Rachel Mars comes to Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts this Saturday, 21 October, with Our Carnal Hearts. 

Our Carnal Hearts comes to us hot off a run at Edinburgh Fringe which received rave reviews.

Rachel tells us more…

“Our Carnal Hearts is a performance that is a cross between theatre, comedy and singing session and constantly takes you from laughter to dead seriousness. It’s a show about envy, competition and the way we screw eachother over.  Envy is a really taboo subject - so it provides a place to think about the grubbier bits of ourselves and how we can live with them. It puts success and achievement under the microscope. It is performed by me with a four-strong female chorus, who sing a brilliant, beautiful and raucous score composed by Louise Mothersole. We perform it in the round - it’s intimate, funny, and political, and asks questions of the current social climate. 

Inspiration comes from multiple sources. The show began as a thought after the London Riots in 2011, seeing how a reaction to an injustice turned quickly into looting and an accumulation of ‘stuff.’ I was really thinking about the pressures we all have on us to compete, to own things, to look over our shoulders at the next guy. I read a lot of material about the psychology, anthropology and sociology of envy, interviewed marketing experts, advertising lecturers, business people, and friends about their attitudes to envy. I also got very into the Sacred Harp singing tradition, for the sheer joyous un-self-conscious noise it creates.

I wouldn’t call the show a musical. It has almost constant singing going on but not ‘numbers’. I was interested in choirs, the act of singing together and the way that makes us feel brilliant and like a community, but also how that feeling of togetherness can easily be manipulated by people in power. It allows the show to ask questions about communities and individuals. I love the notion of singing the unspeakable, of coming together and being in harmony on issues that are deeply personal and normally experienced alone. Music, and especially the unaccompanied human voice, hits an emotional (and unconscious sometimes) nerve when you hear it. I find it can move me even when I’m not consenting to be moved. I watched a lot of musicals growing up, and that moment when the huge choral number comes in, even if the sentiment is questionable, it is so powerful. It’s hugely seductive, so to experiment with it as a thing both of beauty and to express troubling concepts was very satisfying. 

Audiences are generally entertained, thrilled and slightly prodded - they go away considering all the ways their own envy has had an impact on them and the way they operate in the world. It’s a joyous show, you’ve been singing, you’ve been told stories and by the end you wonder how you are implicated .I hope they’ll have had some time to think about their own relationship to envy. To wrestle with it, reclaim it and not immediately find it shameful. I hope they’ll take away a sense of the complexity of our current attitude to competition. I hope they’ll have laughed at things that are both funny and a bit awful. I think it can be a joyful and cathartic experience. Plus, they’ll learn a great line to use when anyone they know achieves something that makes them feel not entirely delighted.. Plus, audiences will learn a great line to use when anyone they know achieves something that makes them feel not entirely delighted.” 

Tickets include Pay What You Decide and can be purchased here: http://bit.ly/2zchFe0

Ahead of their visit we spoke to Helena Webb from South East Dance about Dad Dancing. 

Could anyone ever persuade you to take your dance moves to the stage? 

Meet three brave dads who agreed to dance with their daughters in a new show.  Joined by a supporting cast of fathers, sons and daughters of all ages, they fearlessly slip and slide their way through their similarities and differences, hopes and regrets to a soundtrack including Beethoven, Whitney Houston and Pendulum.

Reclaiming ‘dad dancing’ from the cynics, this dynamic group of performers encourage us all to dance our own dance with joy.

Here’s what Helena said…

• Where did the idea for Dad Dancing come from?

The idea for Dad Dancing came when Alex, Rosie and I were training at Laban. Our dads would come to see our shows and would be totally bemused. Or, they would conjure up these deep and meaningful narratives from abstract work. So we decided to invite them into the studio so they could see what we actually do! Once we started working with them, we began to think more and more about how often men are riddiculed for their dancing and we wanted to flip that on it’s head and celebrate their moves. 

• Is it a very personal project?

It is! Try inviting your family to work with you and see if it can be impersonal! It has also become more politically personal for me, I really believe in the ideals of the show; that everyone can dance and that dancing together can transform relationships.

• How many participants will be performing?

In Brighton we have 22 father-figures, sons and daughters of all ages joining Alex, Rosie and I and our dads on stage. 

