Author Archives: SummerhallTV

Rachel Mars : Our Carnal Hearts

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Venue: The Dissection Room, Summerhall

Dates: 15th to the 26th of August

‘A Welcome! To you and to me and our spikey, sticky, shameful bits!’

With a raucous chorus of original music, award-winning theatre maker Rachel Mars and four belting female singers bring you a gleeful, dark show about the hidden workings of envy. Part symphony, part exorcism, Our Carnal Hearts is a thrilling and murky celebration of desire, competition and all the times we screw each other over. Performed with a surround-sound choral score by Louise Mothersole, it comes to Summerhall after sell-outs across the UK and US.

Tom Cuffe : Kiki Origami Festival

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26 August – 3 September
Portlaoise, Portlaoise, County Laois, Ireland

The Kiki Theatre & Performance Group are proud to present
The Kiki Origami Festival! The festival will run from Saturday, August 26th until Sunday, September 3rd.

This is a great event, not to be missed. We’ll have something for everyone, for people of all ages and abilities.

Rachel Baynton : A Machine They’re Secretly Building

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Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

Dates: 15th to the 27th of August

From what might be a news desk, an office, a bunker under a mountain or a theatre – two people speak up, speak out and blow the whistle on the insidious machine of surveillance. A Machine they’re Secretly Building charts a course from the ‘Top Secret’ secrets of WWI intelligence (via the moon, 1972’s Chess World Championships, a disco in Oklahoma and the cafeteria at CERN) through to 9/11, the erosion of privacy, Edward Snowden, and the terror of a future that might already be upon us.

MJ Ashton : Vagina Dialogues

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Dates: 17th to the 27th of August

Venue: Upper Church

Trigger warning – subjects of rape and sexual assault.

The Völvas is an international feminist performance ensemble. The Vagina Dialogues is a cabaret-style theatre and variety piece that includes a series of episodic monologues, duologues, and movement pieces set to live music. The work is innately feminist, humorous, grotesque and, let’s face it, a little bit nude in its approach.

Timeau De Keyser & Hans Mortelmans : Ivona, Princess of Burgundia

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Venue: Upper Church, Summerhall

Dates: 15th to the 27th of August

Tibaldus, made up of Timeau De Keyser, Hans Mortelmans and Simon De Winne, is one of Belgium’s most exciting and innovative young companies. Their work is fierce, surprising and thrilling. They now team up with five other actors and dancers to create a bold and radical contemporary reworking of Witold Gombrowicz’s (known as the Shakespeare of Poland) ground-breaking masterpiece.

Johan Bark & Chris Mawson : The Crossing Place

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Venue: Upper Church

Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

‘Three strangers meet in the middle of nowhere, in a Crossing Place far from the communications network of civilisation. In their meeting, the last untouched space is tarnished forever’.

The first ever English-speaking production, based on poetry by Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Crossing Place is a fast-paced, visual and highly physical piece exploring loneliness, anxiety and desire. An abstract journey exploring the human’s relationship to nature, and himself, performed to Tranströmer’s poetry, and musical scores by Franz Schubert. Devised in Tallinn, Estonia, by experimental theatre company Romantika.

Julie Cafmeyer : Bombastic Declaration Of Love

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Venue: Anatomy Lecture Theatre

Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Photos of ex-boyfriends, emails, texts, audio recordings and poetry. Struggling with her love life, Julie Cafmeyer experiences orgasms, despair, rejection and heaven. In an intimate setting, and with you the audience, she strives to create a genuine connection. A show that’s both vulnerable yet utterly fearless, giving us an insight into the heartaches that we all share. Fascinated by human dynamics, Julie pushes the boundaries of the private atmosphere and utilizes the spectator as an intimate participant in her work.

Rose Frain : This Time In History, What Escapes / Afghanistan

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Dates: 2nd August to the 24th of September

Venue: Demarco European Art Foundation – 1st Floor Corridor

This Time in History, What Escapes is an installation about Afghanistan, where the humanitarian and political crisis continues and ISIL / Islamic State is gaining ground.

