Hello everyone!
Hope you’re having a lovely bank holiday and had a lovely weekend of striking,marching and taking action.
We’ve got a bumper etude for tou to indulge in this week
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8bit presented by Royal Opera House
Available now
Free
The Royal Opera embraces the digital stage in a series of eight newly-commissioned experimental experiences. 8bit – eight short ‘bits’ of digital opera – brings together some of the most innovative contemporary artists in five short films, two audio performances and a web browser experiment, all of which can be enjoyed from your own home. Expect well-loved repertory in ways you have never experienced before, as well as world premieres of new short works.
We welcome back Katie Mitchell, who leads a new film collaboration with Grant Gee and Anna Meredith, alongside new video pieces from Akhila Krishnan and Anna Morrissey, who collaborates with Royal Ballet dancers. Rakhi Singh, Patrick Eakin Young, André de Ridder, Katherine Manley, Elayce Ismail and Dumbworld make their Royal Opera House debuts.
The 8bit experience is available to watch from 30 April on the Royal Opera House's social media channels: YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
CONTENT WARNINGS
Please note that Heal You features needles and people receiving their COVID-19 vaccinations.
Please note that both FFAALL and Fatal Sytem Error feature flashing images.
Avaiable until 5th May
£10
“And so I figured if McDonald’s can call itself a restaurant, I can call myself an actor.”
Ever since Katie was cast as the lead in her primary school Christmas show ‘Santa’s Snow Mobile’ she believed there was a place for her in show business. Since then named, speaking and fully clothed roles have been hard to come by…
Sexy Lamp brilliantly combines comedy, original songs and storytelling to shed a bright light on how ridiculous the industry can be and why Katie is refusing to stay in the dark any longer.
CONTENT WARNINGS
Reference to sexual abuse and #MeToo
An Acorn : Live by Caridad Svich
Thursday 6th May
£10
Following a critically acclaimed digital North American run, An Acorn returns in a cross-Atlantic collaboration between Oldham and Canada.
Mina Anwar (The Thin Blue Line, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie) and Darren Jeffries (Hollyoaks) will receive the script and some specific instructions just an hour before the performance, whilst Canadian actors Blythe Haynes and Ryan G Hinds will be rehearsed.
Over one year on from the beginning of the first lockdown we continue to be isolated and, while vaccine rollouts mean that some semblance of ‘normal’ life will return, the experience of isolation, fear and upheaval will linger with us.
We have learned in this time about our fellow humans, and while there have been moments of hope, the divide between factions feels to have grown into a chasm. Will we ever reconnect? Or has the awareness of these differences changed us forever?
The two groups of actors have never met before. You, the audience, will also receive instructions on the day for how to curate your space and how you can interact.
Spore Score by Emergency Chorus
Available until 31st May
Free
In Spore Score, performance duo Emergency Chorus and sound designer Alice Boyd collaborate to contemplate the inner life of fungi.
Fragments of text from wide-ranging sources percolate, whilst an ever-changing soundscape emerges from music improvised using the guidance of a spore print. Inspired by John Cage’s Indeterminacy, the minute-long texts are randomly selected from a bank of options, and the sound created separately: each part recorded in isolation.
The resulting composition mines elements of chance, audio processing and environmental data to explore the fruitful collaboration between humans, fungi and technology, asking how we might listen in new ways to the natural world, and how it speaks to us under jeopardy.
Frühlings Erwachen by Suna Gürler and Lucien Haug
Thursday 6th
From €3
When adolescents and adults talk about sex together, it's quickly - stop! Because: Sex is considered dangerous, still. Frank Wedekind's scandalous play Frühlings Erwachen was censored in Berlin in 1891, but published in Zurich. Frühlings Erwachen by Suna Gürler and Lucien Haug from the year 2020 cancels itself: "Frühlings Erwachen is cancelled - but we have to talk.
Unintentionally catapulted into isolation by the corona lockdown, the team of young and adult people now returns to contact with omniscience and ignorance and plunges into the danger zone of shame, curiosity, experiment and playful power, which has more to do with sexy poses on Instagram or instant pose sex on Youporn.
5th until 18th May
Prices vary
The Uroboros – Designing in Troubling Times is a hybrid festival and community network performing experimental inquiry into the transformative potential of design research and practice. Our collective inquiry and activities are inspired by the ambiguous symbol of Uroboros – a serpent devouring itself and changing its form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The circular and cyclical Uroboros captures the ambiguity of present technologies and designs for the troubling and troubled times that we are living in. Asking what design can do to support positive change, we explore the cyclical processes of design imagination, innovation, failure and return.
The Uroboros project was initiated in late 2019 by an independent group of designers, design researchers and curators based in Prague [CZ] and officially released in May 2020 along with the inaugural Uroboros festival. The first festival edition was organised as a hybrid online/offline event and brought together over 600 designers, artists, researchers, and creative practitioners from around the world. Inspired by this interest in the festival theme, we decided to extend Uroboros from a one-off festival into a long-term project, to nurture a continuity of initiated discussions and collaborations. Uroboros was thus re-imagined as an annual festival series accompanied by various collateral events, including the Uroboros Bites.
The long-term Uroboros program aims to foster a globally distributed network of designers, researchers and other creative practitioners interested in collective explorations of what design does and can do in the world today. The looping Uroboros circle is always open to new experimental inputs and provocations. The best way to join is the Uroboros 2021 festival that happens on 5th-18th May 2021. Festival events are accessible either for free or for a small fee. Most of the events are live-streamed, archived, and made available for later viewing.
Liveness presented by Newcastle Univeristy
Wednesday 5th May
Free
Newcastle University Performance Research Network asks: What is liveness and why does it matter? How do bodies interact in space and time? Is liveness changing?
A range of local and international artists have produced short creative responses to our initial brief, exploring ideas and experiences of liveness during the 2021 lockdown.
Please join us as we celebrate this new exhibition. The event will involve brief talks by the artists involved, a livestream of a new live piece by Jonathan Rolph, and an informal discussion about ideas of liveness. A link to the exhibition will be circulated prior to the event; we invite you to visit the exhibition in advance, to inform our discussion.
This week, please consider donating to Green & Black Cross. They have been doing amazing work over the past week supporting protests around the country and ensuring that those attending know their rights. They were amazing on Saturday and could do with your support to help protestors at future demonstrations.
Please check out their website and consider donating!
To finish on a bit of a sad note. I'‘m currently being messed about by my landlord and could do with a little help. They didn’t do a deep clean of the property before i moved in after promosing us that they would. They threatened me and my partner with legal action if we left a poor review online. It’s pretty shitty. If you have 5 minutes then please do consider filling this out and sending Danhamz an email. They’ve started ignoring our emails so flooding them is hopefully going to get them to act a bit faster.
Hope you all have a lovely week and see you next time!
Josh xx