his next project The Lock-in at the Int'l Short Film Festival Oberhausen, which tours the 'real' pubs of London's East End throughout June 2022, and will be installed at the Barbican Centre in July 2022.
I also just wanted to share this picture of Godzilla and Mothra drew by Michael DeForge becuase I really like it. May make it my new phone background
That’s all from me this week.
Talk to you soon
Josh x