NOW NOT NOW Workshop: Exploring multi-temporal realities

Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill & Tim Spooner

Saturday 12 September 2026 | 10am–1pm
Free

National Theatre of Scotland (directions)

We are a collective of UK based artists with specialisms in sound, performance, set design, and visual art, who created The Making of Pinocchio.

In this workshop we will share our current research and process towards our new show - NOW NOT NOW, an ambitious, multi-media project exploring time, sensation and our perception of reality.

We will invite you to take part in some of our multi-tempo experiments, where scenes happen at the same time, at different speeds, on top of each other. This is an opportunity to experience this performance mode from the inside, with clear guidance and instructions throughout. We will record this so that we can watch it back together during the session, experimenting with speed in the playback.

We centre playfulness, curiosity and experimentation in our practice. This workshop is suitable for artists and performers who are interested in experimenting with us from a fun and open-minded perspective.

MORE ABOUT THE SHOW: As four artists nearing what could be the 'middle' of our life, at a time when we are being told all the time that time is running out, we began this process with a desire to wrestle with finitude and open up our understanding of 'time' beyond human made structures.

We are working towards NOW NOT NOW, a performance work which plays out in different tempos simultaneously. Multiple time-worlds co-exist in a polyphonic assemblage, sometimes touching, or coming in sync. Through camera capture and replay at different speeds we bring attention to and understanding of different temporal experiences and glimpse other realities.

About the Facilitators

Cade & MacAskill is an award-winning performance company creating and presenting performances for adults and children, touring locally, nationally and internationally. It’s led by Rosana Cade (they/them) and Ivor MacAskill (he/him): renowned queer artists and facilitators based in Glasgow, Scotland. Their work straddles the worlds of experimental contemporary theatre, live art, queer cabaret, film, children’s performance, site specific, and socially engaged practices.

Their collaboration is born from a shared love of subversive humour, experimentation with persona and text, playful theatricality, and the joy they find in improvising together. They also share a passion for LGBTQIA+ rights and culture. They work with regular collaborators Yas Clarke and Tim Spooner to create strange and rich aesthetic worlds on stage, often embedding cameras and live feed into the work. From 2019- 2022 they collaborated to create the multi-award-winning international hit, The Making of Pinocchio. NOW NOT NOW is the next collaboration between Rosana Cade, Yas Clarke, Ivor MacAskill, and Tim Spooner.

Rosana Cade is known for some of their intimate one-on-one performance works, like My Big Sister Taught Me The Lap Dance and Walking:Holding, the latter of which has toured to over 40 different locations in the past 15 years, collaborating with local participants in each place. They are also the co-founder of radical performance collective BUZZCUT (Glasgow). www.rosanacade.co.uk

Yas Clarke (he/they) is a composer and sound artist best known for his original scores across dance, live art and theatre. His collaborative performance work has toured internationally to critical acclaim and recognition including multiple selections for British Council Showcase / Horizon, Made In Scotland, and Offie awards. Yas’s live work has toured worldwide extensively and his recorded works have been aired on networks including BBC, WFMU and NTS. He is a 2023 Horizon residency artist, associate artist of Interval Bristol, and a member of BEEF and The Brunswick Club.

Ivor MacAskill has been creating unique performances for both adults and children for over 20 years. His humorous works are both experimental and entertaining while making the familiar strange. He is one half of The Polar Bears who have toured internationally with their performances for young children, and he is respected as an expert in creating challenging work for children, particularly around gender and sexuality. As well as a maker and performer, he is often a director, dramaturg, mentor, and panelist.

Tim Spooner works in performance, painting and sculpture, aiming for new strong flavours which are strange and alluring. Fundamentally interested in unpredictability, his work is an exercise in balancing control with a lack of it in the handling of the materials and processes he is working with. His performance works (The Assembly of Animals, The Voice of Nature, The Telescope…) aim to reveal life in material, and have been presented extensively in theatres and galleries in the UK, Europe and Asia. Since 2021 he’s made several large-scale installations of moving sculpture. A New Kind of Animal, a retrospective exhibition was presented at Southwark Park Galleries (London) and Bluecoat (Liverpool) in 2023-4. Most recently he collaborated with Terrapin Puppet Theatre (Tasmania) to make the performance MATTER ERA. As a designer he works with Cade & MacAskill, Lea Anderson, Thick & Tight, Jules Cunningham and others. He lives and works in Cornwall. www.timspooner.com

Access Notes

National Theatre Rockvilla has step-free access throughout as well as accessible bathrooms on both levels and a lift to the second floor. You can find full venue access specification here.

If you have access requirements or questions about the session, please contact studio@takemesomewhere.co.uk. Please give us at least 2 weeks notice for BSL support.