an industrial disintegration of a disintegrating industry.

glamour as a way of holding resentment

waste as a way of celebrating regret

excess as a way of cherishing disappointment

A new durational work from FK Alexander in collaboration with musician Andy Brown (Divorce/Stable/Ubre Blanca/Remember Remember) in which a 25+ year 1,000 piece CD collection is destroyed, soundtracked by distorted remixing of sonics, exploring the failure and bitter glamour of the creative industries.

In this new piece for 2020, FK Alexander takes as a starting point Nirvana's Record Producer Steve Albini's famous 1994 essay 'The Problem With Music'; an explosive and damning take down of the record industry at that time, detailing how exploited artists were by the system ; ''you cannot outsmart basic mathematics''.

Times may have changed, CDs may be obsolete but the precarity of the gig economy is real.

In a darkened music venue space filled with mirror balls and shards of obsolete media, FK Alexander and Andy Brown attack hundreds of CDs, the futility of ambition and the cruelty of consuming the callous fantasy of getting a big break.

Join a performance of discoveries.

Enter the workshop and the great outdoors. Julie and Robbie share their experiences of traversing terrain, exploring landscapes, sitting together and being still.

To Earth is about physical acts of cooperation and a close companionship. With simple ambitions, Robbie and Julie devise novel solutions to share otherwise inaccessible time and space together. Their actions are quiet and personal, bold and adventurous.

Performing their history through movement, talking, film and DIY, this is a space to move and be still, reflect and exchange.

In a world of difference, where lies the potential of doing and achieving more together? Where are we blending in and standing out?

Julie Cleves (London) and Robbie Synge (Nethy Bridge) first met ten years ago after an unsuccessful dance audition. They have been pursuing an individual and shared practice ever since. Their work has been supported by Metal, Siobhan Davies Dance, Dance North, Eden Court and Creative Scotland.

“To Earth is a tender portrait - 10 years in the making - of Julie & Robbie being, doing & encountering the world together.” — Ian Abbott

She is not present in their pornography. She is not found in their eroticisms.

She is not even a part of her own fantasy world.

CUTLASS SPRING is what sex might mean to me right now.

I will roam inside a question : How might I locate my sexual identity within a multitude of complimentary and seemingly contradictory identities – as a performer, as a mother, as a daughter, as a lover, as a stranger? I will map a sexual education – with all of its embodiments, fabrications, and disassociations. I will follow these trajectories toward their softest core so as to discover what I hold back and what I make explicit.

She will solicit her body and all of the many things that go with her person. She will realize what remains within her for sexual contemplation.

Inching towards uncensorship, engaging the infinite potential of everyday objects, CUTLASS SPRING is, at once, a manifesto and a heated reflection, an ethnography of sexual understanding and an archaeology of desire.
Dana Michel & Michael Nardone

DANA MICHEL is a Montreal-based choreographer and live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, sculpture, hip-hop, comedy, cinematography, dub, and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. Her audacious and original works have earned international attention and prestigious awards, including the Jardin d’Europe Award at ImPulsTanz (Vienna), the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale, and the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art.

What is happening, is really happening.

Step into a world of constant self-refinement. Two performers engage in a continuous verbal scuffle, bringing streams of empty promises into a gradually saturated space. Filled with voices and bodies, everything slowly crumbles into a non-place, stripped of meaning, of truth.

Absolutely, Awesome, Affirmative is a radical new project from Nic Green, exploring how we believe – in fact, in nature, in truth, and in ourselves – and how that belief can be targeted, twisted, and shaped into whatever we want it to be. Part TED talk, part shopping channel special, part showbiz hypnotism, the stage becomes a post-truth world of opulent theatricality, visual flair, and driving soundscapes.

In a world drowning in a flow of news, expert opinions, and more-or-less believable facts, is there any real meaning left? Or does everything stand completely void, lone symbols of the things they once signified?

Nic Green is an award-winning performance maker based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work is varied in style and method, with forms often found through collaborative and relational practices with people, place and material.