• Have you started rehearsing?

Yes, we actually started working on Dad Dancing in 2012! The re-working for this tour started in July this year though. And workshops with the local cast began in August. 

• What do you want the audience to take from the performance?

We hope that audience members leave with a real belief in dancing! We imagine their responses to the show will be as varied as the relationships they have to their fathers. It is really important to us that we don’t just tell one story, we hope that everyone hears stories they can relate to in this show.

Dad Dancing will be at ACCA on Friday 27 October at 8pm. Book tickets now. Pay what you decide tickets are available. http://bit.ly/2yBOuBl

The idea of exposing moments of human solitary… where did that come from?  

We originally made a 5-minute solo piece called End of the World Cabaret featuring the performer Silvia Mercuriali - she is sealed inside a case lying on a bed of grass. For this piece, we were thinking more about how people use limited space, about how we can be oppressed or liberated by this. But obviously, she is very much alone. As we expanded the production, gradually adding more new solo pieces, the theme of how we see and frame solitary moments and individual lives came more and more to the fore. 

Why was it vital for you to put this on at this time?

We have often revisited earlier work – (our piece for choir and dancers Silver Swan has been in repertoire since 1999; Red Ladies since 2005). The themes of Under Glass - how we see and are seen -  are if anything, even more in the public’s mind than in 2009 when we last performed this version of the piece. I think there is something timeless about it – not quite located in any particular moment in history.    

Tell us about the rehearsal process…. 

 It’s a very unusual rehearsal process: because all of the performers are in vessels of some kind, they can’t see or hear each other and can’t interact as they would in a conventional production. Much of the time we are working with just one performer at a time and slowly knitting the whole thing together. 

 What do you want an audience member to take from the piece?

Our work is quite open - there is no prescribed message to take home. Perhaps people will consider how they use space themselves or find a moment of unexpected beauty in something very everyday. Perhaps some moment will move them or they will feel or hear something they didn’t expect to. It’s quite an uncanny experience seeing performers that close up and looking at small details in such a concentrated way. Sometimes it feels like looking through a microscope – there are moments when the whole thing has a meditative effect.

How would you describe the work of Clod Ensemble? 

 It appeals to people who like dance, music, visual art and theatre.  In terms of form – the relationship between movement and music is central. In terms of ideas – we often play with ideas about negotiation of space, power, the chorus or group, and anatomy and movement.  Some of our performances take place in in theatres, others in galleries or public spaces. We work with dancers, musicians, and actors. Many of our productions have no spoken word at all - but Under Glass has a beautiful text called Village specially written by poet Alice Oswald, which is woven into the sound track.

 What’s next for Clod Ensemble?

We’re working on a new piece with dancers, called Placebo, and are planning a new piece based on a Charles Mingus piece for big band in 2018.

Clod Ensemble with be at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts from November 1-4, with Under Glass. 

Images: Manuel Vason. 

Any Table Any Room is a performance conceived and created by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, which invites four local artists to join them onstage in each new space. For the Brighton shows, the two artists will be joined by Janine Fletcher, Claire Godsmark. Sue MacLaine and Scott Smith.

We spoke to Jonathan Burrows as he prepared for the show. 

Where did the idea come from for Any Table Any Room?

The starting point of Any Table Any Room was me wondering about the pleasure of doing things together in time with other people, and at the same time the way that doing things together might limit your choices as an individual. So the six performers in this piece share a score, but all the time we must negotiate how to be together, or how to allow each other not to be together. And as we worked on the piece we found words that we sing, from popular music and theoretical texts, which also question what community may or may not be. The piece is at times quite chaotic and I love that chaos, and in other moments you get this sense of togetherness which resonates. 

The Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts is the opening of the piece, but in each place we visit afterwards, beginning in Coventry, Brussels, Oslo and Essen, Matteo and I will invite six local artists to join us onstage after a three day rehearsal period. The short time of meeting before we perform, comes from the observation that there’s nothing better than watching experienced performers fly by the seats of their pants.

How did you get involved working with Matteo Fargion?

