Performance Art

Opening Night

A fantastical collage of sound and theatre starring an off-kilter cabaret diva. This live performance and multimedia installation extends the reach of musical composition into the visual and the theatrical, it is a mysterious and glittering experiment.

Come to the spectacular anti-spectacle noise cabaret! Jane Deasy’s new composition is a work of composed theatre, where a myriad of instruments engulf the audience in an immersive music performance.

Good Sex

‘I MAKE SEX REALISTIC. NOT REAL. IT’S ALL CHOREOGRAPHY.’

How do you have sex on stage? How do you even have sex?

To try and find an answer, each night, two brand new performers tell a story of desire, betrayal, and loneliness. They have never rehearsed together or read the script. They are strangers.

But they are not alone — to help and guide them they are joined on stage by an Intimacy Director, trained in the art of teaching people how to touch. So you can rest assured that the sex is safe. It is consensual. And it is good.

Holoscenes

HOLOSCENES is a suite of multi-format artworks that manifest states of drowning — both in water and the larger systems of our own devising — in order to directly connect the short-term, everyday behaviors of individuals to the long-term patterns driving global climate change. Holoscenes re-imagines historical antecedents of public spectacle and gathering, and simultaneously translates related streams of scientific investigation into a visual, visceral, and public address in urban communal space that challenges our personal and collective capacities for long-term thinking a

Golem

A contemporary dance performance radicalizing the human body in the virtual world. This international and interdisciplinary research project explores the dancing body through technologies including motion-capture technology, VR, and digital avatars to wield a narrative between man and machine. The work seeks to question the human body’s engagement, sensorial response, and viewership in the fields of virtual design and dance.

Tempest

Tempest is a one-of-a-kind immersive theater experience! Travel through time and space to enact an exciting story of love & revenge - with a little magic, of course!

Inspired by Shakespeare’s famed tale, join your intrepid guide Prospero in this intimate, interactive performance. In order to bring Prospero to life, the actor must enlist the help of the audience. The line between real and virtual, and truth and fiction, blur as audience members are "cast" as Prospero's spirits to realize an interactive, virtual version of the story.

Draw Me Close

Draw Me Close blurs the worlds of live performance, virtual reality and animation to create a vivid memoir about the relationship between a mother and her son charting twenty-five years of love, learning and loss . Weaving theatrical storytelling with new forms of technology, the individual immersive experience allows the audience member to take the part of the protagonist, Jordan, inside a live, animated world.

Dancing in the Portico

Virtual reality dance in the Gallery

How can dance interpret and respond to our paintings and architecture?

How can movement animate our space and art and help us see both in new ways?

How can we share the experience of watching a live dance performance in the Gallery with people who live far away?

To the Moon

Fifty years after man first landed on the Moon, Laurie Anderson is flying us all there at MIF19 with To the Moon. Developed with fellow artist Hsin-Chien Huang and presented in the Royal Exchange Theatre’s intimate Studio, To the Moon is a work in two parts: a dreamlike VR experience that takes us on our own lunar exploration, and an accompanying installation with film, images and music.

AbstrACTION

Immerse yourself in a dark and shadowy world, and let your whole self be moved as you choose your own viewpoint and flow within the dance. Experiment with the dancers as they explore new pathways within Virtual Realities – fall, rise, turn, and fly with us into the stars. 

Watching dance is often a passive experience with one fixed point of view. We set about creating an immersive and visceral experience, allowing the audience to explore dance from all viewpoints, creating their own flow within the choreography.