Amsterdam Workshop: Standing in the Way of Control

Date : December 11, 2021

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.


Tender Absence: Run Club, 6th & 7th August, 17th & 18th September

Date : July 29, 2021

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.


‘Performance Telling’ with Coletivo Utopico, Thursday 25th February

Date : February 22, 2021

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.


Festival Cement 2021 postponed: (like) the party has been cancelled

Date : February 20, 2021

I was due to present a new performance project, (like) the party has been cancelled, at Festival Cement in Den Bosch in March 2021. Due to ongoing lockdown restrictions and Covid-19 the festival has unfortunately (but understandably) been postponed.

Planning is underway for Cement Op Reis (Cement on Tour), which will hopefully present the works that were part of this year’s festival in different cities in Noord-Brabant later this summer. More on that as soon as there is more on that..! And more about the show below.

Like The Party Promo Image 800 wide

The party has been cancelled, and we’re staying home.
It looks like a mess out there.

This is a show about the impulse to bring order to mess, and the impulse to disrupt order. A collage performance of cut up bodies, grafted animals, half landscapes, recomposed histories, dissected worlds.

(like) the party has been cancelled is a reflection on meaning-making, and on personal, political, and cultural, systems of control. An intuitive, meditative, image trip, that attempts to burst its own banks and flood the room. With you in it.


Festival Theaterformen: The Practice of Emptying Space

Date : June 12, 2020

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.


A needs graph for Veem House for Performance

Date : June 11, 2020

Veem House for Performance, in Amsterdam, invited artists and members of their community to reflect on and communicate their current experience of the Covid-19 pandemic through poetic graphs. I made this one for them, in response to how my needs were changing throughout the first 10 weeks of the lockdown.

Needs Graph I.Brand


A new project for Fraslab, 12th-14th March

Date : February 23, 2020

I am very happy to have been invited by Frascati in Amsterdam to participate in their Fraslab programme this Spring. I’ll be spending a few weeks in the studio, starting to work on the research for a new performance project. There will be some (very first!) public sharings of the research on the 12th, 13th & 14th March, in a double bill with Jessie L’Herminez. Full details and tickets here: frascatitheater.nl.

This new project is called Commitment Phobe (for now!), and here’s something I wrote for Frascati about what I will be working on:

Commitment Phobe will explore (and celebrate) multiplicity, inconsistency, ambiguity, and doubt. It is a response to a perceived social and cultural demand for the clear, the certain, and the consistent – ways that we are taught it is worthwhile and understandable for a person to be. How can we conceive of doubt as a tool? How can we value ambiguity without making ourselves powerless?

For Fraslab, Ira will engage in a series of formal experiments, with a focus on the relationship between performer and audience, and the uncontrollable qualities of live performance. Ira’s process is often one of starting with broad conceptual questions, translating them into something embodied, visceral, human, and playful, and for Fraslab she will attempt to do the same. 


Ways To Submit on tour in 2020

Date : December 30, 2019

It’s almost a new year, GOODBYE 2019! I’m very happy to be continuing to tour Ways To Submit into 2020. Some already confirmed dates below, and watch this space for more..

Maketank, for SCARE THE HORSES, Exeter, UK
Friday 17th January 2020, 7.30pm
Tickets on sale soon: scarethehorses.uk
(SCARE THE HORSES is a live performance and events club. You can join as a member and subscribe for the year, or buy tickets for each individual event.)

Monty Kultuurfaktorij, Antwerpen, Belgium
Thursday 13th & Friday 14th February 2020, 8.30pm
Tickets: €12/€10
Booking: monty.be

Festival Cement, Den Bosch, Netherlands
Tuesday 24th March 2020 @ 5pm, Wednesday 25th March 2020 @ 7pm & Thursday 26th March 2020 @ 9pm
Tickets: €15/€11.50 (or buy a festival pass!)

More programme info: festivalcement.nl

 


FIAC Festival: A Residency in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Date : October 19, 2019

I am in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, participating in a two-week exchange residency. The project is a collaboration between Forest Fringe and FIAC Bahia Festival, who are hosting us. I am working alongside Deborah Pearson, and three Brazilian artists – Roberta Nascimento, Laís Machado & Lenine Guevara – sharing our artistic practices, ideas, concerns, questions, strategies, and needs. So far it is proving to richly stimulating and exciting, and I am very inspired to be working with these women.

There will be an open studio sharing on Friday 25th October at 10am, for members of the public to share in our exchange also: fiacbahia.com


Review: Ways To Submit, Frascati Amsterdam

Date : October 13, 2019

Here’s a review of the recent performance of Ways To Submit at Frascati from Theaterkrant. It’s in Dutch! But google translate assures me it says some very nice things about the show, and that the reviewer would have liked to have seen the work a second time.

Read it at: theaterkrant.nl


Ways To Submit on tour & new trailer

Date : September 20, 2019

Ways To Submit is touring..

I’ve also just released a new trailer for the show, made by the brilliant Claire Nolan. Check it out below!

Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam
Wednesday 2nd & Thursday 3rd October, 9pm
Tickets: €13/€9.50
Booking: frascatitheater.nl

New Queers on the Block, Folkestone Quarterhouse
Friday 1st November, 7.30pm
Tickets: Pay what you decide

Booking: creativefolkestone.org.uk
More info about NQOTB here.

Arnolfini, Bristol
Friday 8th November, 7.30pm
As part of the expanded programme of Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance
Tickets: £12/£10
Booking: arnolfini.org.uk