It’s been an exceptionally busy year for me – perhaps a little too busy.  As a self employed artist, I’ve been secretly sitting around feeling sad that nobody seems to realise how much I’ve done this year, and then I realised, I’m my own boss, and it’s my own responsibility to make that known!  So having just secretly had the busiest year of my professional life, it felt important for me to take a moment to acknowledge everything that’s happened this year in a public, if invitation only, way.  As my friend and colleague, I hope you don’t mind reading this little round up of my projects in 2017. I’d love to hear yours too, if you want to send one along!

 PhD

 January 1^st of 2017 I was awarded my PhD, which focussed on narrative preoccupations in contemporary performance.  The graduation ceremony was in July, and I got to wear a very exciting yet silly hat.

History History History – touring

 With support from ACE, History History History was on a UK-wide tour in the spring of 2017.  The show visited London, Brighton, Exeter, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Machynlleth and Nottingham, and was performed in a variety of contexts from theatres and cinemas, to a film festival, a comedy festival and a renowned contemporary art gallery.  The show also got a great review in the BFI’s journal Sight and Sound, which, as a film geek, was a particularly exciting moment for me.  History History History continued to tour internationally this year, with performances in Lisbon, Llubljana, Brisbane and Melbourne.  In January of 2018 the show will have its North American premiere at PuSh Festival in Vancouver.  There are also upcoming performances in Dartington (UK) and Porto (Portugal) in the spring of 2018.

 It’s All Made Up – The Royal Court

 In May I had an amazing experience when I was asked to work with Chloe Lamford and Lucy Morrison on the Royal Court’s project The Site.  Chloe designed a very strange and wonderful space and 5 writers were asked to write a piece for Chloe’s design, along with a rule or constraint that Chloe gave us.  My constraint was to write fiction, and I wrote It’s All Made Up, a fictional panel discussion between a Brexit-loving mom, a dubious, charming, Spacey-esque male director, and a secretly pregnant artist.  I had the amazing privilege of being directed by Lucy Morrison in a cast of three actors at the top of their respective games – Siobhan Redmond (MBE!), Richard Lumsden and Amaka Okafor.  I also wrote a little booklet of short stories that took place in The Site for audience members to take away with them, called “Some Made Up Stories for the Real Life Site.”

 The Give and the Take (Tim Etchells) – Tate Modern

 In July, Tate Exchange brought back Tim Etchells’ durational and relational piece The Give and the Take, which I performed in when it opened in 2016.  Along with fellow performers Season Butler and Souheil Sleiman, this July I got to revisit the pleasure of spending several days hosting conversations with strangers at the Tate.

Cameo Live – The Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh

 This August I worked with Corin Christopher to curate a free live performance series at the historic Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh. History History History was performed as part of this series, along with Julie Rose Bower’s  Foley Explosion, Mamoru Iriguchi’s 4D Cinema and the UK premiere of Chris Thorpe and Porto-based company mala voadora’s piece Your Best Guess.  Cameo Live was awarded a Herald Angel for our first Edinburgh programme of performances.

The Filibuster – Somerset House, London

 This year I was awarded a grant from King’s College London and Somerset House Studios Arts in Society Fund to make a durational performance installation that has been on my mind for quite some time, The Filibuster.  The Filibuster is a 12 hour long performance installation, featuring one woman at a time who speaks at a podium for an hour, stream of consciousness.  There are 12 performers in total – the first woman to speak is 13 years old, and the speakers get gradually older throughout the day. At Somerset House our last performer was 73 years old.

 The first iteration of The Filibuster took place in the Grand Arch of Somerset House on September 2^nd.  Listening to the incredible women who spoke made for one of the most invigorating days I’ve had in recent memory.  12 hours literally flew by.  Full credits for the Somerset House iteration of the piece (or for any of the pieces I’ve discussed here) can be found on my website, but I want to take an opportunity in this email to specifically and publicly thank my assistant on this project, the artist and writer Eno Mfon, without whom the project would not have been possible.  If you’ve made it this far in reading this email, once you’re done, be sure to look up her and her work.

 I enjoyed watching and putting together this piece so much that I want to do it and see it again and again, so if you want to help make that happen, please get in touch.

Inside Bitch – Clean Break 

 Since 2016, I have been collaborating with the force of nature and Northern Irish playwright Stacey Gregg (Scorched, Overdrive, Shibolleth) on a new project for Clean Break, working with four Clean Break graduates who are all women who have gone through the punitive system in the UK.  Together we’re devising a piece questioning the ways that women in prison are portrayed in mainstream media.   In September of 2017 we did our first invited sharing of the piece (named “Inside Bitch” by the women).  It was hugely fun and very moving.  Expect to hear more about this in 2018.

