IN BRIEF

An immersive experience investigating the future possibilities of the human race.

IN BRIEF

How does love exist when you’re not there? Live Letter is about absence, love, and your best handwriting.

WHO IS SHE?

Ten years ago Lowri didn’t get into drama school so she studied art. She moved to Manchester, learnt to think sideways, formed a punk band and found her own way to make theatre.

WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT HER

Compelling

David Hoyle

Lowri is one of the most interesting emerging artists and performance makers in the North West

Richard Gregory, Quarantine, 2011

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Lowri has a long history of putting her heart on the line. In the increasing blurring of her life and her work she has lamented about moments of goodbyes over train station tannoy systems, traced eighty year old school photographs and taken you for cups of tea on wasteland. She slid on the floor alongside you during rush hour in a slug suit; she told you everything in a book about the end of a relationship.

This performance is no exception. By working as close as she can between her own life and her art she knows they reveal something about the other, and hopes to delve into the grey ocean of what it is to be human, in all its cruelty and splendour.

WEBSITE

lowrievans.wordpress.com

IN BRIEF

Blue is burying your head in the sand, it’s drowning in whiskey and it’s compiling a list of all the things you haven’t yet done.

WHO IS SHE?

Krissi Musiol is the last person to leave the party (but not necessarily the last one standing).

Krissi Musiol cannot dance - she can’t waltz, can’t salsa, she can’t do a pirouette.  She can’t do the twist, the tango, a tap dance, the tarantella.  She’s can’t two-step, hand-jive, boogie woogie, break dance, dirty dance, maypole dance.  She can’t moonwalk.  No ballet, polka, flamenco, fandango, vogue or rumba.  Nor Irish dancing, Latin dancing, Polish dancing, no pole dancing.  There is no way her legs can do a Can-Can.

WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT HER

The way its language, movement, visuals and content were integrated created something simultaneously richly-layered and spare, intensely plausible yet built on a single family’s histories and myths.  From the moment when Musiol first appears on the white stage in a bridal gown, “a girl in a rotten grey dress searching for a rotten grey man”, the blend of truth and fiction, folklore and history, is seamlessly achieved.

Audience member, Hatch, NEAT 11

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The girl has thoughts about ending her own life on more than one occasion.  She has thought about what it would be like to no longer exist.
She’s going to shed her rotten wedding dress, count the days down backwards to try and go back in time to when she saw you last, back to the party, back to the bar.
There’s so many things she learned but never used.   Things she didn’t understand and things which only happened in her imagination.
Things that moved when no words were spoken.
Things written on huge walls in tiny letters.
Things that were written down in lists that no one ever read.
Things she’s most afraid of and things she’s not supposed to do.
She has created a strategy for survival because she thinks she might be dying…
She’s thinking about dying and also turning 30.  And somewhere in between there, there’s a broken love story.

A solo show by Anna Fenemore and Pigeon Theatre

1 woman.  148 biographies.  1 show.

The Twice Removed is a new Pigeon Theatre show created and performed by Artistic Director Anna Fenemore.  A solo show with three performers: Anna Fenemore as ‘Anna’; Gillian Knox as ‘The Prompt’; and Andrew Crofts as ‘The Technician’.

The show investigates the concept of a ‘biographical’ performance solo, where the lone artist presents only what other people want, and only what other people think of her, and only what or ‘who’ other people believe her to be.  The show interrogates ideas around identity construction and negotiates tricky conflicting views of who ‘Anna’ might be.

Last summer I decided to make a solo show.  It began badly.  I didn’t know how to work alone and I stared for long periods of time at walls not knowing what to do.  In a moment of terror I wrote to 148 people and asked them to tell me what to do, to tell me what solo show they would like me to make.  I wrote to people in different ‘groups’: ex-students, current-students, colleagues, old-friends, new-friends, family, ex-lovers, asking them for show ideas or fragments, structures, instructions, warnings, details or broad brushstrokes.  I assured them that I would not be making their show, but that I would be using the material, stories and correspondences I received to make the show.   And so the project became a large-scale, long-distance collaboration between myself as solo performer/maker/subject and 148 contributors/collaborators/ biographers.  

 Showreel here, full show below.

Method Lab; a greenroom / hÅb co-production

We last saw the pound coin in April 2010 when it was sacrificed to the hands of fate via thegreenroom bar till. We waited in anticipation as news of its whereabouts trickled through the consciousness of the nation. Now, it is back with one hell of a story to tell.

