Ivor Tymchak (often described as Sir Ivor) is a very old friend of Temple.Works.Leeds and in fact with Richard Michie he founded the ultra-successful Bettakultcha at TWL in early 2010. Our paucity of toilets and the need for stringent risk assessments to weed out social enterprise gurus occasionally became a bone of contention specially when he described our grand old pile as a “derelict” – in spite of the fact we had laid on paraffin lamps specially for the occasion – but that is now water under the uhhh…well, underfoot now. Only lightly and in the lesser used spaces only.

Anyway. Ivor is a man for all reasons – wonderful writer, cartoonist, inspirational speaker , Bettakultcha cofounder, rock star going right back to Gentle Ihor’s Devotion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPwMakzp2s. I’m only sorry that the hat I carried faithfully back from the Prairies to add to his sumptuous collection –genuinely worn by old-geezer Ukrainian-Canadian farmers – has not made its way onto his website.

In the meantime Temple.Works.Leeds is lucky enough to have had the Temple Priest perform on more than one occasion and their roar is to live for.

The Temple Priests is a collaboration between Ivor Tymchak and Nigel Goodwin. The fusion of found sounds, loops, electronic beeps and howls, and eccentric drum patterns distinguishes itself from random noise generation by its sheer joy and playful inventiveness. The music is best described as a journey without a destination, a horse without a rider and as a joke without a…

Susan Williamson

We’ve watched and enjoyed the Skeleton Project many times and each time I am amazed at how seamlessly provocative they can be. They inhabit a space and an audience like no other, and will be doing a popup at Why Rush? in one of our grimiest catacombs. That is an invitation in itself.

So…

“Welcome to the catacombs of my psyche. This is a guide to me. Not a step by step instruction, demonstration or education, this is just me, a fast mumbling unconstructive deconstruction of my mind. Join me exploring how I construct thoughts, what I think about my life, the media and how I cope with being me. TRIP TICK is led by a scripted text of short monologues, song lyrics, and nonsense rantings and is driven by audience interaction and improvisation”.

Written and performed by Matt Allen & Anton Krasauskas

There are so many other artists appearing at Why Rush? whom we have not been able to have face to face interviews with, but who have been asked by us – or, luckily for us, have chosen to appear! – for very good reasons.

We told them all the same thing: Why Rush? is about experimental work – music and performance – and it’s about why and how people do what they seem compelled to do at the very edges of art. WHAT on earth are they up to? Why DO they do it? HOW do they pull it off? We’ve been amazed at how many performers have said it just came to them – they had a vision on the 23 Bus about pole dancing mice, they could imagine themselves being grave robbers, they could just FEEL that piano drop, the dog told them to do it…the main thing is that each performer is an artist committed to developing their work, to spotting inspiration when it comes flying in the window, and to doing it all in for not of and with an audience. No holds will be barred, although we have asked them to keep their clothes on. In some cases they will be putting clothes on US…

That being said there will be some achingly beautiful work being performed at Temple.Works.Leeds particularly by those artists who have chosen to make their piece especially to be played in this huge Grade One Listed building site with its extraordinary aesthetic smorgasbord, its spaces and places during twilight and into the night…likewise those artists asking their audiences on a journey to other landscapes through augmented reality, through ambient music, voice, dance and privately headphoned film.

There is strong workshop element to the whole three days and students ( 15 and over) are especially welcome. But the primary reason is to have an energising and enjoyable time seeing and participation in performances. All artists are available for question and answer session after certain of their performances, others are holding formal workshops.

Come, see and workshop with

Jenny Kosmowsky – opera singer, listen to Time Lapse Opera ..you will get goosebumps. http://www.myspace.com/jennykosmowsky/music

I have a professional background as an international opera singer, music collaborator and founder of the singing workshop company, Beyond the Voice. I have worked with, amongst others, the international visual design house, Universal Everything, The United Nations, The BBC and NGO’s in America. I have sung on an art installation at The Victoria & Albert Museum, in films showcased at the Southbank IMAX cinema and art galleries in New York, Paris, Tokyo and Stockholm. My visual work is undoubtedly linked to my musicality. I have developed an art practice that is informed by music and explores the inner and outer worlds in all that I perceive in creation. I am fascinated with my visual work becoming musical scores. In recent installations I have composed a piece of music for each artwork exhibited.

Most of my art begins with images or sounds that start flooding my waking thoughts. Nature has become the core and spiral from which my work extends from. A closer look at my own wants and desires in life lead me to create passionate, intimate artworks. Shamanism, nomadic cultures and inner expansiveness are themes that are currently influencing my creative practice. I mainly work in acrylic and ink; enjoying the smooth, crisp lines that narrate each story.”

