festival of emergent arts
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The 2007 edition of the Festival of Emergent Arts brings together the outcomes of post graduate research activity at Central School of Speech and Drama. The festival features work from students in the MA Performance Practice and Research and the M Phil/Ph D candidates. This year, for the first time, the festival also features the work of professionals who have been in dialogue with the students at various stages of their processes. Key to the spirit of the endeavor is a commitment by all to search for new relationships between concepts and practice as they pertain to contemporary performance practices.
As a result of this the festival's creative processes have been guided by a spirit of scrutiny. In an attempt at clarification, I will poetically paraphrase words from Barthes' A Lover's Discourse (1977) "to scrutinise means to search". Search is usually connected to motion, to movement in time and space, finding new ways, new inroads into the desired body (in this case of knowledge in, of and through our practice). For those involved this journey has been about capturing the minutia, the fleeting, the subtle, by slowing down the process to find the steps within the steps that support innovation of shared artistic skills and methods as well as the generation of discourse through which we as artists, educators and industry providers are able to exchange knowledge in and through our various practices.
Dr Ana Sanchez-Colberg, Course Leader MA Performance Practices and Research, M Phil/ Ph D degrees.
AFlordePiel | Loreto Valenzuela
Embassy Studio | 3-6 September
What lies beyond the body of Latina artists? Their identity is socially conceived, lived, classified, enjoyed, and suffered in a Latino machist context. This piece aims to challenge the condition of women and the contemporary cultural amnesia. Analec is confronted with her past, a past that makes her present elusive. To find her past she must get lost, and to be lost she must find under her skin the layers of pain, love and magic. AFlordePiel plays with the frontiers that exist between reality and the theatrical act.
outside: I | Karoline Bjune
Embassy Studio | 3-6 September
In a stream of consciousness - outside becomes inside, images become distorted, time becomes space.
MAKE | Rose Turner
Embassy Studio | 3-6 September
MAKE, a two-part live art piece, explores the relationship between art and performance - product and process. MAKE explores the self-referential nature of postmodern art as metaphor for the self-referential nature of the human psyche, as it is deconstructed and reconstructed through bereaved fragments of memoried experience.
Do you remember being suspended in time?
MAKE is performed in union with Andrew Wiskowski's MoD
MoD | Andrew Wiskowski
Embassy Studio | 3-6 September
'MoD' is the root of the word and notion 'mood'. It is old English for 'mind, spirit, courage'. At its genetic level, 'mood' is hybrid intellect, imagination, and courage to embark. This is possession theatre. This time, the possession is by mood. 'Mood' contemplates atmosphere and environment. Ours? The apocalypse of Troy, as per its King.
MoD is performed in union with Rose Turner's MAKE.
London Eyes America: An interactive photographic exhibition | Rachel Parish
Studio 1 | 4-7 September
A picture is worth a thousand words - what do you hear?
Studio 1 Guided gallery times: Tuesday 4th 3PM, 4-7 September, Wednesday 5th 5.30PM, Friday 7th 7PM.
Dedicated to my friend, Bruce Kirle. Website
multiple | Mollie McClelland
New Studio | 6-8 September
multiple is a question of identity.
people irreducible to labels,
dancers who create character in body,
personalities which are fluid,
bodies who have stories,
eyes that look out,
and look in.
absurdity,
sadness,
joy,
life.
Who are you?
In Manus Tuas | Sophie Thompson
New Studio | 6-8 September
Fear... what causes it? What does it feel like? What do my fears say about me as an individual? Or about us as social beings? We searched for answers to these questions in various literary works; short stories, novels, poetry. The piece is an exploration of the imagery and the physicalities, given, by the poet's imagination, to the cause of our feelings of fear; that thing which lurks, shapeless, faceless, nameless, in the dark depths of the soul.
The Puzzle | Sylwia Kalisz
New Studio | 6-8 September
Is it possible to interpret any single accident or event that happens to us? What happens when we try to link situations and give them meaning? This is a physical performance about a man who struggles to put linear order to chaos and accidental events. This is also the story about a couple who are connected in an unexplained way. Even though they try to fight this link they are unable to escape it. The scenario is based on two novels of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz- Cosmos and Possessed.
Akira California: post-apocalyptic stand-up comedy | Broderick Chow
Performance Studio 2 | 7-8 September
2019. A boy named Maddox Jolie is in Tokyo, lost in a wasteland of karaoke and lonely people. To get home, he'll need to find his real parents, fall in love, and save the world. All in a day's work! Comedian Broderick Chow fuses stand-up, storytelling and multimedia in a post-apocalyptic picaresque. A sweet, funny and slightly sad hour of stand-up...about being lost, and lonely...and the possibility of connecting with other people and maybe coming home.