Matteo and I have worked together for 27 years, for the past 15 of which we’ve toured constantly around the world to share this growing collection of pieces we’ve made, all of which are somehow a kind of physicalised music. He’s a composer by training and I was a ballet dancer with the Royal Ballet for many years, so we met over our love of formal means and our love of disrupting formal means.

Tell me a bit about the artists who will join you onstage…

We have a wonderful cast in Brighton, with theatre luminary Sue MacLaine, choreographer and performer Janine Fletcher, dancer Claire Godsmark and legendary dance improviser and musician Scott Smith. This was the group of people who helped us slowly develop the piece over the past year, so that it’s ready to go on the road with changing casts.

What do you want the audience to take from the experience?

Choreography is different from theatre in that the meanings are often less stable, more a combination of intuitive empathetic response, and a constant and quite virtuosic reading of fleeting references and emotional states. Human beings are brilliant at reading these kinds of pieces and everyone knows when it makes sense to them.

What’s next for you?

Matteo and I work hard to create the elbow room to do things that we haven’t yet had permission to do. For our last project we were commissioned to make an interruption in a large scale orchestral concert of Schubert in Switzerland. The conductor sacked us after the morning rehearsal, then changed his mind 30 minutes before it started and we did the interruption and got a standing ovation. I’ve never been so frightened in my life. For the next project we’ve formed a one-off rock band for an event in Bergen. It seemed like a good idea at the time and now I wake up at night thinking why, what were we thinking? 

What are you working on?

After the performance at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Matteo and I go to Havana to perform. Then Matteo has shows of an extraordinary choir piece he’s written for the Norwegian choreographer Mette Edvardsen, where the choir suddenly sing from the audience after a long series of spoken and LED texts. And I return to a research project at Coventry University where we’re looking at the language people use to describe why dance seems good or important, and the possibility that the value of dancing might be exactly that it resists attempts to quantify or assess it, almost like it has no concrete value and that is its value, which is somehow liberating.

Any Table Any Room will be at ACCA on 17 October at 8pm. 

Tickets are here including Pay What You Decide- http://bit.ly/2xZhEcP

We are in partnership with Dreamland Cinema for a very special screening of the 1962 cult horror film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Set in an old Hollywood mansion, inhabited by Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), former child star turned horror dame, and her paraplegic sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) whom she’s holding captive.

We are so excited about this and have some information on the original screening sent to us by Dreamland Cinema to get you in the mood. 

In the early 1960s, Warner Bros sent packages of lobby cards to cinemas in order to advertise the upcoming release. These cards were typical of cinema-marketing at the time, usually depicting scenes from the film or headshots of its leading actors. The What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Cards were slightly different, however. 

These cards came with instructions:

“Things you should know about this motion picture before buying a ticket:

1. If you’re long-standing fans of Miss Davis and Miss Crawford, we warn you this is quite unlike anything they’ve ever done.

2. You are urged to see it from the beginning.

3. Be prepared for the macabre and the terrifying.

4. We ask your pledge to keep the shocking climax a secret.

5. When the tension begins to build, try to remember it’s just a movie.”

With this original marketing campaign in mind, Dreamland Cinema suggest the following instructions for those of you planning to attend our October 8 screening of this classic.

1. Reacquaint yourself with the careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, specifically their heydays of the 1930s and 40s. For Joan, try Mildred Pierce and Grand Hotel, while All About Eve and Jezebel serve as a good introduction to Bette.

2. Stop washing your face for the foreseeable future. Just keep on slathering on that make-up and by the time October 8 is here, you’ll be Baby-Jane beautiful.

3. Start thinking up creative recipes. We hear parakeet and rat are the ingredients of the season.

4. Call your sister. Make amends for any wrong you’ve caused her. Then invite her along to the screening.

5. And finally, don’t neglect to pre-book your ticket here.

We will be showing What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? on Sunday 8 October at 5:30pm. A perfect way to end a weekend on or off campus. 

The weeklong programme at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts as part of this year’s Brighton Digital Festival is the most ambitious programme of contemporary electronic music to hit Brighton since the Loop Festival, almost ten years ago. The opening night (Tuesday 19th) ends a summer long collaboration between Warp Records veterans (and perennial totallyradio favourites) Plaid and Brighton born audio visual sculptor Felix Thorn. Felix’s Machines are visually stunning tactile sculptures built from layers of deconstructed acoustic instruments, toys and mechanical equipment.  Plaid have the ability to meld abstract electronic composition with physical and organic instrumentation. I’m looking forward to whirring, blinking, bleeping, living machines on September 19! 

