Author Archives: John Ellingsworth

About John Ellingsworth

John Ellingsworth is the Deputy Editor of Total Theatre Magazine. He also runs the online circus magazine Sideshow and trains non-performance corde lisse.

SPILL National Platform: Call for entries 2012

Part of SPILL Festival of Performance, the SPILL National Platform showcases the work of emerging artists creating ‘innovative, daring and exciting work’. SPILL are currently calling for submissions for the National Platform at SPILL 2012:

The National Platform is for artists who are at the beginning of their professional practice, including recent graduates, and who have only had a few opportunities to show their work publicly. The National Platform is aimed at artists and companies based in the UK and Ireland who are interested in the ‘experience’ or the ‘event’ of art and who work with ideas of ‘liveness’. The Platform is open to artists and companies who are centralising or exploring the ‘liveness’ of the artist and/or the ‘liveness’ of the audience through performance, sound, film, video, installation, new media or digital practices.

Across three days and at multiple locations in Ipswich, emerging artists and companies will have a fantastic opportunity to showcase their work to an audience made up of national and international promoters and artists, and members of the public. Each artist or company selected for the Platform will receive an inclusive fee of £200, plus accommodation, and technical and marketing support.

Previously biennial, this year SPILL becomes an annual festival, alternating between Ipswich in November 2012, and London in April 2013. To download an application pack and for details on how to apply for the National Platform see here. The deadline for applications is strictly noon on Monday 18 June 2012.

Elevator Repair Service: Choreography & Text: Translating Source Material into Performance

At the end of June, Brighton venue The Basement will be hosting a workshop from the seminal New York-based performance company Elevator Repair Service. Scheduled as the first in a series of workshops by leading international performers and performance companies, Choreography & Text: Translating Source Material into Performance will explore the approaches to performance that are embodied in the company’s own work. Four members of the ensemble will conduct the workshop, led by Elevator artistic director John Collins.

Application process: spaces on the workshop are limited and the organisers expect a high demand for places. Applicants are requested to send a short description (strictly no more than one page of A4) of their practice and how they believe the workshop will be beneficial to their artistic development, and links to video documentation of their work. The Basement will be able to provide a list of reasonably priced accommodation on request.

Dates: 24 June – 26 June 2012
Price: £50

Applications should be sent to Abby Butcher: abby@thebasement.uk.com

The closing date for applications is 4 June 2012 at 10am. Successful applicants will be informed by 8 June.

The Choreography & Text: Translating Source Material into Performance workshop is presented as part of east.by.south.east, a project designed to enrich and strengthen practices and infrastructure for contemporary performance in the East and South East regions.

Elevator Repair Service will be performing GATZ at the Noël Coward Theatre in London 8-15 July as part of LIFT.

Physical Fest 2012

Now in its eighth year and taking place once again in Liverpool, Physical Fest is an international festival of physical theatre that combines a rich programme of workshops (in movement, mime, martial arts, clown, etcetera) with a showcase of new work, Fest Live, organised in association with the Unity Theatre.

The workshop and showcase programmes are both online, with opportunities to train with the likes of DV8’s Nigel Charnock, Tanya Gerstle of Opticnerve, Fin Walker, Evgeny Kozlov (the artistic director of Russia’s Do-Theatre), and others, plus performances of work by Clout, Cie Twain, Clowns, Ding Foundation, Mary Pearson, and Caustic Windows.

The Physical Fest is organised by Tmesis Theatre.

The Space Launches as a Pop-up Summer Platform for Digital Arts Projects

Today sees the (soft) launch of The Space, a collaboration between ACE and the BBC to create a pop-up online platform for digital cultural experiences. The site runs from 1 May until the end of October, and over that time will present work from 53 commissioned projects spanning Dance, Film, Literature and Spoken Word, Music, Performance & Festival, Theatre, and Visual & Media Arts.

Most of the projects aren’t running the entire six months, so at present the website only has a few offerings for each section. Worth a look though is the Dance category – to fill it out, they’ve surfaced some old dance for camera films that were made during the 90s and early 2000s as part of a project (again between ACE and the BBC) to pair directors with contemporary dance choreographers. Total Theatre would particularly recommend Tom Cairns and Aletta Collins’ Alistair Fish, which has this surreal hazy 90s vibe and is actually sort of about a man who’s trapped in an illusory dance for camera world (where he learns to love again; it’s got a definite and very charming Singing Detectivefeel).

Over the coming months we can expect projects from, among many others,Fuel (a film of Sound&Fury’s Kursk which ‘experiments with filming from the audience’s perspective in order to more closely mimic the immersive experience of watching it live’), Crying Out Loud (a documentary mini-series about contemporary circus), Sadler’s Wells (they’re actually doing two – basically broadcasts of Wah! Wah! Girls and Breakin’ Convention), Bristol Old Vic (something really vague sounding: ‘a unique and interactive way of replicating the emotional experience of watching live performance using the pioneering techniques developed by the BBC Natural History Unit’), Forkbeard Fantasy (an online game that takes inspiration from the company’s live and film work), Blast Theory (a new piece, I’d Hide You, that will ‘connect virtual worlds, video streaming and performers on the streets of Manchester’).

DIY 9 Call for Proposals – Pitch a Training / CPD Project

A collaborative initiative led by the Live Art Development Agency, the DIYseries presents opportunities for those working in live art to conceive and run unusual training and professional development projects for other artists.

Previous projects have covered practical and conceptual issues and have included: ‘city centre adventures; unexpected train journeys; a 24 hour immersive experience; rural retreats about art and activism; workshops about gut feelings and autobiologies; new approaches to artistic research, networking, collaboration and documentation; experiments around the impact of time in art; treasure hunts; skills swap shops; live and wireless video; a 1,000 mile bike ride; considerations of risk in performance; football leagues; dialogues around self and performance; urban audio recording/listening; hypothetical proposal development; personalising understandings of success; making the most of day jobs; unblocking and reinvigorating the creative spirit; camping trips; walking journeys; joke writing; professional wrestling intensives; GPS lessons: live twitter writing and intimacy in performance’.

Project proposals for the ninth DIY will need to take place between 1 August and 31 October 2012. They can take any form, and there’s no minimum or maximum length within the given date range. Up to eleven projects will be selected and will each receive £1000 to cover artists’ fees and expenses.

There’s more (much more) information here about DIY and the application process, including a series of thematic ideas and opportunities applicants can optionally respond to in pitching their projects: ‘Live Art, oil sponsorship and the Arab Spring’, ‘Live Art and Cornwall’, ‘Live Art and Whitstable Biennale’, ‘Live Art and Freedom’, ‘Live Art and Yorkshire Sculpture Park’, and ‘Creating a space to fail’.

The deadline for proposals is noon on 14 May 2012.