The work conveys the rupture in military masculinity since the withdrawal of Nato troops, and the symmetric pan-cultural erasures of women: “what escapes” conventional reportage.

The materials used have both direct and symbolic significance, referencing the rich mineral resources of Afghanistan, including gold, lapis lazuli and copper; a blue burka as worn by Afghan women and survival kit used by the UK armed forces.

What Escapes cites Chelsea Manning the WikiLeaks informer who was recently released from Military prison in the US, having as Bradley Manning leaked the Afghan War Logs and other sensitive material. The work also references Alexander Blackman, known as “Marine A”, recently freed from prison in Wiltshire, his conviction for murder (of a Taliban fighter) under the Geneva Convention having been reduced to manslaughter.

The opium trade flourishes.

Rose Frain has been closely following the geo-political situation in Afghanistan ever since the US led bombing of November 2001 in reprisal for the attacks of ‘9/11’. She has also spent time in Alexandria, Egypt, just prior to the uprisings there and her work Alexandria Light – part of the extended and continuing project This Time in History – is considered to have been prescient.

Supported by:

Hope Scott Trust

Highlander

Vestey Foods

KSLD

Hazel Egan : High tide

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25 July – 27 August 2017

Dunamaise Arts Centre
Co. Laois

High Tide’ is an exhibition in response to climate change and global instability.
Due to pollution and the excessive burning of fossil fuels, the natural balance of everyday life is disrupted as ice caps melt and sea levels rise. ‘The damaging effects on the environment are becoming more and more extreme. Egan’s practice draws on the threat of drastic change and the anxiety of an uncertain future.

Pauline Mayer : What If I Told You

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Dates: 11th to the 26th of August

Venue: Army Reserve Centre, 89 East Claremont St

Let’s spend an hour playing together. As members of The Mayers Ensemble we’ll explore boundaries, personal histories, gender, race. Throughout her life, choreographer Pauline has defied assumptions made about her based on gender, background and skin colour. Now we are invited into this skilful blend of theatre and dance as she tells her story and the history that has informed it. The story of James Sims, self-ascribed “father of modern gynaecology” who operated on slaves without anaesthetic weaves through Pauline’s own. After the show, Koan: What If You Told Us takes the conversation further, an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas.

What If I Told You is written and performed by Pauline Mayers and directed by Chris Goode. It was developed at West Yorkshire Playhouse and is a co-production by The Mayers Ensemble and West Yorkshire Playhouse

Suzanne Grotenhuis – On Ice:De Nwe Tijd

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Upper Church

The young performer Suzanne Grotenhuis won a prize for her previous theatre show at a Belgian theatre festival. The money was meant to produce a new show. But she decided to spend the entire prize money on buying an actual ice skating rink. Why she did that and why this ice skating rink somehow seems to be the solution for a broken heart, will be revealed in her funny, absurd and moving show On Ice.

Annoushka Hempel, Maya Bastian & Radhika Hettiarachchi : Return: In Search Of Stillness

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Dates: 2nd of August to the 24th of September

Venue:Sciennes Gallery

supported by British Council Sri Lanka
Curated by: Colombo Art Biennale
Artistic Director Annoushka Hempel

The Sri Lankan VA programme presented at the 2017 Festival is a journey of installation, visual and performance art, curated to explore the push and pull within community histories and individual memories of past violence, ongoing provocations, and the myriad of hopeful possibilities that exist within Sri Lanka’s still tenuous peace. In essence it is the exploration of the value, risks, and processes of healing.

Colombo Art Biennale (CAB) holds the position as the largest and most internationally recognized contemporary art manifestation in Sri Lanka. Amidst the civil armed conflict in 2009, CAB was launched to harness the power of contemporary Sri Lankan art as a channel to communicate needed social change. CAB recently completed a successful fourth edition.Drawing from artists that have participated in the Colombo Art Biennale since its inception in 2009, ‘RETURN: in search of stillness’, presents a multi-media visual representation by eleven visual artists and 3 installation projects from Sri Lanka and of Sri Lankan inspiration, to deliver a visual trajectory of catharsis, displacement, exit and stillness.

