April 2012 – Fierce Festival
Uninvited Guests and Ron Athey
at TROVE for Fierce Festival, 2012
Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, Uninvited Guests (UK)
Sat 31st March & Sun 1 April, 9.30pm
Let’s raise our glasses to long lost loves and current lovers, to mums, to dads and to absent friends. Uninvited Guests stage an event that is somewhere between a wedding reception, a wake and a radio dedication show. We speak of our own and other’s loves – deep, passionate, ambivalent and unrequited – and dedicate songs to them.Using dedications contributed before the event, the performers recite words exclusively written by those in the audience, creating unique content for every show that is then interspersed with back-to-back songs played in an amateur DJ battle.
Audience and performers are seated at two long tables, where cava is served, toasts are made and speeches given, continuing the company’s practice of blurring the lines between theatre and social festivity. If you want to join us on this happy occasion, send a dedication to someone you love to info@uninvited-guests.net.
Uninvited Guests is a UK/German company founded in 1998 and based in Bristol. They are dedicated to producing innovative, collaborative and challenging work that uses the high-tech and low-tech, visceral and virtual, new and second-hand material, to produce original and ground-breaking performance pieces. Love Letters Straight From Your Heart is presented alongside another show from this company Make Better Please during Fierce at two separate but historically resonant sites. http://www.uninvited-guests.net/home
A BAC Scratch and an Arnolfini We Live Here commission. Also commissioned by Leeds Met Studio Theatre. Produced by Fuel, presented in association with mac.
Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing, Ron Athey (US)
Sat 7 April, 9pm
A performance installation conceived, scored and directed by Ron Athey with automatic composition and music performance by Othon Mataragas. Ron Athey will read extracts from his memoir, Gifts of the Spirit, accompanied by 16 automatic writers, a piano, 6 typists, 4 editors, 1 reader, and a glossolalia chorus – all in a hypnotic trance. The performance focuses upon notions of channelling through automatic writing. This performance is sited in TROVE, Birmingham’s former science museum and the setting of Dominic Johnson’s Departure in Fierce 2011.
Ron Athey has a rich association with Fierce Festival notably through his curation of the multi-artform platform Visions of Excess which featured scores of invited artists in Fierce 2003. Athey has been a crucial figure in the development of performance art, body art, club performance; the intersections between punk, queer and alternative cultures; sexual politics, specifically in relation to queer practices and the politics of HIV/AIDS; and the representation of religion and ritual.www.ronathey.com/bio.pdf
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