This September I’m presenting both Commitment Phobe and Ways To Submit again, one in Germany and the other in Spain:

Commitment Phobe
Theaterszene Europa Festival, Cologne, Germany
Saturday 23rd September, 20:00
Tickets: €15/€7
Booking: studiobuehnekoeln.de/theaterszene-europa-2023

Ways To Submit
Festival TNT, Terrassa, Spain
Saturday 30th September
Tickets: €11
Booking: www.tnt.cat/en (on sale from 6th September)

Ahead of the premiere of Commitment Phobe, and it’s tour to The Yard in London, I wrote some things about the show, the process, and why I made it. You can read them here:

A blog for Run Riot.
An interview with Theatre Full Stop.

Enjoy. x

I’m excited to announce that my new show Commitment Phobe – which began as an idea back in 2020! – will premiere in April 2023, and then also be presented in London in May.

Commitment Phobe is an exploration of doubt in a society that values certainty. It is a response to a perceived social and cultural demand for the clear, the sure, and the consistent – ways that we are taught it is worthwhile and understandable for a person to be. It is about what it means to not know, to not choose, and to keep moving. 

Dates:
Frascati, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Wednesday 19th-Saturday 22nd April 2023, 21:00 (Premiere: Thursday 20th)
Tickets: €10-€15
Booking: www.frascatitheater.nl

NOW 23 @ The Yard, London, England
Tuesday 2nd-Saturday 6th May 2023, 21:00
Tickets: €15/€17
Booking: www.theyardtheatre.co.uk

The work is produced by Frascati Producties, in coproduction with wpZimmer, C-Takt, Festival Cement, and The Yard Theatre. Read more about the show here.

We’re starting 2023 (well, February) with some performances of Ways To Submit at CAMPO in Gent, Belgium. I’m very happy this work continues to have a life, and that I can share it with audiences again.

CAMPO Nieuwpoort, Gent, Belgium
Wednesday 1st & Thursday 2nd February 2023, 20:30
Tickets: €14/€12
Booking: www.campo.nu

An upcoming tour date for like the party has been cancelled:

Monty, Antwerpen, Belgium
Friday 23rd September, 20:30
Tickets: €15/€12/€10
Booking: monty.be

And we have a lovely new trailer below! Made by Tessel Schmidt.

like the party has been cancelled is a collage performance of cut up bodies, grafted animals, half landscapes, recomposed histories. A reflection on control, on losing yourself, and on desire. A show about wanting to build new things with old shit. ✂️

This summer I will be performing Ways To Submit again, for the first time in over two years. In 2020 touring of the work was abruptly cut short due to Covid-19 and – due to the nature of it – it’s been impossible to present it up until now (there is no ‘socially distanced’ version of the show!). So I’m super happy to finally be able to get onto the mat again with this piece.

I’ll be performing at Theaterfestival Boulevard, as part of the Afzender Cement programme, full details below – tickets are on sale from the 13th June.

Boulevard Festival, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
Friday 5th & Saturday 6th August 2022, 20:30
Tickets: €15/€13
Booking: festivalboulevard.nl

Read more about Ways To Submit here.

After several Covid-postponements, my new show like the party has been cancelled will finally premiere in March 2022.

It has been a long time coming, and I have a lot of complex thoughts and feelings about how these postponements and extensions of an artistic process affect the work, and affect the artists making the work. It feels exciting to put this project into the world, finally, and perhaps also a bit more fragile than usual. But I’m excited to share it with you, and for this work to find its completion. The show premieres at Festival Cement, and then will be in Frascati in April:

Festival Cement, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
21st-24th March 2022, various times
More info & tickets here

Frascati, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
8th & 9th April 2022, 21:00
More info & tickets here

Read more about the show here.

like the party has been cancelled is produced by Festival Cement, in co-production with Frascati Producties.

On Saturday 18th December I’m running a free practical workshop in Amsterdam at the invitation of IPOP, Queer Performance Pedagogy and Feedback platform.

Standing in the Way of Control is a workshop exploring notions of control and lack of control in live performance. How can we create practices and frameworks that allow us to not be fully in control, within the situation of a live work? Why might we want to?

I have for a long time been fascinated with ideas of control and power, both in my life and in my performance practice. My work is often pursuing ways to destabilise my own sense of control, and to trouble binary expectations of where the power lies. I have an interest in putting myself in particular embodied states, in finding a ‘looseness’ as a performer, and in letting go of the reins as a maker.

Together we will come up with and try out practical performance situations that can create, subvert, and play with dynamics of control and power. We will explore why this might be desirable, what it can do to us, and to the audience. Finally, we will think about what kind of strategies we can use to process the things that can occur when we make space for the unexpected.

Jodenbreestraat 3, Studio 410
Saturday, December 18th, 11:00 – 15:00
Sign-up by December 16th here.

I’m currently making Run Club, a new performance experiment in which you can accompany me on a run through the city, as part of the lone|some programme of Tender Absence. It’s a live piece, but experienced remotely from wherever you are, for one person at a time. The first showings are next week on 6th and 7th August, with more coming up in September!

Run Club is a remote audio performance for one person at a time. An invitation to walk or travel as the performer is running, elsewhere – or even run along if you like. Listen to the body in motion. It is sweating, breathing heavily, exerting itself. Let the runner be your guide. Go on a journey inside an unfamiliar body and through an unfamiliar place. You and the runner, terrains mapping over each other.

Tender Absence is a festival of playful and intimate digital experiences from artists all over the world. It runs from July to October 2021. To see the full programme, and to book tickets go to: td.ongoing-project.org.

I was invited to participate in a short digital residency with Coletivo Utopico, an international group of artists from Argentina, Switzerland, and Brazil: Paula Baró, Marina Quesada, Tomas Gonzalez, Igor Cardellini, Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis.

Performance Telling is a project that aims to share/recycle existing pieces through the respective prisms of different artists. We have composed four variations inspired by End Meeting For All by Forced Entertainment, questioning notions of togetherness and parasitism.

The residency is supported by LIFT in partnership with Pro Helvetia, and on Thursday 25th February (19:00 GMT) we will share work-in-progress presentations. It’s been a short and sweet process, and I think it’ll be a really nice set of experiments. The event is online and free but you need to book here.

Like many artists I have had work, touring, and other projects cancelled as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic and in response to regulations about distancing. One festival I am particularly sad not to be able to attend is Festival Theaterformen in Braunschweig, where Ways To Submit would have been part of the programme in July. In the absence of being able to host live performances, Theaterformen have conceived of an online festival, A Sea of Islands, for which I making an alternative contribution.

The practice of emptying space will be live online from 7pm (CET) on the 4th July until midnight on the 6th: theaterformen.de.

More about the new project:
Ways To Submit is a live performance that makes an invitation to the audience to have a physical fight. It asks strangers to be in close physical contact with the performer, and with each other. However much we try to not allow the current conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic to be the lens for our every experience, to separate our making and thinking from present limitations, it’s hard to be rid of the question: when will this be possible again? The practice of emptying space is the consequence of this preoccupation, an inter-disciplinary reflective essay in three pieces: a text, an image series, and an audio piece. It is part archive, part invitation, part meditation on fighting, power, and absent bodies.