Broderick Chow is a comedian, writer and MPhil/PhD student at CSSD. He wishes it were easier to talk to strangers and enjoys dystopian fiction.
The Studios | Tara Christine Holmes
Performance Studio 2 | 7-8 September
The Studios is my own adaptation of Jean Genet's "The Balcony". In a cabaret setting, you will view an evening in Madam Irma's brothel, which she lovingly calls her studios. The project is specifically looking at the relationship of body-as-object, and body-as-subject, between the puppet, and actors. This piece is not intended for children under 15. I hope you enjoy the evening!
Crumbs! | Nando Messias
Embassy Studio | 7-8 September
I love finding new possibilities, pushing my own boundaries, blurring territories. I began exploring the diagonal and what it means: the body in space, space in the body. Moving between horizontal and vertical took me on a journey, following clues, negotiating other opposites. A strange personality emerged - another contradiction because I am not playing a character as such. I entered a world of mixed realities, something from the documentary Grey Gardens with its fusion of past and present, glamour and filth.
Crumbs! marks an arrival, but not a terminus. One is only ever on a trail.
NEXUS Bodies of Pain | Feyza Deveci-Matthews
New Studio | 11 September
Re-cycling the reportage | Delia Giubeli
Rehearsal Room 1&2 | 12-13 September
A journey through the creation of the performer-reporter
Cyclist as reporter. Cyclist as performer. Cyclist as migrant. Cyclist as part of a community around the streets of the city.
This performance-demonstration explores the creation of the performer- reporter: a journey through a reportage about cycling in London, as metaphor of the performer-reporter's condition on the stage. The topic at the ground of the research is climate change and how people commit themselves in social, political and artistic activism.
Silent Partners | Vox Humana Theatre Company
New Studio | 14 September
This new Charles Marowitz play is based on Eric Bentley's The Brecht Memoir . Silent Partners is a dramatization of Eric Bentley's real life collaboration with Brecht from 1941 until 1956. Silent Partners dramatizes Brecht's troubled sojourn in Hollywood and the creative process which led to the 1947 production of The Life of Galileo starring Charles Laughton. The play also encompasses Brecht's testimony before US Congressional hearing and the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Eric Bentley was the primary translator of Bertolt Brecht's writings and the champion of his work in the English language.
Welsh born actor Victor Spinetti recieved Broadway's Tony Award for his performance in 'Oh What A Lovely War!' as well as First Prize at the Theatre De Nations in Paris for his performance. Victor's critically acclamed Lord Foppington in 'The Relapse' at the Royal Shakespeare Company was one of his career highlights.
At the Royal National Theatre, he directed a play which he co- authored with John Lennon entitled 'In His Own Write'. He has starred in numerous West End productions and films.
In Safe Hands | Jessica Hartley
Embassy Studio| 13-14 September
A workshop, lecture and provocative discussion on the nature of risk and responsibility in our lives. Come and try your hand at static trapeze and support Jessica Hartley's research into questions of identity, trust and danger.
Paradox Lost: Playing with the infinite | James Palm
Embassy Studio | 13-14 September
'Any discussion of acting almost invariably touches on Diderot's famous paradox: to move the audience the actor must himself remain unmoved'. Lee Strasberg
This interactive performance/lecture will explore the plethora of paradoxes and contradictions that face the actor. We will explore these paradoxes in relation to theatrical, philosophical and scientific principles.
We have created a model of the universe that is riddled with paradoxes. How does an actor present or represent the universe truthfully? Is our obsession with truth the ultimate absurdity?
'I never predict anything and I never will do'. Paul Gascoigne
Additional Performances: Missing | Holds no Memory | We: Implicated and Complicated
Embassy Studio | 11 September
Missing Devised | The Visitors - Jane Munro and Rebecca Bogue
Missing is a performance event which offers tributes to our lost lovers and friends, and to those we would never have known. Those who laughed, loved, cried and died in the debris of other cities. This event is The Visitors response to the crisis in the Middle East.
Holds no Memory & We: Implicated and Complicated | Dance Films by Chris Clow
Films will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and dancer Ana Sanchez-Colberg
The festival would like to thank.........
Dr. Ana Sanchez-Colberg, Senior Lecturer in Performance, Course Leader Research Degrees, MA Performance Practices and Research, Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), Embassy Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY
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