Jenny will be holding a two hour workshop at Why Rush? on The Naked Voice, come only if you want to sing!

Performance: Rachel Sweeney: crow-glove / croagh-love

the dead bird’s wings flapped / her heart a worn glove map

This short solo is a butoh influenced movement piece, inspired by the story of Christopher McCandless and his travels across North America in the early 1990s. The piece addresses questions of wilderness, survival tactics and boredom through short bursts of movement attention within a choreography of steel wire, suspended rock, ice, flesh and bone. The body becomes the site for live writing in response to pre-planned physical instructions while the audience provide individual readings of the performance according to the erosion and blurring of each individual surface over time.

crow-glove / croagh-love is a meditation on place, history and map making that explores choreographic language through a negotiation with textured objects. Interactions between dancer and object are actioned through mobile transfers between porous skin, displaced weight and kinaesthetic response, whereby the dancer’s own presence becomes absorbed into the materials, then – through a natural weathering process – the materials becoming absorbed into the space. The performance itself is located in the transition between frozen and melted, between the hard and soft edges of time passing.

Biography – Rachel Sweeney

Rachel is an interdisciplinary dance artist with a passion for moving in extreme locations. She has received several awards for her independent research into the Japanese dance art of Butoh from the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin Corporation, as well as two solo performance commissions from Butoh UK (2003) and Dance in Devon (2009).

Rachel is co-director of a transnational terrain arts and ecology partnership together with Australian dance artist Marnie Orr. Ongoing projects have been supported by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts, Perth, the Centre for Sustainable Futures, University of Plymouth, a Lisa Ullmann dance scholarship and Dance in Devon.

Rachel currently teaches dance at Liverpool Hope University, UK where she also runs cross disciplinary research forums between Performing Arts and Environmental Science and has published on dance ethnography, dance ecology and cross cultural performance training.

www.rachelsweeney.co.uk

‘VIEWPOINTS and COMPOSITION’ WORKSHOP

workshop with Rachel Sweeney

Over the past 25 years, Viewpoints training has ignited the imagination of choreographers, actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs and writers.

Viewpoints is a comprehensive training system adapted from Anne Bogart’s innovative approaches to contemporary performance devising and is taught all over the world and used by countless theatre artists in the rehearsal process.

Viewpoints can be described as….

• a philosophy translated into a technique for training performers, building ensemble and creating movement for stage.

• a set of names given to principles of movement through time and space; these names constitute a language for talking about what happens onstage.

• The selection and synthesis of specific points of awareness that a performer or creator makes while working.

_{In terms of its role in composition, Viewpoints operates as} a contemporary method for creating new work and is the systematic practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art for the stage.I particular, Viewpoitsn promotes generative dialogue with other art forms, as it borrows and reflects the other arts.

Frisch and Sweeney combine their respective directorial and choreographic practices to develop a workshop integrating the theories as well as the practices of this performance approach.

Workshop is open to up to 20 participants for students and professionals from all performance backgrounds.

Duration : 90 min

Come ,watch, listen and question

MELANIE WILSON

Melanie Wilson presents the first outing of a new solo piece, in which she explores further the beguiling territory between performance and sound work, a distinctive approach that has established her at the meeting point between sound art, new writing and theatre.

This new work orchestrates elements of storytelling, reportage, performance lecture and off beat recital into exhilarating and contemplative directions, and shares a convivial relationship with its audience. 

Melanie Wilson is an award winning writer, performer and sound artist based in London. She makes performances, installations, films and audio works that centre on the use of sound as a distinct and subjective agency.

 Melanie’s work has been presented nationally and internationally, and includes Simple Girl, Iris Brunette, every minute, always, The View From Here, Self Portrait with Frida and Autobiographer. She has collaborated with Rotozaza, Clod Ensemble, Coney, Shunt, Chris Goode, Boilerhouse, Abigail Conway and Peter Arnold. Her work is produced by Fuel Theatre.

Be entertained in a bowled over kind of way by…

Executive Legs

http://www.executivelegs.com/home.html

Formed in 2008 Executive Legs aim to make music for dancing that is both joyful but tinged with menace. Being in a band is also a good excuse for us to wear ridiculous brightly coloured outfits. We are: Gwen (vocals/stylophone) who was in Molliger, more commonly seen alarming audiences in Australia and is in Harry Callahan. Johnny (bass) used to be in Polaris, Martha (Keyboards/whistle) also plays Cuban music and plays in Pifco, Katie (Keyboards) is in Cissy, Mary (Drums) is in Pifco and used to be in D’astro. Things that make us happy are Kid Kreole and the coconuts, Henry Hoovers, animals (particularly Johnny’s cats), cartoons, Kraftwerk, killing.