After making ‘funny, baffling, mystical, absurd and mind bending’ work for the past five years with Escape Theatre,Wayne Jackson has created this solo piece as a climax to the journey of his coin. Trawling through issues of memory and certainty, he confronts the fleeting moments of performance in an attack on his own memory.

thelostpoundcoin.co.uk

Method Lab & SeedFund

In its last eight years, our long-running incubator has seen over thirty-five new works ranging from a bearded ballerina to a naked ensemble of women; many go on to tour, some win awards; placing greenroom and hÅb’s Method Lab firmly as the place to see the ones to watch.  With support from this year’s project mentor Peader Kirk, 2010 promises funny, touching and sometimes quite frightening meditations on life, love and loss; featuring:

You Were Saying is a bittersweet semi-autobiographical comedy written and performed by Chris Fitzsimmons - a young man with too much time on his hands.

“I was waiting and thinking

and thinking about waiting

In an empty town

where the silence was deafening.”

There are streetlights overhead as he waits patiently under the clock for someone new to arrive. He checks his mobile to see if he has received any messages and considers that he may be making one of many new mistakes. The day before yesterday he received a letter from the council about his wheelie bins. Yesterday, he argued with someone about the bible, God and the afterlife. Tonight he is thinking about lost voices, Eartha Kitt and how everything changes.

Leentje van de Cruys Belgian knitting guru and the host of the best party ever continuing her quest to fit in and be loved in a foreign country presents HORSE. HORSE is a story about a woman who thinks she is a horse. But that’s normal, because she is indeed a horse. The problem is that she thinks she is a different horse than the horse she really is; a different horse from the horse you see in front of you.

‘I once knew a rabbit who thought he was an incredibly dangerous predator. So he attacked a dog. Because he didn’t understand that he was only a rabbit. Well, I am not like that. I know very well what I look like. I know very well what you see when you look at me. It’s just that I think that how I look isn’t quite right’

Based on a short story by Dutch author Esther Gerritsen, HORSE is the new show from Leentje Van de Cruys, Belgian knitting-guru and host of previous greenroom events The Best Party Ever and Knitting to Worry About.

PLUS: Gemma Neep, a free SeedFund mini-performance from our resident commentator on Facebook stalking, Swine Flu and alienating your neighbours.

Gemma is a solo artist, making awkward comedy, who is interested in playing with the idea of introducing others as (often unknowing) fellow performers. In her current work, Gemma explains how easy it is to stalk a man using the internet - it only takes two minutes if you know what you’re doing! [ limited capacity ]

PLUS: An ongoing work from Wayne Jackson

Wayne has been devising and performing ‘Funny, baffling, mystical, absurd [and] mindbending’ work for the past five years with his company ‘Escape Theatre’. After receiving support from greenroom and Arts Council, with them he is now developing his own work. He has recently completed his Masters where his interest in the concept of liveness began and he is now exploring the fleeting moments within performance which lie somewhere in-between the live and the mediated.

His most recent project, showcased at Emergency 09, originates from an experience he had when he was three (three and a half or four) when he swallowed a pound coin. Through inter-locking and contradicting accounts he is exploring the ways in which memory can distort and alter the past and cast doubt on that which has definitely happened. Because it did definitely happen, didn’t it..? The journey is now taking him on a journey, supported by greenroom, to find the pound coin he lost twice. He will attempt to trace a pound coin around the country using its own website, which will launch as past of this years Method Lab event.

I could tell you what has happened. But what would be the point? You’re going to make your own assumptions anyway. After all, it happened to you, didn’t it? This is your story, so who else knows it better than you?

As he struggles with contradicting memories and the certainty of forgetting, he tells the story of a desire to find his lost pound coin and capture the journey it has been on. It has been over twenty-three years since he last saw his pound coin, and a lot has happened since then.

Friday 5 March:
All Dressed Up: Julia Griffin
Forum for the Pedestrians: Julia Griffin and Co3 Dance
Rain: a score from Apparently Normal: Touchdown Dance
a dancer’s heart: DawN’s MinD Dance Theatre
A Still Return: Charlotte and Tom Spencer
Pawn: Jo Ashbridge
Poolovum: Johanne Timm

Saturday 6 March:
All Dressed Up: Julia Griffin
Forum for the Pedestrians: Julia Griffin and Co3 Dance
A Time Upon Once: Jade Stubbings
Accumulation Processes: Pavlos Kountouriotis
Liquid Gold: The bodyfarm
Beam: Ceri Rimmer
Disconnected: Out of Bounds
Static Change - Manchester: Project Auske
Latin Beach!: The bodyfarm

Turn is a 3 evening event, featuring a total of 15 short dance works – from finished pieces to excerpts and works in progress in a sneak preview of the best of new North West dance. There is one small commission, ‘The Turn Prize‘ financially supported by DiGM and produced by greenroom and hÅb, to be awarded to a piece shown at Turn.