‘RETURN: in search of stillness’ is gratefully supported by a number of organizations and individuals with special thanks to British Council Sri Lanka.

Works include internationally acclaimed performance artist Venuri Perera’s look into barriers of entry and experiences of interrogation at airport immigration. Sovereign Asian Art award winner Pala Pothupitiya’s view into the politics of cartography. Photojournalist Abdul Halik Azeez’s religious intolerance in Sri Lanka. Anoli Perera’s gender and colonial discourse. Mixed-media artist Kanesh Thabendran’s visualizations of the missing, and Vijitharan M’s look into the wheel of war in politics.
Other highlights in the documentarian vein include BBC and Al Jazeera featured UK-SL filmmaker Kannan Arunnasalam’s shorts on diverse Sri Lankan identities. Researcher Radhika Hettiarachchi’s work based on the ‘Herstories’ Archive of life histories of women across Sri Lanka.

Rounding off the visual arts programme will be Anup Vega’s performance-installation piece enacting pan-religious rituals. Sujeewa Kumari’s interactive space within which audiences can engage with the timeless order of nature. Diaspora artists’ Rajni Perera’s take on the politics of cultural identity, and Maya Bastian’s new-media collage dealing with dissonance and reconciliation within shared family memories of trauma. Finally, there is Alex Stewart, a British artist who has been visiting Sri Lanka since 1993, crafting story-telling exhibits that celebrate both the whimsical and hard-truths of Sri Lankan life and folklore to much local acclaim.

Annoushka Hempel is the founding Director of the Colombo Art Biennale (2009) and Hempel Galleries (2003) in Sri Lanka. She graduated in Art History & Social Anthropology at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and went on to become head research assistant for The History of North African Art by Werner Gillon before moving to Sri Lanka in 2004.

FK Alexander : (I Could Go On Singing) Over The Rainbow

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Dates: 11th to the 27th of August

Venue: Basement

FK Alexander returns with her Total Theatre Award-winning sell-out 2016 show. FK sings live against a wall of noise music, to the recording of the last time Judy Garland ever sang Over The Rainbow, recorded four months before Garland’s death. This performance is an intimate, interactive experience of undivided attention and love, for a small number of people at a time. Stand hand in hand with FK, and witness others do the same. With live accompaniment from Glasgow-based noise band Okishima Island Tourist Association.

The audience is free to come and go as they please in the durational performances (12, 19, 26 August) This ‘durational’ work allows you to come and go as you please during the performance of the piece. Due to to the artists experience, expectations and the nature of the work there is certain amount of oversell. We have a fixed capacity for the room, at the point it is full we will operate as ‘one in one out’

Elinor Cook : Out of Love

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4th – 27th august 2017
Venue: Roundabout, Summerhall

Lorna and Grace do everything together. They share crisps, cigarettes and crushes. That’s what happens when you’re best friends forever. But when Lorna gets a place at University, and Grace gets pregnant, they suddenly find themselves in starkly different worlds. Can anything bridge the gap between them?

A tale of friendship, love and rivalry over thirty years from award-winning playwright Elinor Cook.

Elinor Cook is the Winner of the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright (2013).

Ellie Dubois : No Show

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Old Lab, Summerhall

New contemporary all-female circus from award winning director Ellie Dubois, last seen at Summerhall with Ringside in 2015. What do you expect when you go to the circus? The glitzy smiles, the glitter of sequins, the drum rolls as performers effortlessly perform death-defying acts? No Show joyously and heartbreakingly goes behind the flawless smiles and perfect execution to reveal the wobbles, the pain, and the real cost of aiming for perfection. There will be desperate attempts and heroic failures, glorious achievements and bruised bodies and egos. A show for anyone who has tried, failed and failed better.

