Hello friends,
We’re excited to announce almost the full programme for our gathering in London this December. Everything is free and you’re welcome to drop in at any time, but the live elements of the programme have a limited capacity so we encourage you to book a place to ensure you can get in. It’ll all take place at one central London location which we’ll be announcing on Wednesday. We hope to see you there.
FOREST FRINGE IN LONDON
Friday 9 December
Opening Night Double Bill – Simone Kenyon & Neil Callaghan and Augusto Corrieri
Doors at 7pm
Book tickets
A double-bill of short works about collision, collapse, memory, history and survival.
Simone Kenyon & Neil Callaghan – Someone Something Someone
The world is in a constant state of flux. Two bodies engage in a delicate physical activity, striving to become something other than a body: material, force, a single organism. Colliding, pushing, pressing, mingling, uniting. A sculptural and minimal performance that entices the audience into the details of micro-movement.
Augusto Corrieri – In Place of a Show (A Lecture)
In place of a show is a series of lecture-works exploring four theatre buildings around the world. Turning attention away from the human element (the work of performers, artists, audiences, architects, etc), the lectures focus on the buildings themselves: theatres stripped of their primary purpose, lying empty, preserved as museums, or demolished. When the human element no longer dominates the space, non-human elements take centre stage: curtains, seats, balconies, doors, as well as animals, insects, air currents, dust.
Saturday 10 December
Chapter 1 – Memory
12pm-3pm
Book tickets
How do we remember performance and who does the remembering? We have asked artists, archivists, critics and academics to think about the memories they have of performance and the way in which they remember. The event will include performances and conversations featuring:
Season Butler – artist and writer
Arike Oke – archivist, Rambert Dance Company
Alan Read – professor of theatre, Kings College London
Diana Damian – critic and academic
Simon Bowes – writer and performer
Chapter 2 – Europe
3pm-6pm
Book tickets
Europe. Beautiful Europe. Fractured and fracturing, history spilling out of every crack. In this year of all years, we want to take some time to think about Europe, about our place within it – how it is changing and what if anything we can do about it. The event will include a first sharing in the UK of some new experiments by Forest Fringe co-directors Andy Field, Deborah Pearson and Ira Brand, alongside Gigi Argyropoulou speaking about Green Park and its self-organised Performance Biennial earlier this year. More speakers to be announced soon.
Sunday 11 December
Chapter 3 – Resistance
12pm-3pm
Book tickets
In a moment of growing crisis it feels to important to us to try and think about resistance. About gestures of resistance and spaces of resistance. About the relationships that currently exist between art and activism, and how to build new ones. The event will include talks, conversations and installations involving:
Farah Saleh – dancer and choreographer
Hamja Ahsen – artist and curator
Liberate Tate
Lisa Skuret – artist and writer
Rima Najdi – performance artist
Chapter 4 – Survival
3pm-6pm
Book tickets
As 2016 finally dies with a whimper, we want to take this opportunity to think about survival. Survival as artists. Survival under capitalism. About self-care and adaptation. About longevity. There will be talks, conversation and music, involving:
Alex Swift – director and theatre maker
Douglas Murphy – author of Last Futures: Nature, Technology, and the End of Architecture
Liz Aggiss – dance artist and choreographer
Rhiannon Armstrong – artist
Verity Standen – composer
All Weekend
Jemima Yong
Photographer and performance maker Jemima Yong presents fragments from her residency with Forest Fringe in 2013 and 2016.
Action Hero X They Are Here
Two practices, Action Hero (Gemma Paintin & James Stenhouse) and They Are Here (Helen Walker & Harun Morrison) are brought together for the first time to publicly explore the nature of collaboration.
www.actionhero.org.uk | www.theyarehere.net
All The Arguments We’ve Ever Had
A video installation charting 10 years of arguments conducted via email. An exploration of the language of frustration, conciliation, negotiation and love.
Farah Saleh – Cells of Illegal Education
Cells of Illegal Education (C.I.E) is a video dance installation that revisits gestures of civil disobedience carried out during the First Intifada in Occupied Palestine. More specifically it reenacts, transforms and deforms gestures exercised by Birzeit University students between 1988 and 1992 while trying to continue their education process at a time when schools and universities were closed by Israeli military rule and students and teachers who refused to abide were labeled “Cells of Illegal Education”. Presented as part of our chapter on Resistance, but available to experience all weekend.