Her work has received several awards, commissions and recognitions including A Herald Angel, 'Best Production’ at Dublin Fringe, The Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance, Total Theatre Award for Best Physical/Visual Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Nic is the recipient of the Inaugural Forced Entertainment Award, in memory of Huw Chadbourn.

She is also an Associate Artist at National Theatre Scotland.

Molly & Lucy: Is it Too Hard to Be (A) Human? [Performance Lecture]

I have noticed a type of energy, possibly power emerge when I dance. Maybe it's a spirit, or a non-human force that is encouraging me to fall deep a kind of extreme physicality, to overthrow time, grace and logic. In this altered-nation of dance I am offered a glimpse of other ways of being and ways to re-negotiate my very human relationship with power, ambition and responsibility.

Molly & Lucy are creating a performance-lecture that seeks to find connections between the sprawling mass of information, theory, instinct & obscurity.

Molly & Lucy: The Moody Blues (Greyhound & Dancer) [Live installation]

A soft, padded space, a giant dog bed, a space for reclining, listening and embodying stillness.

This installation will be a meditation on companion species, kinships, parenthoods; on tired hopeless bodies, on exhaustion…….extinction. The public are invited to join, witness Molly & Lucy in their daily practice of being and reclining together. Molly is an ex racing greyhound aged 6; originally from Ireland, Lucy is a dance artist aged 42; originally from Yorkshire. Both bodies have endured extreme physical pressure, sometimes out of choice, nature, addiction and or survival.

“I only just got a bit of dirt under the nails with the last thing. Now wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig. So much debris! I couldn’t have predicted how much debris there would be and how much work I had created for myself in waking this beast. But they needed waking. I have seen the eyes and I’m circling, skipping, daintily lifting limbs and sniffing its scent. What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body? This is another science experiment. This is another ground on which to test skins that belong to me, outfits and ideas that may or may not have been imposed.” Dana Michel

In the wake of the acclaimed Yellow Towel, Mercurial George traces and transforms the banal, provoking a certain malaise. Sifting through the heaps of dusty clues leftover in the wake of initializing a cultural excavation, Dana Michel offers a destabilizing solo. The body vacillates as it struggles for balance and a toehold. Stretching out time with minimalist and deconstructed movement, Michel becomes the archeologist of her own persona.

DANA MICHEL is a Montreal-based choreographer and live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, sculpture, hip-hop, comedy, cinematography, dub, and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. Her audacious and original works have earned international attention and prestigious awards, including the Jardin d’Europe Award at ImPulsTanz (Vienna), the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale, and the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art for Mercurial George.

Life: LIVE! is a 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.

★★★★★ “a balls-to-the-wall skewering of the misogyny and exploitation that underpin popular culture” — GUARDIAN

★★★★ “Lucy McCormick has the moves of Beyonce, the lungs of Christina Aguilera and the morals of a punk iconoclast... as a comedian she is fearless. As a performer she is reckless... she is one of the most extraordinary and extreme performers around.” — SCOTSMAN

JEZEBEL is a dance production inspired by the Video Vixens: provocative female models who appeared in hip-hop videos on MTV in the late ’90s. The Vixens danced in revealing costumes to male-dominated music. But the influence they exercised could be great: often, the Vixens determined the aesthetic of these videos and so the popularity of the artist. They were hyper-sensual and lived by the Ride or Die stereotype, but at the same time were strong and independent.

Jezebel refuses to be defined by others. She navigates the hip-hop cultural landscape, looking for ways to claim her image for herself. Will Jezebel be able to deconstruct the controversial stereotype associated with the black hip-hop honey? How is this video girl redefining herself in 2019?

