Sitting in the lotus position on a mat of taped-together tennis towels, Jamie Wood meditated as the audience idled in. Every now and then he opened one eye to spot someone in the audience, picked up one of the tennis balls encircling him, pointed at the person, and threw it at them. Usually they caught […]

97 Years by Jo Hellier is an interactive installation, facilitated by the artist, in which the audience are given strings that control a delicately balanced soundscape featuring Jo’s granddad talking about his garden and his wife Marian. The composition of sound, film and performance has a light touch yet enormous emotional weight, evoking tears and […]

This May saw two major UK festivals – Brighton Festival and the Norfolk & Norwich Festival (NNF) – presenting a hefty amount of circus work from across the world. Unsurprisingly, Quebec and Australia were heavily represented… The Quebec crew first: it’s hard for outsiders (and even insiders) to understand how a circus company could come […]

Tempting Failure 2013 promised ‘an immersive experience of live art & noise’. It certainly delivered. Curated and produced by Thomas John Bacon, the festival is now in its second year. The setting? The Island, a disused police station situated at the heart of inner city Bristol. The site itself stank of a rich history of […]

This cleverly devised production from the Marlowe Studio’s first resident company seeks to deconstruct and explore memory and inheritance through visual metaphor, direct address and imagined meetings with long-dead relatives. The stimuli is John Berger’s semi-autobiographical book Here is Where We Meet, a disparate narrative which travels across Europe as the elderly protagonist ‘John’ reflects […]