Seed of Barrabas. It’s weird shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YdH1UL8Qbw

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=OiFwJMIChRg&vq=large#t=12

Sloth Hammer

Circuit bending rhythms meet doom riffing bass.

Biography

Born by accident in the below zero temperatures of November 2010, in a foggy, hazy wasteland of despair, anguish and terror.

RELEASES…
- Split with Drvonesound – February 2011
- ‘The Improvised Torture Sessions Vol. 1′ – April 2011
… – Split with Deerstalker – October 2011
All available for free download:- http://www.slothhammer.bandcamp.com/

TO FOLLOW
- More abject terror…See more

Description

LUKE circuit bends dolls and games and speak n spells and keyboards and toys and alien figures and makes them make noises they shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t make ordinarily.

PAUL plays bass, has done many bands and projects in past years, some you may even know, he plays death and black and grind and tech and doom and sludge and prog and horror and hate and misanthropy and harsh discordance.

Together they make SLOTH HAMMER. They improvise and jam and scare and enthrall and hypnotise and harm and stab and hack and bash and crash and crunch and stick things in your eyes and hit you with planks of wood and mash you into the stinking horrible mush that you deserve to be.

http://www.facebook.com/SlothHammer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtz4neK5a3Y

Brown and Benbow

Hmmm. Sound and…art…

Temple Priests

The famous Sir Ivor Tymchak and co…more on them later…

Performance: Rachel Sweeney: crow-glove / croagh-love

the dead bird’s wings flapped / her heart a worn glove map

This short solo is a butoh influenced movement piece, inspired by the story of Christopher McCandless and his travels across North America in the early 1990s. The piece addresses questions of wilderness, survival tactics and boredom through short bursts of movement attention within a choreography of steel wire, suspended rock, ice, flesh and bone. The body becomes the site for live writing in response to pre-planned physical instructions while the audience provide individual readings of the performance according to the erosion and blurring of each individual surface over time.

crow-glove / croagh-love is a meditation on place, history and map making that explores choreographic language through a negotiation with textured objects. Interactions between dancer and object are actioned through mobile transfers between porous skin, displaced weight and kinaesthetic response, whereby the dancer’s own presence becomes absorbed into the materials, then – through a natural weathering process – the materials becoming absorbed into the space. The performance itself is located in the transition between frozen and melted, between the hard and soft edges of time passing.

Biography – Rachel Sweeney

Rachel is an interdisciplinary dance artist with a passion for moving in extreme locations. She has received several awards for her independent research into the Japanese dance art of Butoh from the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin Corporation, as well as two solo performance commissions from Butoh UK (2003) and Dance in Devon (2009).

Rachel is co-director of a transnational terrain arts and ecology partnership together with Australian dance artist Marnie Orr. Ongoing projects have been supported by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts, Perth, the Centre for Sustainable Futures, University of Plymouth, a Lisa Ullmann dance scholarship and Dance in Devon.

Rachel currently teaches dance at Liverpool Hope University, UK where she also runs cross disciplinary research forums between Performing Arts and Environmental Science and has published on dance ethnography, dance ecology and cross cultural performance training.

www.rachelsweeney.co.uk

Rachel’s workshop was accidentally omitted from the timetable but is indeed scheduled for Saturday May 12 at 4:30. This will turn up on all late-issued programmes.

‘VIEWPOINTS and COMPOSITION’ WORKSHOP

workshop with Rachel Sweeney

Over the past 25 years, Viewpoints training has ignited the imagination of choreographers, actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs and writers.

Viewpoints is a comprehensive training system adapted from Anne Bogart’s innovative approaches to contemporary performance devising and is taught all over the world and used by countless theatre artists in the rehearsal process.

Viewpoints can be described as….

• a philosophy translated into a technique for training performers, building ensemble and creating movement for stage.

• a set of names given to principles of movement through time and space; these names constitute a language for talking about what happens onstage.

• The selection and synthesis of specific points of awareness that a performer or creator makes while working.

_{In terms of its role in composition, Viewpoints operates as} a contemporary method for creating new work and is the systematic practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art for the stage.I particular, Viewpoitsn promotes generative dialogue with other art forms, as it borrows and reflects the other arts.

Frisch and Sweeney combine their respective directorial and choreographic practices to develop a workshop integrating the theories as well as the practices of this performance approach.