“Cherish Menzo is a rock-solid, captivating performer. In her solo Jezebel, premiered during the To Voice Festival at Frascati on 5 November, she revisits the video vixen, an ideal avatar to touch on very current and polemic debates such as new forms of feminism and misogyny in hip hop culture. A shorter version of the piece already earned her the Fringe Award 2019, and this polished premiere confirms: Menzo is a force to be reckoned with, not only as a dancer, but also as a brave maker of her own work.” — MOVEMENT EXPOSED

How we handle Things is a performance installation exploring the shifting relationships that we have with bodies, objects, memories and touch. Investigated through a contemporary lens, performers and audience build a landscape together – a mix of flesh and plastic, simultaneously revered and disposable. The environment is one akin to a laboratory, inviting us to contemplate interactions between body and object through dance, sculpture and conversation.

The work will ebb and flow throughout the duration of the day, meandering from near-static installation to a fluid, mobile landscape. The cycle of activity will repeat after approximately 50 minutes. Audiences are welcome to enter at any point during the day, and will be invited to take part in creating sculptural forms at the beginning of each cycle.

Mark Bleakley is an artist and choreographer based in Glasgow. This work is devised in order to invite guest artists to bring their own artistic enquiry into the work frame.

I am trying to listen to you,
To get to know you,
To mark and honour you,
To see what you have to say
And let you take centre stage.

Pain and I is a meditative, playful and bold exploration into living with chronic pain.

I have lived with chronic back pain for 18 years, and have largely related to my pain as a barrier to my life and work. For this performance I turn towards my pain as a creative collaborator, exploring it as an unwanted life partner and intimate companion. Through experimental movement and text, Pain and I acknowledges the hardships and celebrates the richness and complexities of chronic pain experience. [Sarah Hopfinger]

Sarah is an artist-researcher whose work sits between live art, dance and performance. She creates solo and collaborative choreographic work, often collaborating with child, adult, professional, nonprofessional, disabled and non-disabled performers. Sarah's artistic and academic work has been shown nationally and internationally with organisations such as South London Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre and Earth Matters on Stage (USA).

WORKING WITH CHILDREN is a choreographed essay that looks at the problem of intimacy and exposure by exploring the nature of performance and the curiosity of artists who make contemporary performance with children for an adult audience. Performed with a different group of children each time, whose only rehearsal consists of two 2-hour workshops prior to the performance, it is an attempt to perform a kind of radical and joyful vulnerability. With a seemingly unconnected collection of anecdotes that spin around a central core without ever naming it, the audience is invited to wonder about the effect of language on the body as five children learn choreography live in front of them. Through this accumulation of purposeless movements that are slowly built up and pieced together and a tangential, divergent monologue with vaguely orbiting ideas about appropriateness, shame, what we look to protect children from, ethics, empathy and imagination, language and power, there is created a tension between the children’s live copying, the authority of the artist and the audience’s gaze. The work plays with the idea that we can find a different way of behaving by finding a different way of inquiring and of listening.

“Nicola Gunn’s Working With Children deals a final, gorgeous blow. This is the dessert of performance – layered, rich and silly like a trifle ... things emerge out of this quite simple, formal structure to produce joy and surprise... It’s masterfully assembled” — EXEUNT

“The strands are mesmerisingly many. In a miraculous feat, Gunn weaves a thick narrative out of them, in which minute observations of life, descriptions of the legalities of making theatre with children and some wild guesses about perfect strangers come together into a layered question about ethics: what are we trying to protect children from, and who decides? ...Working with Children is a mature work of an artist who has defined her terms.” — GUARDIAN

ROUND 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit; ROUND 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat; ROUND 3. Whatchu Gonna Do: Marvelous like Marva

In this immersive solo work, Keijaun Thomas investigates and embodies resistance, asking: “How do we resist temptation, how do we slow down, how do we play, how do we survive?”

Thomas traverses a multimedia installation, combining structural fragments of environments associated with labour, ritual, and hospitality such as locker rooms, strip clubs, waiting rooms, church pews, and field days. Investigating forms through which black and brown people hold space for each other, Thomas asks, how to carry the multiplicities of being young, gifted and black, powerfully engaging with the entangled histories of labour, subjugation and resistance.

