Every Building Tells a Story (and every story collapses eventually)

 Every Building Tells a Story, Every Story Collapses Eventually 

A devised and performed by Luke Fairbotham, Andrew Roberts and Dani Mosimann

A devised performance created around themes and issues in architecture, construction and identity. An investigation in to how we live our lives and create our social worlds in relation to our environments. This performance mixes comedy, inventive visual techniques with surprisingly moving and poignant moments. Shedding an interesting light on a potentially mundane subject area.

Please come and see this premiere at New Stages Festival on March 3rd at Stage@Leeds £10 day ticket or £5 for just this. Click here  for event details.

Performance

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Dramaturg on The Grief Series

I have been appointed by acclaimed theatre-maker Ellie Harrison to work on an ambitious programme of seven artworks loosely based around the seven stages of grieving that can be found in popular psychology.

Each of the 7 works feature Ellie collaborating with an artist or maker from a different discpiline, including engineers, photographers and web-designers.

I am currently working on research materials that will be shown upon the website.

You can see Ellie’s portfolio of works at http://www.ellieharrison.org/, Grief Series website to come soon.

Boredom Exhibtion

http://www.facebook.com/events/151727791603660/

31st January 2012
6-9pm
The Leeds Library
18 Commercial Street, LS1 6AL Leeds, United Kingdom

Come to the Cure to Boredom Exhibition to see my exciting new art work.
The Sometimes Profound Pain of Boredom is an exploration of the sometimes productive nature of boredom. The piece draws parallels being the pain of being bored and mindless drawing by creating a quasi-permanent place for these drawings to be presented: The artists body.

Boredom

Boredom: a condition that everybody somehow accepts, a fundamental emotion that affects each person while differing from body to body.

“Walking is not included in the salary” Henry Ford.

One could say that the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the notion of boredom, especially when Taylorism and Fordism reached their heights. Before this period in time there was simply no time for leisure or free time to occur unless you were in the fortunate upper classes. There was simply work, eat and sleep, in that order, until you died. The notion of taking leisure time was simply unheard of in the general mass of the population, as you would simply starve. The social gap between the rich and poor was very prominent. This resonates in a contemporary setting as well. This can emphasize on the point of social control within the masses, and what is “free time”? The time is lived by everyone, for example “the invention of free time” is a new invention, and is really the victory of realization of time. In other words, there is a limited time for working and a limited time again is reserved for entertainment as “free time”.

In Bertrand Russell’s essay In the Praise of Idleness he highlights idleness as a fundamental act of happiness and prosperity in modern civilised countries, stating “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” Russell states that idleness was a necessary period of a person’s day where he/she could reflect on their actions and take the time of better themselves, be it through meditation, introspection or even the development of arts, crafts and other hobbies. Can we propose that the viewpoint of an artist is a privileged one? To take ones time in reflection of ones self and work. A job that doesn’t need to be conformed and sculpted by a system in which “Time” is everything?

Th exhibition is looking into the condition of boredom, and what avenues can arise from the emotion. The artists involved are looking into historical and contemporary merit of what is boredom, while some are looking at this on a more personal note. The exhibition contents are as diverse from audio, photographs, video, performance and music.

That Dark Horse

That Dark Horse are a new performance collective founded by Antonia Beck and Andrew Roberts. That Dark Horse make research led performance that question the audience’s complicity in performance, whilst maintaining an entertaining and approachable style.

That Dark Horse have been selected to perform at A Working Title festival, Lincoln, UK from the 25th to the 27th November. For this performance we will be creating an interactive installation within a venue (TBC) and a headphone guided walk along the canal towpath in Lincoln, where the participant will encounter live performance, projections and live and recorded sound-scaping.

The aim of the proejct is to highlight and bring together various networks;

the canal network

the network of people that use the canal

social media networks to document the experience

We look forward to seeing you in Lincoln.

 

I took part in what is billed as a group action, organised by http://www.artevict.com last year. And I do not know what to expect, and I am, as ever, sceptical that something that consists of so many random unplanned fragments could actually mean anything. The idea for the performance was basically ‘do what you want’.

The performance event begins by one artist walking at speed in circles around the space, whilst another rhythmically stamps face to face with one of the walls. I am, at this point, still sceptical. However some of the events that transpire really affect me. There is a moment where one artist is shouting, A GHOST, over and over and over and over, whilst holding up a plank of wood over his head, the conviction in his tone really added to the dramatic-lie he was telling, we all knew it was a plank of wood, but he seemed convinced of ghost. This was uncannily resembled when another artist mirrors his body shape but is holding a plant, the image is uncanny.

I am always relieved to hear words spoken at live art events.

My other favourite spotting amongst this chaos is a girl who is dancing, as if in a nightclub, to no music. She seems to be having a truly enjoyable time. I kept asking the question to myself ‘is she just really pissed, or is she aware that she is performing, and in this moment I decide that her performance could tell a hundred stories about the performance of social dancing, in clubs, at raves, in the bedroom, on ones own.

Myself, and a friend I have dragged into the performance, are using the detritus of a previous performance. We are tearing up flammable cotton-wool stuff, halving it, passing it to each other, repeating the process, until we end up with millions of tiny pieces of cotton wool. The action is hypnotic for the performer, the mountain of fluff seems to expand, and I find it pleasing to see the product of a meaningless process build up…just as we come to an end of the process, another performer comes over and sets the pile alight. I find this to be deeply beautiful, so much time spent doing a task, then it goes up in flames.

String is wrapping the pillars, people are entwined in it, people are becoming entwined in the architecture of the space, people are viscerally and visually responding to the space, people are showing their own style of art within a wider umbrella of the group action, non artists are joining in, people are looking to see what they can add, what can they to improve this mess, what can they do to take it further?

I am passed the string and carry on wrapping it around and around.

Left at the Theatre

Currently restructuring the way Left at the Theatre operate. Hoping to attain more members of the collective so we can look to make fresh new collaborative works. It is a challenge to get people in the same place at the same time, work commitments interfere, I have erratic hours, RM is studying a PGCE, AB is working in Brimingham and others are based in the north. However this struggle is somehow positive. It is giving me time to scrutinise Left at the Theatres output, from Clutching at straws which we have shown in numerous guises and various festivals and showcase nights, to Intimacy which was a long slow grind, until production day when everything seemed totally worthwhile. I am also deliberating all of the failed studio experiments that Rachel and I have played with.

Without this long stretch of studio time where we created movement pieces based on flirtation, or awkwardness, that piece where scratching was a motif, or the time we experimented with random narratives, writing sentences, rearranging, creating stories to entwine them, the improvisation, the musical stimulus, were all ghosts of performances yet to be actualised. To conceive an idea of to make a performance about, first we must start making, we make blindly, and we agree, and we disagree, and we scrap, and we edit, and we redo, until eventually something is created…or discarded.

Considering this maximal studio practice I am pleasantly surprised with Clutching at Straws aesthetic values, it is somehow poetic in its minimalism, 2 bodies, one glass, a bottle of wine. We would never have physicalised this if we hadn’t improvised a scene about relationship breakdowns.

So now I am looking at Left at the Theatre from a more business like approach, understanfing our strengths and weaknesses, aiming to discover our values, our objectives. And this is giving me great hope, I am lookign forward to collaborating with a wider range of artists, to establishing a shared vision, and to taking this project to a new level.