Presenting a diverse line up of performance artists from across England Tickets for the online public performance programme of events available now via edfringe.com
Curated by a consortium of England’s leading artist-focused arts organisations and commissioned by Arts Council England, the lineup celebrates artists who are working across an exciting range of performance disciplines – all born out of a new approach to build deep and sustainable collaborations internationally.
The 2021 showcase includes streamed live theatre, dance and live art performances, digital works and events for audiences around the world. Six new, tour-ready, public performance works will be presented digitally from next Monday including:
Future Cargo, a sci-fi dance show performed in a 40-foot haulage truck is the latest outdoor work by Requardt & Rosenberg, filmed for audiences to experience at home with an intimate sound score.
26 August at 11am and 7pm
29 August at 2pm
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/future-cargo
Artist Janine Harrington presents a digital online version of her 2018 Screensaver Series, a five-dancer-strong movement and sound installation inspired by the obsolete screen-saving programmes of early computing.
27 August at 1pm and 9pm
29 August at 6pm
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/screensaver-series
First presented at Contact in Manchester earlier in 2021, mandla rae brings short film As British As A Watermelon which explores the citizenship process, questions the realities of decolonisation, picks apart the long-lasting effects of trauma, and explores mandla’s fragmented memory.
26 August at 4pm or 11.30pm
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/mandla-rae-as-british-as-a-watermelon-1
Also part of Summerhall’s On Demand Fringe 2021 programme
Built with original music and virtual performances, Chinese Arts Now’s Every dollar is a soldier/With money you’re a dragon invites audiences to roam freely as avatars through an ‘after hours’ digital art gallery. Mixing gaming and 3D technology, writer and performer Daniel York Loh compares the apparent success of the once-richest man in America – William Waldorf Astor – with the migration of Chinese people.
24 – 29 August at 1pm and 7pm
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on#q=%22Chinese%20Arts%20Now%22
Multi-award-winning British Asian choreographer Seeta Patel presents a screening of their reimagining of Stravinsky’s iconic ballet The Rite of Spring in the classical Indian dance style Bharatanatyam in the year of the 50th death anniversary of Stravinsky.
27 August at 11am and 7pm
29 August at 4pm
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/rite-of-spring
Tarik Elmoutawakil’s Marlborough Productions will enable audiences across the globe to join their widely celebrated Brownton Abbey (BA) an evolving, international performance collective, centring and celebrating disabled, queer people of colour. Adapted for a digital landscape, Brownton Abbey: Talk Show will be a frank and open conversation.
25 August at 11am and 7pm
29 August at 11am
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/brownton-abbey-talk-show
Performance and installation artist Joshua Sofaer, theatre director Olivia Furber and Palestinian filmmaker, writer and actor, Ramzi Maqdisi, and award-winning choreographer and director Botis Seva also feature in the programme with new work but as part of a smaller delegates-only series of presentations with a view to public touring and performances this year and next.
Moving forward from a year of mass cancellations, drastically reduced opportunities, and with creative freelancers now facing more restrictive and costly regulations for touring work, the Horizon pilot marks the development of a thrilling new collaborative model. Responding to the need for different and more flexible ways of thinking, the consortium has placed care, innovation, environmental sustainability and accessibility at the heart of the showcase.
Horizon aims to be distinctive from other performing arts showcases by encouraging connections and relationships to be built between artists and programmers at different stages of an artists’ journey. The inclusion of seven residencies will offer this – providing an opportunity for artists to develop their ideas while inviting international delegates into their creative process at an early stage. Alongside the public performance strand, the brand new projects, supported as part of a ‘residency’ programme taking place this week include:
The Dan Daw Show in which artist Daw will look at his relationship to his disability and to kink, and how power, pride and shame all intersect. It is a show about letting go and reclaiming yourself. Jo Bannon’s Blind Magic is a dance piece with two visually diverse/blind performers and one unreliable audio narrator. It explores the imaginative dance between sleight of hand, deception and dexterity present within magic shows, with a canny parallel to the experience of visually disabled people. Artist and producer Katy Baird will be workshopping Get Off – a funny, relatable and sometimes ‘wee bit grim’ performance that revels in excess whilst exploring ways in which it unites us. Katy asks, ‘what gives us pleasure?’ and ‘how much is too much?’
PROJEKT EUROPA will be working on LET YOUR HANDS SING IN THE SILENCE, a planned performance for one actor to recreate their own personal family tree from memory presented by the international female-led theatre company. Multi-award winning writer and performer Rachel Mars’ will use her residency to develop Forge – a new set of work about memorials, replicas, and human behaviour at spaces with difficult histories. Mars asks what and who memorials are for, and what should happen to places where traumatic events have taken place.
Urielle Klein-Mekongo’s TRASH is to be a dark, musical comedy about two working-class black girls who decide to join the expanding industry of earning cash, pushing for financial success at all costs, from social media. ULM will use her residency to explore how TRASH will present power and boundaries in this shiny, online world. UKM’s first self-penned solo show Yvette was presented to acclaim at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And rounding off the residencies, British Flamenco dancer and practitioner Yinka Esi Graves’s will be working on her first solo creation, The Disappearing Act, will draw on her experiences as a black flamenco dancer and the historical questions that have been raised along her journey.
Supported by a community of artists and associates, all performance-makers in the showcase will work collaboratively, and will be encouraged and connected with international artists and partners to exchange ideas. This showcase of England-based artists will enable strong connections between international festivals, producers and presenters even in this most difficult year for artists and creators.
Commissioned by Arts Council England, the Horizon showcase is being delivered by a consortium made up of Battersea Arts Centre, Dance4, Fierce, GIFT, MAYK and Transform.
The consortium partners are working with several established independent artists to help shape the showcase, including Project O (Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson- Small), Javaad Alipoor, Kirsty Housley, Sonia Hughes and Renny O’Shea. Associate partners reflecting different specialisms and art form focuses have also had input into the process, including Akademi, ATC, Bush Theatre, Circus City, The Cocoa Butter Club and Unlimited.
Horizon runs from 16 August, with the public event programme during the week of 23 August.
ENDS.