Keijaun Thomas’s work in performance, multimedia installation, and poetry explores the labour of black femmes, in situations ranging from housework and hairdressing to athletic training and exotic dancing. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, and her poems slip between various modes of address, exploring the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. Thomas underscores the endurance and intimacy care work demands of those expected to perform it – predominantly black women, black femmes and people of colour. Thomas is currently based in New York City.

…where this cycle comes back around, and in this knowing that’s felt. And of necessary burning, where these lines and edges blur, dissolve, give way, keep holding…

and floating in nothingness and nowhere and not knowing why we’re here or why those souls didn’t-

and i can’t find a place to go back to.

Premiere performance of sendiri, a Tramway Supports commission for artist Claricia Parinussa with musician / vocalist Alloysious Massaquoi and visual designer Sequoia Barnes.

Drawn from physical inquiries under research project the sky was pink; with sound and writings on existence, resonance, labour, and healing. On the conversations we can only have through our bodies.

Claricia Parinussa is a Glasgow-based artist with a movement research and performance practice. She is Associate Artist with Dance Base and has an ongoing body of work developing under the sky was pink.

“impressive ability to morph from delicate, traditional Indonesian head tilts and toe lifts to full body crumples and kinetic wigouts” — THE LIST

Soojin Chang (b.1991) presents an encounter and invitation into a world inhabited only by womxn and dog, combining audience interaction and sculptural elements over two 45-minute durations. Here, Chang presents the seed of a multispecies surrogacy dream, formed and un-formed as a sort of repetitive food-reward experiment – enacted by a continuously altered set of performers, composed of the artist, a female dog, and members of the audience. A small waxen grotto serves as an isolated capsule in which the interactions are carried out, though the ephemeral boundaries will be simultaneously transplanted on the exhibition walls in the form of a live feed.

Wild Breathing subverts the taste of disgust and shame in biopolitical exchange. It speaks of unpalatable consumption and dependence, of remaking politics with womxn and animals, and of orifices.

“Chang’s work blends performance art and cinema, addressing notions of time, memory, identity and technology.” — LOVE magazine

Part-social and part-salon, Take Me To Sunday School is a relaxed opportunity to think and talk critically about performance.

Drawing on some key ideas from theatre and performance studies, we’ll explore how such concepts might help us articulate our responses to work in this year’s festival programme. We’ll also chat about the ways that artists might draw on conceptual languages to articulate their own practice - and consider strategies for engaging with academic theories on our own terms. How can audiences and artists ask and answer questions through performance?

In the weeks running up to the event, we’ll be sharing some readings and clips to give us food for thought. These will be available free of charge, and in a range of accessible formats.

“I can feel its presence… it’s like the reply of an echo, or longing dressed as waiting, like the darkness dressed up as the night, and light dressed up as galaxies…”

Somewhere between clairvoyance and theatre criticism, A Sea of Troubles tensely exorcises the relationship between dominant theatrical tradition, masculinity, the burdens of language and the potential of the performing body.

Slow and silent, paranoid and muddled, a solo performer traces the ghosts of the performance space pulling us into a world that slips out of now-ness into strangely beautiful somewhere else-ness.

★★★★★ “a work which defies categorisation, and is all the stronger for it. McMaster and Ahl have created a world which slips and shifts, expands and diminishes like the intake and exhalation of breath, and with the expansive logic of a dream.” — A SPY IN THE STALLS

“An attempt to make something beautiful and true from shreds of discarded paper.”

Rhiannon will be in residence across Paisley & Glasgow libraries, inviting members of the public to work with her to write poetry around shreds of paper found in bins in the city and beyond.

The resulting Poems Made from Words Found in the Bin are animated and added to a growing collection, written by people in Portsmouth, Lincoln, Brighton and London. Look out for films of existing Poems Made from Words Found in the Bin, on show at various locations in Paisley and Glasgow throughout the festival.

