From pitched rooftops to pitch-black rooms – Rebecca Nice explores performance and installation work seen and heard at Toynbee Studios in the opening weekend of SPILL Festival  A sunny Saturday afternoon on Commercial Street in the constantly-evolving East End of London, where local landmark Toynbee Hall (now Studios) is wedged between soaring new office buildings. […]

A House Repeated  is a video game stripped down to its framework of commands and voice prompts.  But these are described and narrated by Seith Kriebel and a female performer, who personify a virtual and specific site, revealing a fantastical imagined world based on Battersea Arts Centre itself. The duo divide the audience into two […]

Voodoo, debauched dancing, white-and-black minstrels, abused crucifixes, popcorn, twerking (culturally appropriated and otherwise), wigs, stilettos (knives and shoes), tits, bums, and a superb jazz drummer. Not your average night at the theatre. What exactly is it? Is it a gig? Is it performance art? Is it immersive theatre? Yes to all of the above. Merging […]

Stacy is greeting us as we come into the Marlborough Theatre’s cosy, pink, womb-like theatre space. She’s wearing a radio mic, but there’s also (80s pop) music playing, so her words are only just audible, which is rather nice – a kind of murmuring undercurrent. Everyone gets a hug or a smile or a wave […]

Churchill referred to it as something other, something outside of himself that followed him, haunted him and, on occasion, consumed him: the black dog. Stephen Fry has publically implored us to consider that there is nothing other about depression, that it is simply, incurably, a periodic aspect of personality that is simply there. There are […]