Hey everyone!
How are you? Hope you have a lovely week a head of you.
This week I was back in the part time job working 6 days on the bounce. Honestly? Knackered.
I’ve been wanting to talk about how I have been feeling over the past few weeks but I’ve deleted it each time. I’ve had a really tough month and it’s just really tired me out. I’ve not had the energy to watch any theatre in a while which means I’ve just missed out on so much. Everything feels a bit loose and weird at the moment. The only thing thats provided a nice constant is etude. Every sunday I spend a few hours putting it together and learning more and more about theatre around the world. It’s so exciting seeing how much stuff there is. I love it. It gives me a few hours to sit and reflect on the scene and industry and where I sit in it. It gives me a moment and thats what I desperatly need each week. So I thank you for all reading it becuase it means a lot to me.
Below is this weeks selections. Hope you find something you love.
From 28th May
Free
Parallel to our own world is a delicate, welcoming and wild one, called Alongame. Previously out of reach, a series of newly discovered rituals has made it possible to cross the divide between worlds, and explore Alongame.
Alongame is a free world-building game for a community of remote players. Over the course of a month (beginning 28th May), weekly game releases will invite players to add to the world through role-play and storytelling, whilst weekly streams will give players a chance to connect as more discoveries about the world are shared. Players create the world in tandem with each other with the stories, characters and places they create not just shaping each others' play, but even the following games that are released.
Alongame offers an interactive storytelling experience that players can enjoy remotely at their own pace, whilst feeling connected to a wider community.
Being Pink Ain’t Easy by Joana Tischkau
From 26th May
€5/€10
Pink people wanna know if other pink people like hip-hop
how can it still be hip-hop?
That’s like asking, if Black people like
Dirty Harry
is he still Clint Eastwood? (Greg Tate)
Gangstas, pimps and hoes: The rap world in the US is drowning in images of excessive masculinity. When Black artists such as Cam’ron and Kanye West set off a fashion trend of pink plush, fur and velour in the early 2000s, they proved that even Barbie’s favorite color cannot harm the image of heterosexual masculinity. With the performance Being Pink Ain’t Easy, the choreographer Joana Tischkau makes the fragility of social constructs such as race and gender visible and poses a question to what extent are the bodies of the “others” used to reinforce the structural power of white cis masculinity?
Presented as part of Performing Arts Festival Berlin
This is Not a Solo Dance by 云云 Yun Collective
From 28th May
£2.50
The meaning of a decent woman is set by this patriarchic society. For generations, women have been expected to dance in the same choreography; however, underground, many of us fight to break the pattern and to change the design.
This performative drawing solo is inspired by Chinese calligraphy.
'女', the Chinese word for woman, contains three strokes. It has to be written in the set order, as women are expected to perform in certain patterns.
The performer embodied the writing and transformed it into dancing. Through the repetitive movements, she undergoes a negotiation between the outside world and herself.
Presented as part of Brighton Fringe
Mise-en-Crise by Marikiscrycrycry
Available now
Free
Mise-en-Crise is a film that considers choreography as both the site and the scenography of hope, performatively carved from crisis and rebellion. Playing with the theatrical concept mise-en-scène, this work uses dance as a material tool and texture for elemental seduction and strategic unruliness.
From night to sunrise to day to night, Mise-en-Crise relies upon a documentary-style framework to follow and visiblise the formal construction of atmosphere and persona. By materialising an aesthetics that is admittedly not here, unknown, joyous, flamboyant, gestural, defiant and even ritualistic, the work attempts to create conditional desires for an unspoken and untold freedom and fantasy for the marginalised subject. Dancing on top of the vortex of a crafted, apocalyptic visual and subtextural narrative that doesn’t give into its own fatalism, yet ruminates on the question, ‘And what to be thrown into crisis?’ We create the possibility of hope from nothing
Scores that Shaped our Friendship by and with Lucy Wilke and Paweł Duduś with music by Kim Twiddle
24th May
Free
Actor and singer Lucy Wilke was born with spinal muscular atrophy. There would be no reason to mention this in any other context, but it is in fact the point of departure for this production, “SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP” from Munich. Together with dancer Paweł Duduś, Wilke developed this intimate, seemingly utopian portrait of a friendship that does away with all boundaries. In seven short chapters and accompanied with live interpreted and mixed music by e-composer Kim Twiddle, the two of them explore their bodies and their dreams through symbiotic movements, attentive speaking and synaesthetic choreography. Playfully and without any moralistic attitude of superiority, they overcome society’s norms and insecurities towards people who appear to be different from the majority.
Bit of a change this week. If anyoen wants to support me and etude then you can chuck a couple of quid over to my ko-fi page.
Thanks again for reading and please do share with your mates!
Talk soon
Josh xx