The animated poems are then uploaded onto the Slow GIF Movement channel on Giphy, which allows your poem to be read and shared globally on messaging apps and social media. Once your poem is part of the collection it can go on to be screened in other places as the project travels, including (so far) advertising billboards in Brighton, Victorious Festival in Portsmouth, and Wellcome Collection in London.

Rhiannon Armstrong is the 2019 recipient of the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance. She makes works with empathy, interaction, and dialogue at their core, and brings the audience-focus of a theatre background to richly inclusive, interdisciplinary work. This work includes performance, installation, street interventions, web-based works and audio projects.

Recent work includes The Soothing Presence of Strangers for Waltham Forest Borough of Culture (an audio piece made to be listened to on a bus including field recordings, interviews with bus drivers, and original music). Rhiannon is currently undertaking research and development on a new work, The White Noise Factory, exploring tactile ways of making and experiencing sound.

Scottee grew up around mould, mice and clothes off the market. After a chance meeting with some posh kids, his Mum teaching him to talk proper and him successfully persuading his parents to take him off free school meals, Scottee knew he didn’t want to be common.

In his final solo show, Scottee uncovers what it is to be embarrassed about where you’re from and how you can pretend to be posher than you are, and explores why we all get a thrill playing god with green tokens from Waitrose.

Class isn't a show for those processing issues around domestic violence, food addiction and the effects of growing up in poverty.

This is a show for the middle classes.

★★★★★ “A brilliant, angry, damaged, brutal, savagely funny reflection on what it means growing up working-class” — ATTITUDE

★★★★ “Scottee creates theatres of discomfort… If you’re middle class, you might prefer to avoid a situation in which you’ll be caricatured, patronised or judged; not everyone, of course, has that luxury” — SCOTSMAN

★★★★ “It’s furious and chilling… Questions about collective responsibility, and who theatre is really for, are not always addressed in performance. Scottee goes there, because few other people do” — THE LIST

A sylphidic reverie in stunts with excessive attentiveness to the self

TANZ is the third part of the trilogy: Recovery, Apollon, TANZ. The trilogy deals with notions of practice through training of different physical disciplines on stage. TANZ takes early 19th century romantic ballet as a starting point. It uses the frame of a ballet class guided by Beatrice Schoenherr, the first ballerina who danced the Sacre de Printemps naked (John Neumeier, 1972).

In an operatic set up, brutal parodies of established images found in ballet, comedy and pornography are made in order to be watched from afar and up close. This industry of gaze finds its translation in the work of a porn producer who documents the performance from within. With an all-female cast of twenty to eighty-year-old performers who represent different dance backgrounds, TANZ poses the question what ‘dancing the lineage’ means and how to reconcile with tradition in the territory of the nonverbal and its relationship to beauty.

“Pitching witch against fairy, Florentina Holzinger’s TANZ bares the corporal discipline and punishment of romantic ballet through brutal parody and spectacular stunts” — SPRINGBACK

Ca va?

BUZZCUT are teaming up with the newest queers on the scene Bonjour Bar to shake off and celebrate the closing of BUZZCUT Festival 2020.

DJs and performances to be announced - but save the date and see ya on the dancefloor.

Thick Time Radio Station is made up of 10 artists from across Scotland and Europe and is part of Take Me Somewhere's commitment to relationship building between Scottish artists and the wider world.

The workshop will take place as part of Take Me Somewhere’s 2020 Scotland - Europe exchange programme.

This two-day Thick Time Radio Station workshop is designed to explore approaches to co-mentoring relationships between artists, blurring the boundaries between mentorship and making, between making and finding, and between finding and illuminating.

Strategies around the collaborative composition of new performance material will be used to respond to questions about development, as well as a way to reflect on and assess one's own and others' creative practice or desired trajectory. Making is a way to respond. Co-mentoring is reciprocal.

Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. With her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, she is engaged in creating a series of performances generated through collaborative performance-making processes. Karen was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. She now lives in the UK, working to define a practice which continues in a collaborative mode. Her focus is on artistic negotiation in the making process and finding non-traditional structures for working and composing live performance works.