in the loop jan 30: guided by the moon

in between time 13, bristol, uk

Simon Faithfull, Fake Moon, IBT13 courtesy the artist

Auspiciously the 2013 In Between Time Festival in Bristol will take place not under one but two full moons. There’s the real one, perhaps difficult to glimpse in the February gloom, and then there’s Simon Faithfull’s Fake Moon, ready to pick up nature’s slack. Based on the College Green, Faithfull will send aloft a helium balloon fitted with its own illumination and each night of the festivities it will make its way across the Bristol skyline.

In fact for a festival in a Northern Hemisphere February, IBT13 offers quite a number of outdoor activities, challenging the brave to rug up and tough it out to experience art’s liveness. In The Woods, Norwegian group Night Tripper will take their audience on a walk through the wintery forest to experience a magical concert exploring animistic myths and voodoo rituals and said to feature an invisible choir. With more of an urban feel, Carmine Mauro Daprile’s The Moon will use “cosplayers”—people who dress up as their favourite cartoon characters (particularly from manga and anime)—to render the everyday environment strange and wonderful (exact location in Bristol’s CBD yet to be divulged).

Zierle & Carter & Chamber Made Opera, Living Room Opera: Between Lands and Longings, IBT13 photo Alan Warren

However, for the weak willed and easily chilled there are plenty of indoor wonders as well. Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera have been commissioned to create one of their boutique living room operas with Cornwall-based artists Zierle and Carter (see previous review). Titled Between Lands and Longings it will explore ideas of home, displacement and migration. (See RT101 for a review of previous living room operas, and RT108 for an interview with CMO director David Young.)

Victor Riebeek and Florentina Holzinger, Kein Applaus für Scheisse, IBT13 photo Nellie de Boer

There’s also a range of performances in more conventional theatre spaces, not that this means conventional theatre fare. From Amsterdam comes Victor Riebeek and Florentina Holzinger with what we are told is a flagrantly boundary-pushing exploration of contemporary pop culture—Kein Applaus Für Scheisse (no applause for shit)—which features “an elusive mix of dance, trashy pop, theatre, roller skating, acrobatics and love” (program). English ensemble Reckless Sleepers will perform A String Section—five women, five wooden chairs and five handsaws—you might be able to imagine how that will end. (After appearing in Brisbane’s World Theatre Festival, Reckless Sleepers will appear in February at Performance Space, Sydney in the Last Supper (http://www.performancespace.com.au/2012/the-last-supper/). There’s also Italian physical theatre company Motus’ whose piece Too Late! (Antigone) Contest #2 is a re-interpretation of the Sophocles classic. And the provocative Glaswegian performance artist Nic Green explores her relationship with her father and her native Scotland in Fatherland.

Coney, Early Days (Of a Better Nation), IBT13 photo courtesy the artists

Looking particularly enigmatic is Early Days (Of a Better Nation) by performance group Coney, which invites the audience in as players in a large-scale interactive video performance exploring what happens now after the heady optimism of the people-led upheavals of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements has settled.

No live art festival is complete without a one-on-one performance, and here it is provided by IBT Associate Artist Jo Bannon with Dead Line, in which you are invited to have a private phone conversation confronting your own mortality. Nor should a festival be without a workshop; for IBT13 it is literally that—in Worktable, Kate McIntosh invites visitors to don goggles and wield tools to make something new from something broken.

There’s also an exhibition at Arnolfini titled Version Control which explores performance not “solely as a ‘live’ activity” but as a method of “making the past present” (program). The exhibition features Amalia Pica, Tim Etchells, Felix Gmelin, Andy Holden, Rabih Mroué and includes video, painting, drawing and sculpture with performative interventions. The opening night of the exhibition will feature Tim Etchell’s Untitled (After Violent Incident) in which he recreates Bruce Nauman’s 12-screen installation Violent Incident using a combination of texts on screens with footage of dancer Wendy Houstoun reenacting the slapstick content. Houston will also perform live on the opening night.

And of course there’s much more, including pavements of gold (Pete Barrett), peripheral visions (Alex Bradley) and fireworks (festival director Helen Cole) and a horsey themed final party which is rumored to involve 5000 My Little Ponies. But if you can’t make it to Bristol, don’t despair. RealTime will be offering up meaty coverage by Tim Atack, Osunwunmi and Niki Russell, alumni of our 2006 IBT writer workshop, as part of our RT114 “festivals” edition.

In Between Time 13: International Festival of Performance, produced by IBT in association with Arnolfini, director Helen Cole; Bristol, various venues; Feb 14-17, 2013, exhibition Feb 2-April 14; http://ibt13.co.uk/

previous in between festival coverage in rt

ibt2010
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Inbetween_Time_2010

ibt2006
(including onsite intensive writing workshop) http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Inbetween_Time_2006

RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 pg. web

© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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