Vicki Bennett’s People Like Us (Wednesday 20th), a double bill with extraordinary cellist and composer Oliver Coates, ‘began life on totallyradio’s forerunner - Brighton’s Festival Radio, as a show called Gobstopper in 1990, where Vicki re-constructed cut up ‘plunderphonics’ with audio cassettes.’ She has since released around 20 solo albums based on her radio sound collages broadcast on the grandaddy of freeform radio stations, WFMU in New York and her work has been seen at; Tate Modern, The National Film Theatre, The ICA, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and at Sonar in Barcelona. Unlike many of her chin stroking contemporaries, there is always a mischievous and surreal humour to her performance. By contrast, Holly Herndon’s music (Thursday 21 September) is unashamedly cerebral. Music, voice, deconstructed samples, the laptop and her own image are integral in a quest to divine emotion in sound and vision at the cutting edge of technology coupled with an overtly political questioning of consumerism and the nature of personal and private space. The enigmatic Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, closing the festival (Saturday 23 September) is also unmissable and equally uncompromising, but unlike Holly, offers no manifesto, subtitle or explanation in his exploration of the synthesis between the “data of sound” and “sound of data.”  It must be seen, heard and felt - be prepared for an out of body experience, if you enjoy that kind of thing! 

Totally Radio will be broadcasting across the week with us – see more here: https://www.totallyradio.com

Oliver Coates is one of today’s most sought after contemporary cellists. Having travelled all over the world to play his music, he has also collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack and Radiohead. 

He graduated from the Royal Academy of Music with the highest grade in the history of the institution. He has gone on to be awarded many a musical accolade and on Wednesday 20 September he comes to ACCA for an evening of music and visuals. 

We spoke to Oliver about the development of his work…

 Do different venues affect how you play or what you play?

Yes massively - the shape and size of the room, I like to see a picture of it before the day, and also to find out how the audience will be configured in relation to the performance area.

 How important is collaboration to any piece of work?

I guess music doesn’t exist without collaboration at all, because listening activates it, so I feel a performer is collaborating with the audience. Also a dialogue or a tension with another human spirals into an network of association and detail based upon multiple lives.

 How did you get involved with Laurence Lek?

We met online through a mutual appreciate of the music and art we were making. We later found out we went to the same school at the same time for a year when we were much younger. It’s like a polyphony his first person movement and the music I play.

You studied at Royal Academy of Music…was it a very traditional education? Were you able to explore music in the digital age?

CD’s and computers existed before I was born so I’ve always been able to explore music in the digital age. I studied classical music and cello playing mostly at the RAM but it’s also where I first heard some pretty avant garde stuff, like Nono and Kagal and the European 20th century hardcore stuff.

 How did you get involved with Brighton Digital Festival?

Not really sure and yet I’ve been looking forward to this show for a long time.

How important is technology now when it comes to art and music?

I’m a bit unusual maybe but I think a cello or a piano or a pencil is a piece of technology. A piece of software or a lighting desk is another instrument, which you need to learn and figure out how to do good stuff with. Digital processes are well handy because so much information can be tracked, saved and stored. I adjust curves and tweak sounds in my laptop all the time, I think I do it as much as my left hand micro-adjusts the pitch on the cello, measuring of millimetres which I’ve been doing since I was a child. The balance between being free with technological possibility, or the sophistication of an endless craft, and somehow having the discipline to limit yourself to a single set of variables and focus on making something of quality is the most important thing.

We are really looking forward to welcoming Oliver Coates with visuals from Laurence Lek at 8pm Wednesday 20 September. 

Vicki Bennett, best known for her audio-visual collages, will also be playing on this night. She is recognised as an influential and pioneering figure in the still growing area of sampling, appropriation and cutting up found footage and archives. 

We have attached a video for you as well to get an idea of the work Oliver produces.

Visit our what’s on page for tickets. 

The Autumn season at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts is now upon us. To celebrate, we have rounded up the best bits of our first year to get you in the mood for things to come this season.