Workground/Playtime<>Playground/Worktime is an improvised performance project linking two specific post-industrial sites in Sheffield. Curated by Gillian Whiteley, Geoff Bright, Max Munday and Steve Pool with Martin Archer.
Overview
This intra-active twin site, live-improvised sonic/visual/kinetic performance is in two phases. The first phase, using visual and sonic materials collected through performance from a former industrial site (CADS Eagle Works studio complex), functions as a creative ground-work for the second phase. The second phase at CADS Abbeydale Picture House Flytower (or Theatre Deli) has two features, a sonic installation by 20+ member anti-choirJuxtavoices and a performance by five-piece improvising music outfit, Yowl (Gill Whiteley, Lyn Hodnett, Geoff Bright, Walt Shaw). The Yowl performance will involve the installation of large-scale video projections by Steve Pool prepared from materials generated in the first phase. The overall concept is to use multi-modal improvisation to unsettle dominant spatialities reversing sites of work and play thus opening up, in the moment, a new hybrid space of performative possibility in the post-industrial city.
Whiteley and Bright have successfully used this approach before when they led the co-curation of a large-scale improvisation event at the Magna industrial heritage site in 2012 (See Magna http://bricolagekitchen.com/magna/).
Artists and performers
Yowl is Walt Shaw (percussion, electronics), Lyn Hodnett (voice, cello, trumpet) Gillian Whiteley (piano, viola, hurdy-gurdy), Geoff Bright (saxes) plus Max Munday (bass, contemporary dance) VJ Steve Pool (projections)
Juxtavoices anti-choir led by Martin Archer (twin-site vocal installations)
Curators bios
Gillian Whiteley is an artist-improviser with a background in art history/visual culture at Loughborough University. She likes to create ludic dissent with instruments, materials and objects. Collaborations include Les Petroleuses, J[a]B[a]W, Alchemy/Schmalchemy and [the gathering…the chewing]. See www.bricolagekitchen.com for print work, writings on art and activism and live art/performance projects.
Geoff Bright is an improviser and live art performer based at Manchester Metropolitan University. Recent performances have included J[a]B[a]W, Proposition 5, The Bottom End (with Mick Beck) and at Treignac Projet, France (with Gill Whiteley). Geoff also thinks and writes about the relationship of politics and improvisation.
Max Munday is an artist and musician working mainly with movement, voice and double bass. He is currently exploring identity and memory in an art practice-based PhD at Sheffield Hallam University in which meaning is generated in constellations of bodily gesture, deliberate and incidental sound and mark-making.
Steve Pool is a visual artist interested in how people interact with space. Originally trained as a sculptor he explores ideas, materials and light on both a large and an intimate scale.
He has recently completed his Doctorate which explores the artist’s residency as a complex set of relations. He owns and hires two large digital projectors. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWf51lF-f5o&t=13s
Links (to examples of work)
Ear-Ear at Access Space 14 February 2023 http://www.vimeo.com/earearimprov
Steve Pool projection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITypVWlsC24
Geoff Bright/Gillian Whiteley/Walt Shaw project for AC Institute New York 2021 https://www.acinstitute.org/here-there-everywhere
Yowl, Dubrek session audio, February 2023
Juxtavoices, various sound and video links over 10 years
Summary for publicity materials
Workground/Playtime< >Playground/Worktime is a twin-site improvised music and body performance with live V-J’d projections. It generates a collision of massed voices, sonics, imagery and movement harvested from a former steel foundry, Eagle Works, delivered into the dizzy heights of the Fly Tower at Abbeydale Picture House, materialising a new hybrid space of work/play in the post-industrial city.
polimprov 