Workshop is open to up to 20 participants for students and professionals from all performance backgrounds.

Duration : 90 min

The first time I saw Urban Exploration it was at Hayden Cohen’s Age of the Geek in the Painter’s Bar at Temple.Works.Leeds. They were so geekily cool they looked like they were doing the washing up as they casually adjusted bits of kits spread out on three enormous tables, seamlessly flitting around each other to turn up one bit and slide another. They had more cables than most men collect in a lifetime and they were all hanging down the front. Mick, Nat, Adrian and Dave entranced the audience and made anyone who had ever wielded a musical instrument in anger or otherwise want to jam with them – myself included.

I asked Dave – as he handily built the stage for fellow artist Anna Frisch’s My Polar Disorder’s pole dancing mouse’s at Why Rush next weekend – why they do what they do. Oh, and what exactly is that they do do? And how?

It’s a complex background and their Soundcloud page says:

“Urban Exploration is a recently formed music and art collective based in Leeds, UK. Comprising artists, producers and DJs working in various different combinations, they deliver a diverse body of work which is wilfully difficult to categorise.

They make field recordings in abandoned buildings, perform improvised music using homemade synthesisers and tape echo, run techno nights, free parties and experimental music events, and create films and interactive video installations.

Their records explore the hinterland between many different genres including, but not exclusively, Ambient, Techno, Electro, Noise, and Dub – sometimes with unrelenting dance floor functionality in mind, and sometimes just for the joy of sonic investigation.

Urban Exploration’s music is often diversiform but is held together by both atmosphere and process – always pushing forward into new sonic territory, experimenting with new methods of sound design and ways of improvising using electronic equipment.

Their debut EP was released in March 2012 on Berlin’s ITK Label. Subterranean comprises of four atmospheric Techno-inflected tracks created by members of the collective during their inaugural year.

http://ifthekids-records.com/?tag=urbanexploration

Dave said that it is only recently that they have decided they want to move away from genre music and into ambient improv – with an audience. They want people for inspiration, for feedback, and for them to have a little play.  They genuinely don’t know what will happen each time they perform now they have started and Dave reckons the improv is so improv they’re not always sure if they’ve started, let alone finished. What they do know is that they want to bridge the gap between music and art and they want to do it with real people in an environment where anything can happen.

Urban Exporation will be playing – quite literally – at Why Rush? on Saturday May 12 and Sunday May 13 and I for one will be hanging around probably far too closely, gawping at the kit and reaching for a dial. On the Sunday they will be playing with the famous Slim Pro 6 & The Bobettes in the Open Loading Bay in the dark, with Sloth Hammer (apparently the loudest band in the world) playing next door in the Joiners:  so Why Rush’s? grand finale will be  salute, crash, bang and fireworks…and then a long ambient sigh.

Susan Williamson

Why does anyone want to make a performance about the true story a lonely middle aged Russian cemetery expert, who robs the graves of young women only, dresses their mummified remains as dolls and then …keeps them sedate company where he lives in his parents’ three room apartment while his mother and father are away at their summer dacha?

I asked this of Ivel Goverda, Creative Leader of Contemporary Beef Productions, also known personally as Evelina. A Newcastle-based artist, musician and international DJ, she is Russian herself and was fascinated by the extraordinary narrative this presented last year when it came to trial in her homeland. She spoke of a stunted childhood, his narrow and extreme interests that led to an adult expertise, and the sheer logistics of such an enterprise as his risk-taking grave-robbing. She told me then of her company’s commitment to exploring contemporary issues , combining different art forms, ages, experiences, sexual orientations and nationalities,

But still, I ask, why would anyone at all want to make performance of out of this bizarre story ? Where do we draw the line?

Evelina says it is about a personal vision, an empathy and a compelling backstory. She said she could imagine staging this production from the moment she read about it. She could see herself being the male grave robber, and her team being the dolls… She insists it’s a great story and an involving narrative about a very real person with a very real obsession which started in childhood after a funeral experience leading to an adult expertise on cemeteries bordering on genius. She also says this is a chance for audience challenging and involvement like no other. So be prepared to be asked to be one of these dressed dolls as you sit enjoying your drink in the Painters’ Bar during Why Rush? on May 11-13 at Temple.Works.Leeds. She is giving nothing else away on the meantime.

See this link for the background to the story… http://m.nypost.com/p/news/international/horror_dollhouse_UwYlel1rfjxJWveyvylJPM

Susan Williamson

A lot has been happening at Temple.Works.Leeds in the dropping piano department – in fact you could say it has become our theme tune for Why Rush? May 11-13. Intern Daniel Cunningham got into the spirit of gentle destruction on Saturday May 5 and decided the narrative was all about a dog pushing 93 in human years and its best friend, the piano…

“As Slim Bob and his dog silently gaze in time

A piano ages and it slowly rises to ten feet high.