James Cousins : Rosalind

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Dates: 4th to the 26th of August

Venue: Main Hall

Rising star choreographer Cousins takes one of Shakespeare’s most beloved heroines, the curious and courageous Rosalind, and asks whether women still need to emulate stereotypical masculinity to find equality in our modern world. Rosalind ventures through the modern metropolis – by day, ordered and traditional, by night, a neon wonderland. She is on a quest for enlightenment, driven by both love and oppression.

Commissioned by the British Council as part of Shakespeare Lives. Co-commissioned by Arts Council Korea, The Place and Tramway, Glasgow.

Jari Juutine : I Am Faransis W.

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Dates: 6th to the 27th of August

Venue: Old Lab

A new play by award-winning Finnish playwright-director Jari Juutinen based loosely on Büchner’s classic Woyzeck. A theatrical kaleidoscope and a mixture of a TV game show, interrogation and a Kafkaesque nightmare, it asks where the world is going now as we define our neighbours by colour, religion, nationality – or just by our day-to-day prejudices or intuitions.

Ben Caplan & Christian Barry : Old Stock A Refugee Love Story

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Dates:5th to the 27th of August

Venue: Kings Hall, Main Space, Summerhall

Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is a humorously dark folk tale woven together with a high-energy concert. This music-theatre hybrid starring international Klezmer sensation Ben Caplan is inspired by the true stories of Jewish Romanian refugees coming to Canada in 1908. It’s about how to love after being broken by the horrors of war. It’s about looking into the eyes of God.

Alison Colborne & Joyce Lee : MIA Daughters Of Fortune

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Dates: 8th to the 27th of August

Venue: Old Lab, Summerhall

Having kids is not an easy decision. Now imagine you have a learning disability… Woah! Can they do that? Do they even have sex? Yes, yes ‘they’ do. Fast moving, raw and eye-opening, Mia explores the truths and myths about learning disability and parenthood in today’s society. Think pop culture with popcorn, science with silliness, stories with statistics. A Mind the Gap production created and directed by Joyce Ngayu Lee, performed by four learning-disabled artists.

Erik Bassier and Kathleen Wijnen : Arm

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Demonstration Room, Summerhall

Mireille & Mathieu unpack their paraphernalia at a flea-market. Objects and toys they pick up turn out to be bursting with stories. Gentle, poetic, cruel or comical scenes follow in a happy delirium of absurd experiments. One of Belgium’s oldest and legendary absurdist companies makes its Edinburgh debut as part of Big in Belgium 2017.

Tom Poulson : The Last Post

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Dates: 17th to the 22nd of August

Venue: Army Reserve Centre, 89 East Claremont St

One man’s love letters from the front line. Towards the close of WW2, Army signaller Dennis Marshall wrote a series of moving letters to his fiancée, tracing his journey and his experiences. Dennis’ grandson, trumpeter Tom Poulson, with composer Alistair MacDonald and director Susan Worsfold, explores these letters in an extraordinary immersive performance, with music reflecting the technology and sounds of the era. Inspired by the Last Post bugle call, the work is a very personal exploration of war and memory in an intimate setting, where audiences can experience the letters together.

Stephen Sutcliffe : Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs

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28 July – 30 September 2017
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs takes its title from a damming review of David Storey’s novel ‘Radcliffe’, which was critical of all the qualities Sutcliffe admires, namely its bleak, alienating narrative and ‘garrulous’ characters. The exhibition pulls at the seams of identity, expanding upon recurrent themes in Sutcliffe’s work: self-doubt, obsession, cultural constructs and class conflict. Central to the exhibition, one of two new video works draws parallels between the story of Radcliffe and the unrequited homosexual fixations of British filmmaker, Lindsay Anderson, toward possessive actor, Richard Harris. The exhibition also features a collection of working notes and images from Sutcliffe’s personal archive associated with previous video works, placing emphasis on the central role of collage within his creative thought. Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs marks the publication of the first catalogue exclusively dedicated to Sutcliffe’s work, with essay and interview contributions from Ilsa Colsell, Michelle Cotton and Dan Fox.

