Now 18 at The Yard Theatre
The Yard Theatre, London will be kicking off the new year with NOW 18, their annual festival of radical performance, returning Tuesday 16 January- Saturday 17 February.
Since The Yard Theatre’s founding six years ago, the promotion of work that is unapologetically live has been the driver of its programme, with the work of extraordinary artists at the heart of this. 2014 saw the very first NOW festival with 20 artists using performance to explore what it meant to be here and now. Four years on, NOW 18 continues to celebrate the uncompromising and unpredictable live event. This year it will welcome 10 shows from some of the leading artists in contemporary performance, dealing with subjects ranging from gender, spirituality, disability and sex to Curious George and Michael Barrymore.
Over five weeks, five double-bills of shows that are loud, raw, rowdy, political and messy will each play on The Yard stage for five nights. Opening NOW 18 is a double-bill from Stacy Makishi and Lucy Hutson. Stacy’s new show, The Comforter, uses 80’s/90’s pop culture, ritual and disco to reclaim spirituality. Following it is Bi-curious George and Other Sidekicks, a show by Lucy Huston and her dad- a children’s entertainer and Punch and Judy man extraordinaire.
The second week of NOW 18 sees a double-bill of double-acts. Tomas Jefanovas’ video visuals fuse with Christopher Brett Bailey’s machine gun poetry to create the chaotic and cosmic RATED X. The other collaboration- Moot Moot -sees queer artist-lovers Rosana Cade and Eilidh MacAskill morph into doppelgänger radio hosts Barry and Barry to conduct a surreal phone-in talk show in their outer-space echo chamber.
Katy Baird and Katherine Araniello make up the third double-bill of NOW 18. The third week sees the very first outing of artist and activist Katy Baird’s new show Unreal, about feeling lost in your thoughts and failures. It will be followed by The Araniello Show, a show by Katherine Araniello, which uses subversive humour to pay homage to pity porn, sympathy and the impaired.
Week four of NOW 18 welcomes Nick Cassenbaum and Rachel Mars. Nick pays homage to his childhood hero Michael Barrymore in My Kind of Michael and Rachel shares filthy sex and love letters she has unearthed from dead people like Mozart and Frida Kahlo in Your Sexts Are Shit.
Rounding off NOW 18 is a double-bill from Anton Mirto and Emma Frankland. Anton’s show, The Army sees women marching for healing, purpose and power. In Hearty, the final show of NOW 18, Emma uses conversations with women from around the world to explore HRT, attitudes to menopause and the liberation of her own body as a transgender woman.
See the breakdown of the programme in full detail here.
Categories: Featured Activity
Date Posted: 23 November 2017