Over the past decade and more we have devised and delivered many one off performance events, mainly for Festivals.
Our live art events usually see us creating work that place performers in "everyday" or traditional locations in a city or building but we then skew the lens a little on what they are doing there, we ask audiences to step closer, listen in and get involved as we playfully examine something that we usually take for granted and we re-position it in an original way, so that maybe that place or activity might not ever seem the same again…..
Working with elderly community members of several residential homes in the city we recorded their thoughts and memories of a lifetime lived in the city, then, interwoven with music and song, we placed these soundscapes of half recounted stories in MP3 players and listening stations in the trees in the city centre. The interface with the organics of the tree and the new digital media embedded in it highlighted the conflict and the resolution between old and new and the relevance of our past in moving forward as a city.
Click the project title above for more details and quotes on this project
3 works that playfully focused in on the daily ecology of a city centre hotel. Beginning with Where did you last have it?, where audiences were invited to find actors in the hotel and listen into their interior monologues- all tied together in that each of the dozen stories had something lost within it, followed by The Minutes where we invited audiences to join us in one of the boardrooms, for 12 consecutive half hour meetings on one evening about…er…very little at all…. as we together mischievously deconstructed and lampooned traditional meeting structures, through to And We Are Now Taking Questions From The Floor… where similarly audiences dropped in and out, in the role of faux-journalists, of a 6 hour press conference, about er again... nothing in particular, and in doing so, we toyed with the gimmicks, stereotypes and hackneyed form these PR events have lured us to accept as we see them all over the 24hour media.
These works were commissioned jointly by Leeds City Council and City Inn Hotel, Leeds
* "Where did you last have it?" has been reprised several times in different contexts looking at loss in different settings
PLease click the link below to visit a short film of the work
EborVox was a the anniversary centrepiece of York800, where the city celebrated 800 years of its own democracy in July 2012.
Building up from over 1 year out we brought together 25 of the city’s adult choirs and several school choirs with musicians, puppeteers and dancers for a weekend of staged and flash singing and performances that we staged in a variety of traditional and unusual locations across the city.
Over 800 members of the community took centre stage as participants in these landmark events and performances, the finale of which of which was covered live on BBC1.
Here is a link to the official documentary of the project- https://vimeo.com/54310387