‘Radcliffe’ is referenced within the exhibition with the kind permission of the Estate of David Storey.

Rachel Bagshaw Melanie Wilson & Hannah McPake : The Shape of the Pain

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Dates: 2nd to the 26th of August

Venue: Old Lab, Summerhall

I don’t have to remember being in pain. I’m not sure that’s something we can do anyway. And in my case, it’s irrelevant. You can’t remember something that’s still happening.

One woman attempts to articulate her experience of physical pain. Pain with no apparent cause. Also, she’s met someone, and they want to make this work. A new show from a Fringe First award-winning team exploring life in extremity and the joy that can be found there.

Commissioned by Battersea Arts Centre / The New Wolsey Theatre. Supported by artsdepot. Funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Amina Khayyam : Slut

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Old Lab, Summerhall

I saw him looking at me when I danced, I saw the look in his eyes, I knew what he wanted to call me…

Slut is a Kathak dance theatre piece exploring issues of sexual grooming across culture and race while challenging labels given to women who do not conform to expectation. Amina Khayyam Dance Co (AKDC) is a UK dance–theatre company that makes new work using the south Asian dance Kathak as a contemporary storytelling form, alongside theatre, live art, and technology.

Chen-Cheih Sun : The Backyard Story

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: The Red Lecture Theatre

Summerhall favourites Puppet Beings Theatre combine traditional Taiwanese puppet arts with the use of contemporary everyday objects, allowing adults and children to exert their imaginations. In The Backyard Story, a red balloon breathes life into clothes that have been hung out to dry by two women. Let your imagination run free as the jackets, shirts, dresses and trousers make friends and form relationships, reflecting those between parents, children and others. When you get home, can you make your clothes come to life like these?

Paul Smith, Marc Graham & Bryony Davies : All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Roundabout

Meet Leah and Chris; raised on Harry Potter, New Labour and a belief they would be special. But what happens when dreams don’t become reality? Set over three decades, from Cool Britannia to Brexit Britain, this is gig theatre from the award-winning team behind Weekend Rockstars.

Jacob Kerray : LOOKY LOOKY

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28 July – 30 September 2017
Talbot Rice, Edinburgh

For his TRG3 commission Jacob Kerray has been invited to explore and respond to the University of Edinburgh’s vast Art Collection to create a new work, or series of works, for the Talbot Rice Round Room.

Kerray’s work draws on the visual cultures that surround his main interests – particularly football, pro wrestling and historical painting. Engaging with the hierarchies of culture, social distraction, mob mentality, myth, belief and taste.

Usually realized as paintings, they are revisions of redundant fantasies. Observing the role of the deification, myth/media faith and power, their relationships with morality and attempts as a culture to achieve a consumable reified thread throughout history, that uses pictures and words as manipulative tools of magic for both ambivalent ‘good and evil’.

Thomas Eccleshare : Heather

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Cairns Lecture Theatre

A reclusive children’s writer becomes wildly successful. Her books are treasured across the country. But when a troubling narrative starts to unfold, we find ourselves asking: what matters more, the storyteller or the story? Brilliantly imaginative and theatrically original, Heather is a short, sharp play about language, prejudice and the power of stories. Thomas Eccleshare is the Verity Bargate Award-winning writer of Pastoral and the co-artistic director of Arches Brick Award winning company Dancing Brick.

Low Pei Fen : The Heart Of Darkness

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Cairns Lecture Theatre

Taipei-based Sun Son Theatre fuses instrument, voice, body, drama, ritual and environment, traditional and folk elements, symbolic objects and contemporary theatre to explore the inner self. Its work is characterised by an organic performance energy free from racial and cultural boundaries. Heart of Darkness is inspired by choreographer Low Pei-Fen’s grandmother, her long life gradually eaten away by time. It uses the symbol of her long hair and ritualistic imagery to describe a woman’s journey through life; her aspiration, expectation, ambition and fear. It asks if the paths we choose are irreversible and attempts to understand that grandmother and other women who are slowly forgotten.