Staycation Residencies 2016
Staycations @ CDS: A chance to use our artistic home to experiment at whatever pace feels appropriate. No outputs necessary.
Throughout the month of August, CDS is once again running a residency for artists that need space to begin creating work with no requirement for outcome.
This year we will be supporting four different projects between both our studios. Staycation will be running parallel to the development of new work as part of Small Spaces Commission.
Staycationers 2016:
Studio for Electronic Theatre
Jo Cork
Nando Messias
Joe Wild
Studio for Electronic Theatre (SET)
About the project:
Jo Cork
About Jo:
CDS Artist Member Jo Cork has choreographed work for Liverpool’s LEAP Dance Festival and Ludus Dance Cuts, and danced in works by Lea Anderson and Frauke Requardt, Kate Jackson, Ruth Tyson-Jones, Fleur Darkin and Gary Clarke. She has also worked with Temporeare Theatre in Berlin, London Symphony Orchestra and Brooklyn based choreographer, Elizabeth Streb. Jo has been an active member of the artistic community at Chisenhale Dance Space since 2013 and is working as choreographer and performer with digital arts company, Studio for Electronic Theatre. She is working with Stopgap Dance Company over Summer 2016 and is currently screening her film, Sensate, in international and UK events and festivals.
Nando Messias
About Nando:
CDS Artist Member Nando Messias‘ work straddles performance art, dance and theatre. His performances combine beautiful images with a fierce critique of gender, visibility and violence. He has performed at prestigious venues such as Hayward Gallery, V&A, Tate Tanks, Roundhouse, Royal Vauxhall Tavern and ICA, among other spaces across the UK. He has also worked extensively on the international circuit.
As well as a practitioner, Nando is movement director for Theo Adams Company and an academic of queer theory and performance. In May 2016, Theo Adams Company presented Safety Curtain as part of Channel 4’s Random Acts. Nando recently had a chapter published in Queer Dramaturgies (Palgave Macmillan) entitled Sissy that Walk: The Sissy’s Progress.
Most recently Nando has completed a national tour of The Sissy’s Progress to much acclaim and press interest. The tour saw performances at prestigious LGBTQ festivals SHOUT! (Birmingham), OUTBURST (Belfast), Pink Fringe (Brighton) and Homotopia (Liverpool), as well as a run at Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios London.
About the project:
Shoot the Sissy straddles dance-theatre and performance art. The premise is a freak show, placing the Sissy in the category of General Tom Thumb, the Elephant Man and the Hottentot Venus.
The piece is based on an existing 3-minute performance in my repertoire, in which the public throws tomatoes at me. In extending it, I work with collaborators to compose original music and create a portable tent-style set. Punters purchase ammunition as admission and shoot the sissy with paintball, tomatoes, custard pies, etc. Accompanying the piece is a separate lecture on the mechanisms of gender.
The freak show theme stresses my somatic difference. The mode is highly intimate, drawing on my earliest memories–arguably well-intentioned attempts by my parents to erase my sissiness. I take physical risks in this performance and confront the ordinary, everyday danger of death inherent in the queer condition–essential for an audience to feel. A murky figure of oppression evokes dread and beauty. So too, black music anthems encourage consideration of whether ‘queer lives matter.’ The show’s itinerant circus aesthetic doubts whether a queer subject can have a place in the world.
Joe Wild
About Joe:
Joe Wild is a theatre-maker, with a specialism in movement and the body. He trained as a choreographer and dancer at Laban and as a Movement Director at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He is an associate artist with Mary Bijou Cabaret and Social Club. His most recent solo project, The Joe Wild Sex Tapes has been performed at Buzzcut Festival, Steakhouse Live, Forest Fringe, Latitude and Dance Live.
“Joe Wild’s solo piece Sex Tapes, disconcerts by his willingness to give so much of himself to an audience of one – he’s astonishingly vulnerable as he creates an uncomfortably intimate dance that elastic-band flicks you into his life, like a passive observer implanted under his skin.”
About the project:
Ways out – working title
This seed of a research project sets out to map the body as a landscape of sensual and emotional experience. Activating a space where romantic relationships become a site for social and political dialogue. Through movement and conversation, detaching desire and companionship from patriarchal ideas of ownership: ownership of the physical body, ownership of experience, ownership of the possibility to change.
Creating, then carefully deconstructing, a safe-space to understand better my own (male) sexual vulnerability. Finding the ways absence of touch in my life has affected me. Finding ways absence of touch might be feeding negative power systems. Finding touch.