Earlier this year, our Going Global season was cancelled due to Covid-19. In the weeks that followed, we asked some of the artists whose performances were cut short or cancelled if they would like to share a version of their work online. Some of them had lockdown projects underway, some had filmed live performances just in time, while others have created something completely new. All were excited to come together and take part in our virtual love letter to Going Global.
Going Digital featured a film created during lockdown by Sleepwalk Collective, the filmed trilogy of The Spirit by New Perspectives and Thibault Delferiere, an online response to Rich Kids by Javaad Alipoor, a new live writing work from Jo Fong and Sonia Hughes and music from the album life: LIVE! by Lucy McCormick.
‘Created during lockdown – in isolation and at a distance – Swimming Pools: Home Movie is a homemade collage of phone videos and audio messages that we made for each other over four long weeks of talking and thinking and trying to find ways to be together, somehow, in the Spring of 2020.
It documents a chaotic, freeform attempt to recover a sense of intimacy and closeness through technology, and to imagine the show we will one day make when this is all over…’
Neither Here Nor There is a piece of work that slows us down and invites us to listen. Devised for Going Digital, The Sun’s Come Out is a new live writing work from Jo Fong and Sonia Hughes. Jo and Sonia sat by their windows and wrote what they saw, and they invited us to ‘listen in’ on their conversation as they connected at a distance.
‘So much happens in a week and a moment to “check in” sounds like therapy (it is and it isn’t). The Sun’s Come Out is somehow an exercise in observation… noticing the eggs being left off the shopping list, what colour the bathroom is going to be, how many people died yesterday or how well the people of Hong Kong have managed the pandemic. And all through this noticing how relentless spring is, it just keeps coming.’
The Sun’s Come Out happened live on Tue 2, Thu 4 & Sat 6 Jun at midday.
The Spirit is a mesmerising, viscerally intense trilogy of performances from one of Europe’s most distinctive and radical performance artists, Thibault Delferiere.
Set to live improvisation for solo instruments (performed by Giuseppe Lomeo, Steve Noble and Sharon Gal), these works explore how the human spirit can develop from servitude to freedom; in an explosive vision of the birth of the artist.
The Spirit premiered at Battersea Arts Centre Thu 27 Feb – Sat 14 March 2020 as part of the Going Global season. For Going Digital, we will be sharing all three live performances in full, captured on film just days before lockdown.
“Gripping” Reviewsgate
“Evocative” The Stage
“An enthralling performer. Creating chaos and beauty” Disability Arts Online
Musicians:
Part One: Giuseppe Lomeo (guitar)
Part Two: Steve Noble (drums) Giuseppe Lomeo (keyboard)
Part Three Sharon Gal (voice and electronics)
‘The three shows that make up The Spirit are each an example of a group of live performers (musicians and a performance artist) at the top of their game bringing their highly sophisticated languages together to create an unrepeatable live event. With no script, no score and no fixed map, the artists watch, listen, read each other and build together to generate an extraordinary level of tension, feeling and movement, conjuring the spirit of a performance rather than its narrative representation. Imagine one of Arthur Miller’s great tragedies stripped of all spoken language, characters, scenes or story, leaving us with a highly concentrated distillation of the play’s beating pulse in one continuously evolving live event. Each of the three works begins with a specific premise and the task of each performance is to push the existing world of the play up into a whole new philosophical dimension.’ – Jack McNamara, New Perspectives
Lucy McCormick
Life: LIVE! is subversive, immersive, pop concert spectacular imagined by nu-pop sensation Lucy McCormick, and her electrotrash Girl Squad. Featuring shonky-spectacular, stadium-chic live visuals created with artist Morven Mulgrew, and an album of original music, Life: LIVE! straddles stardom, self-care and redemption in a hilarious, crumbling, musical extravaganza.
We can’t give you Life: LIVE! in concert right now, but we took an exclusive sneak peek into footage from Lucy’s already iconic debut gig, with new songs taken from her accompanying album of original music.
Co-created by Javaad Alipoor & Kirsty Housley
The global gap between rich and poor is growing. As the world decays, the spawn of the powerful dance like everyone is watching.
This darkly comedic, dizzying show about entitlement, consumption and digital technology invites you to use Instagram to explore what is happening in the world.
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran was due to open at Battersea Arts Centre in April. Created during lockdown, this online reimagining blurred the lines between live and recorded, theatrical and digital.
‘In this online version of Rich Kids we want to find a way to bring a genuine interaction between the digital and the theatrical, to bring out the pervasiveness of the original work, and really explore those parts of the show that speak to the feeling that our world is falling apart.’
Javaad Alipoor
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran happened live on 29 Jun – 1 Jul.
“A provocative snapshot of a world speeding towards a cliff edge” ★★★★ The Guardian – read their review of Rich Kids and the rest of the Going Digital season here
#BACGoingDigital