Heya!
How are you all?
I’ve been very slowly thinking about what etude should be over the months and I’m wondering what you all think? I want to address what is missing in theatre discourse and how can it engage audiences on a local and international level. Should etude include writing about some of the shows that have been metioned? Reviews of old archive shows recontextualised for modern audiences? I also thought how could we engage in different mediums to enable different forms of ciritisim. What would a twitch stream at the end of each week refelcting on all the shows that were on the previous weeks etude? Or maybe something similar that the No Proscenium discord group does every week and host a live chat between reivewers and audience members about work presented during the week?
This is something I’ll be setting up in the new year but I’d love to hear your thoughts about what etude could be in the future.
You can respond to this email with your thoughts!
Below are this weeks selections
A Place to Sit by Tara Fatehi Irani
free
streaming now
I thought I had taken videos when I crossed the border, but when I look back at them there’s nothing, They’re barely a few seconds long. I was so scared. There’s nothing.’
a place to sit, is a performative reflection on borderless thinking in places where geo-political borders are fiercely observed, where the word border brings forward fears and traumas and the word borderless seems hard to define, like an evaporating dream.
For a place to sit, Tara Fatehi Irani has conversations with three women from Afghanistan who have been displaced by ongoing wars. They talk about the smells and colours of border, the lunch they had the day before, their experiences of border crossing, images flashing in their mind, things they’ve heard, things they’ve seen, learning patience in the peak of fear and anticipation, waiting for flights to leave Kabul, waiting for passports to be renewed, poetry writing and the beauty of Mazar-e Sharif.
As part of Performing Borders
£6
Wednesday 3rd November
Will Jackson has accidentally stolen 300-second-class stamps from the post office. But he's making them count. He's going to write letters. From reconnecting with old friends and ex-boyfriends to run-ins with the marketing department at John Lewis, stamp collecting has never looked so sexy...
Based on real-life correspondences; storytelling and lipsync cabaret collide in this queer coming-of-age comedy about the complications of 21st-century communication
As part of Homotopia
free
archive
A vast two-screen film piece entitled Momentum (2010). Here, the memory of that dance performance from her childhood is transformed into something more playful and questioning. Almost seven minutes long, the performance is mirrored on the screens and begins before the actual dancing, with the dancers standing still. Everyone has gold skin and hair as well as a gold costume, so the film seems both mundane – the dancers wait, pirouette, stand still, look bored – and yet imbued with a Hollywood musical unrealness. Again, there is an odd flatness to proceedings, as if the memory of her initial disappointment is the key emotional determinant here.
I found myself studying faces and gestures – that word again – as I waited for a moment of revelation that never quite materialised. Instead, the dancers twirl and stop, twirl and stop, some more graceful than others, some utterly absorbed, some less so. What you are seeing is the mechanics of performance: the waiting, the doing, the redoing, all made new by an artist's – rather than an artistic director's – wilfully undramatic choreography.
The Sex Congress by Bubblegum Club
€5
Monday 1st November
For this year’s SPIELART Theaterfestival the art collective Bubblegum Club – founded 2015 in Johannesburg – bring you an online meta-performance held together at its narrative nucleus by a matrix of subversive questioning. A collaborative performance rooted at the intersections of Sex Work, the politics of subjective self-governance and controlling institutions of the nation state. In our contemporary age of hyper-connectivity, the collective taps into the fabricated connecting space of the internet to open the doors to the virtual red light district of South African Sex Workers. “We question and create, with a wink and critically playful smirk, at the intersection of art and commerce”, THE SEX CONGRESS existing as the imagined space the performance unfolds within. What do the lived social realities of individuals working in erotic economies in South Africa look like? What wishes, desires and perspectives for the future do South African Sex Workers have and are they all the same?
Content Warning - mentions of: sexual assault, physical violence, explicit sexual content
2nd-5th November
free
Latvian Theatre Showcase presents a selection of performances made in Latvia. LiVe invites international professionals to engage with digital presentations, performances, pitches, talks and a selection of works from Riga theaters.
The 2021 LiVe: Latvian Theatre Showcase is organized by the New Theatre Institute of Latvia (NTIL) in cooperation with the Latvian Theatre Labour Association (LTDS), the Latvian branch of the International Association of Theatre Critics (AICT/IACT) and Latvian theatres, companies and individual artists.
The Showcase and the digital platform LiVe are financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia and the target programme “KultūrELPA” of the State Culture Capital Foundation.
There’s lots of shows to see here but to highlight one in particular that I think looks pretty cool…based purely off image alone
2nd November
Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov worked on the poem Demon throughout all his short life. It is considered a masterpiece of European Romantic poetry. It is a story about a fallen angel who is forced to spend his existence in hatred and loneliness until he spies the beautiful Tamara and falls in love with her. Neither can she resist his charm.
The work is created by director Viesturs Meikšāns has worked in close collaboration with set designer Monika Pormale and jazz trio Auziņš – Čudars – Arutyunyan, which perform live music by composer Matīss Čudars. The elements of acting, poetry, visuals and music in the performance merge in a close connection, looking for an answer to the question “What is a demon?” here and today. Performance has received the Liepāja Culture Award 2020.
Thanks for reading. I think this week is a really solid selection of work so please do catch one of the shows.
We’re getting closer and closer to 250 subscribers so please do share and tell your mates to sign up!
See you next week
Josh xx