So long to a lonely instrument

Fallen into decay having lost its play.

In order to capture that fleeting moment in the future he once planted recording devices so be silent as you enter; the room is bugged and inside the pianos insides will project onto the walls.

The piano will be winched over head in the Open Loading Bay at Temple.Works.Leeds and when it drops the sound will echo and resonate in the works, through suspension rods, cavities and doors. From amongst the at once relentless cacophony our old dog finds harmony. On Friday night May 11 Slim Bob pro 6′s experimental set will be accompanied by ‘Shatners’ Bassoons’ and on Saturday May 12 the ‘Laura Call ensemble’. Three pianos will be hanged in total – one a day – and all of them will drop, 4 inches at a time. Sunday May 13 they will be ending on a jointly cacophonous note with digital musicians Urban Exploration.

An executioner wishes farewell from behind a balaclava to these pianos who lost their play. They were meant for the gallows not the landfill and for an audience they must be sacrificed.

The dog gazes into space and Bob drifts off”.

Slim Bob Pro 6 and the Bobettes are old Temple.Works.Leeds hands and built our original artists’ scaffolding tower in 2010 during the Twin Peaks Festival “Fire Walk With Me”. They’re known for extraordinary performances of space-saluting strings and horns: masked, eared, suited & booted, with and without dogs, with and without popcorn popping and bacon frying while light projections and water droplets provide a background sensory pull. The overall experience is possessed of an absolute magic when performed at dusk, and is not for the fainthearted. Stand well back as the pianos come down.

See a 2011Temple.Works.Leeds performance by Slim Bob Pro 6 and the Bobettes on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQNDEulA6WU

Daniel Cunningham

]]> http://www.templeworksleeds.com/2012/05/06/slim-bob-pro-6-the-bobettes-and-dog/feed/ 0 http://www.templeworksleeds.com/2012/05/06/my-polar-disorder-the-question-of-the-pole-dancing-mouse/ http://www.templeworksleeds.com/2012/05/06/my-polar-disorder-the-question-of-the-pole-dancing-mouse/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 23:08:35 +0000 Hackenbush http://www.templeworksleeds.com/?p=1991

I’ve known theatre and performance auteur Anna Frisch for a very very long time. One thing of which I can be certain is that there is no point asking leading questions of her because she will decimate them with terrifying literalness. So when I asked “What makes you want to put on a show about a pole-dancing mouse then, Anna?” she answers “ What? Why? Why does anyone do anything? Why does one fall in love? Cross the street? Eat guacamole with pico de gallo?”

So back to the pole dancing mouse. It’s as good as reason as any that Anna – when pressed very hard – agrees that the idea just came to her one day and she couldn’t stop laughing. In fact she burst out laughing again when she finally admitted these dark origins to me today. She had apparently visualised it on the bus in Stoke Newington right down to the sheer sexy sexlessness of it, the essential wrongness of it, and the sleazy grind rock background. And then with her usual 1000% focus she set about finding the tiny dancer, the aesthetic, the music, and of course the pole. It has been months in the making and for a very short piece it is as much a work of art as a punch to the cultural plexus.

She won’t give away the show that will preview and perform several times at Why Rush? May 11-13 before going on tour, but be clear that it will rock your little white cotton socks. She will also, working with Leeds filmmaker and Temple.Works.Leeds resident Dave Lynch, be filming the performance so it can be enjoyed in a private-dancer way through headphones for the rest of Why Rush? by those wanting to see it again on their own. In future the mouse will go on virtual tour as a hologram. The mouse will live on and on , well -ish.

Anna is known for outstanding work – some of it WIP for years – that always features twists of fate, stories of love, loss, chewing gum, gossip and disrobing craziness, experiences inside one’s head and ears backed by music – some of it with half-naked guitarists, others with mad preachers and pink ladies. She has years of residency at Shunt (London Bridge), with shows at the National Portrait Gallery and at London’s Merge Festival amongst others. The London-based curator for Why Rush? in 2012, she has been part of Temple.Works.Leeds since 2008 and helped set the scene for TWL’s reputation for randomness early on with our first online performance February 2009 Temple.Works.Leeds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5g6_B-xWQU. See Anna Frisch’s Portrait Part II performed by Serena Bobowski on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7bnJcS4so. and come and see My Polar Disorder at Why Rush?

Susan Williamson