We’ve just launched our first crowdfunding campaign with the help of the great team at Sponsume. All proceeds will go towards production costs for our May 2012 performances of Sensual Emergency. Show your support in exchange for some fun rewards.
We are pleased to announce a forthcoming collaboration with Art Lobby, a popup gallery space in Willesden Green. We will be presenting an intimate night of Live Art, spoken word and improvised music at the gallery on Saturday 26 May, kicking off a month of experimental programming by the curators. The night will include a fully staged performance of our Live Art kabarett, Sensual Emergency.
Art Lobby puts artists in touch with regeneration projects, and community projects in touch with artists. Its endeavour is to effect meaningful change for communities and individuals through the medium of art. In addition to its work with curators, artists at all stages of their careers, and community groups, Art Lobby also operates mentorships, guided cultural tours, workshops, lectures, development programmes, agency services, and a residency for international artists.
The night will include excerpts from the 2011 album by the award-winning Canadian spoken word artist Andrea von Wichert, Here, There and Nowhere, as well as performances and improvisations by Montreal bass clarinettist Krista Martynes and London cellist Lucy Railton. Ticket price will include a complimentary drinks reception on arrival. Art Lobby, Unit 1, Queens Parade, Willesden Lane, NW2. Nearest tube: Willesden Green. Doors 18:30 for 19:00. Tickets £6.00 for presale online at our Sponsume page, or £8.00 on the door (cash only).
We’ve been invited onto the programme of the V22 Summer Club, and will present a night of spoken word and live music on Thursday 24 May at the V22 Halls in south London.
V22 Summer Club is a festival programme of collaborative, original and multi-disciplinary events taking place in a former biscuit factory. The programme includes exhibition, film, dance, Live Art, theatre, performance, music, sound, lectures, discussions, workshops, games, digital interactivity, and community events.
Utilising their 50,000 sq ft exhibition spaces in Bermondsey, V22 has created a purpose-built cinema, an intimate live music venue, and a pop-up record store to invigorate the site and offer a range of experiences, activities and art forms. V22 Summer Club is designed as a flexible environment for audiences to use as suits them, whether that be to engage with the many live activities, screenings, performances and broadcasts, browse the independent record-label store, or pop in for a bite to eat, an organic cider, relax in one of the many seating areas and soak up the atmosphere.
We’ve been invited to perform Sensual Emergency at the opening night of the Repeat Rewind Rephrase Performance Series at the Latymer Projects artist space in west London on Friday 25 May.
Repeat Rewind Rephrase is a programme of events that explores the different degrees in which creative practitioners engage with the wealth of performance practices that have come before. From sampling, quoting and referencing to re-staging and re-interpreting, the programme seeks to explore a diversity of acts of appropriation. The opening event, Here is Now, will be a showcase of six performances including our own.
The poem on which Sensual Emergency is based is a contemporary paraphrase of the 1968 Parma Manifesto by the composer and pianist, Frederic Rzewski. Performed against a free improvisation, our improvising musicians move within a system of internal quotation, with players responding to one another musically at any given moment, to their greater environment, the room, the night, and the programme as a whole. The content of Rzewski’s manifesto, on the other hand, centres around existential creativity and radical freedom, condemning the use of references in “true” artistry. It is this conflict between quotation and anti-quotation which we seek to explore, and we are so pleased to have the chance to do so in the context of this series.
Pazzia Collective, an experimental performance initiative directed by Australian conductor Kelly Lovelady, is to make a return appearance at this year’s Brighton Fringe Festival using Canadian collaborators.
Pazzia Collective, a Live Art and chamber ensemble fusion experiment, returns to Brighton Fringe Festival this month with its cabaret opera, Sensual Emergency, featuring as performers an award-winning Winnipeg spoken word artist, Andrea von Wichert, and internationally-renowned Montreal clarinettist, Krista Martynes.
The collective will perform at St Andrew’s Church in Hove on Sunday 27th May as part of the series The Musicians Body, curated by Brighton New Music organisation, Music Of Our Time.
Sensual Emergency was commissioned by Cluster New Music and Integrated Arts Festival in 2011 for an evening of Surrealist cabaret. A commentary on freedom and constriction, classical and jazz improvisers were physically bound in bandages and strings of lights, while being made to perform a free improvisation. An original text was written by Canadian composer Matthew Ricketts in response to Frederic Rzewski’s 1968 ’Parma Manifesto’. Ricketts’ text was then performed as a beat poem against improvisation by, among others, Montreal’s Trio ’86, of which Martynes is a member.
Having been issued with the task of devising and directing a 20-minute performance for the Canadian festival last year, conductor and director Kelly Lovelady was sent a copy of Rzewski’s ‘Parma Manifesto’ by the trio.
“An artist is a person who lays claim to a heightened state of perception,” writes Rzewski, in the manifesto. ”He creates the sense of emergency in a state of tranquility, where there is no threat to individual survival and where the spirit is free to emerge, to extend its dimensions, to create space. Such an art form must be concerned with creation out of nothing. Its decision cannot be governed by structures and formulas retained from moments of past inspiration, which it is content to re-arrange and re-interpret. Such an art form must be improvised, free to move in the present, without burdening itself with the dead weight of the past.”
Rzewski’s manifesto was passed on to Canadian composer and writer Matthew Ricketts, with the request that it form the basis of an original beat poem. “So sit / so sing / cling to survive: / create space / sufficient for / survival-efficiency / systematically cultivate / salvation in sync” writes Ricketts. ”But wait – / in silk shackles… / wait – / in a club, dark… / wait on a rope, tight, / carefully balanced / over-weight and awkward / wading the murky present, / wet / poised / shaking / tipping this way and that / toward what’s uncertain / certainly shifting / forward is future / glancing backward, pastward, / password: sass“.
Pazzia Collective is running a crowdfunding campaign for Sensual Emergency on Sponsume to support the production costs of the project. The two Canadians will be joined by several local experimental performers including cellist Lucy Railton, and directed Kelly Lovelady.
For a PDF of this press release, click here.