Melbourne Fringe Exchange Lab (Forest Fringe)

 Oh my gosh how is this email still going?  I’m exhausted already!  It really has been a busy year.  It was perhaps at its busiest when Andy Field, Mish Grigor and I went to the Melbourne Fringe in Australia to do a two week long exchange with Melbourne-based artists Plastic Loaves, Shian Law and Stuart Bowden.  We explored Footscray, making work that responded directly to that suburb of Melbourne, got to know each other’s practices, and worked with the Substation (who also very kindly hosted Melbourne performances of History History History), to make work that responded to the Melbourne Fringe as a context, and to West Melbourne as a place.  It was an intense two weeks of new friendships and new collaborations.

InForming Content – Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Together with Volcano in Canada, Queen’s University (my undergrad alma mater) hosted their first InForming Content.

InForming Content is a 3 day creation lab I have run in Canada almost every year since 2008.  InForming Content creates a context in which students work with artists to make new pieces based off of some of the leading academic research in Canada, led by the some of the most exciting live artists in Canada.  Over the years we’ve been home to experiments in performance by Nadia Ross, Jacob Wren, Ravi Jain, Heidi Strauss, Marjorie Chan and Sunny Drake, just to name a few.  This year, we hosted new experiments by an incredible group of artists – Shannon Cochrane, David Yee, Nova Bhattacharya, Aisha Sasha John and Liam Kerry.  The weekend was fantastic, and Queen’s made for perfect hosts for the lab.

Post National 

 Alright!  Finally, the last project of the year!  Along with York University’s Theatre Department, I collaborated with choreographer Kate Alton and director Ross Manson (Volcano) on my concept Post National, an instruction-based piece for 12 guest performers at a time, all between the ages of 18 and 24.  The piece uses instruction-based choreography created by Kate Alton, and asks performers to answer live questions addressing their generation’s attitudes towards nationalism, revolution and protest. The piece runs between 45 minutes and an hour.  At York, it was made alongside a pre-rehearsed piece that we devised with the fourth year acting students, also called Post National.

I’m spending this Autumn in Canada! Throughout October and November I will be working on a new piece with Volcano and York University in Toronto called Post-National.  Post-National is an instruction-based piece for 12 guest performers at a time, all aged between 18 and 24, about nationalism, revolution and protest.  It premieres in Toronto at the end of November, but we’d love to bring it to a festival near you, if you have a group of 18 to 24 year olds you’d like to hear from about the future of your country.  More info here.

The three day creation lab InForming Content is going on the road to Kingston, Ontario – October 20th to the 22nd – hosted by Queen’s University.

Also – the next dates for History History History in early 2018 are in Vancouver, Porto and Dartington and will be announced soon.  In the meantime, sending you love and overhead projectors.

If you are keen to see History History History and haven’t already, it will be at the amazing Cameo Cinema as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from August 6th to the 10th.  I’ve helped Corin Christopher at the Cameo Cinema choose a whole roster of brilliant shows to host for free at the Cameo throughout August.  It’s a very very tiny programme because they can only host shows around their cinema’s screening schedule, so performances are only on at 11am or 11pm.

History History History will also be in Llubljana at Malda Levi Festival with Bunker in Slovenia on August 22nd, then coming to the Brisbane Festival in Brisbane from September 12th to September 16th and to the Substation as part of the Melbourne Fringe from September 20th to the 23rd.  I will also be part of running an amazing Forest Fringe workshop as part of Melbourne Fringe while I’m in town, along with Andy Field and Mish Grigor.  Find out more about that here.

I am very excited to announce a new and epic performance art piece – The Filibuster – which will be on at the grand arch at Somerset House from 10am to 10pm on September 2nd.  Come any time between those hours and stay as long as you like.  The Filibuster is a collaboration with Dr. Anna Snaith and is being funded by King’s College London’s Arts and Society project.

On September 7th, I am hosting the first Forest Fringe Amateurs Club at Somerset House Studios.  We will examine the old Hollywood Studio System of the 1950s, and try to figure out whether or not applying a communism-inspired, moneyless ethos to it could open up new and weird models for films that are directed by a collective.  More information about that here. I really don’t know what I’m doing, and hopefully that’s half the fun of it.

If you’re keen to see Deborah in London, she will be performing again in Tim Etchells’ wonderful piece Three Tables at the Tate Modern from June 15th – 18th.

The Future Show has been published by Oberon!  

Get your copy hot off the presses.  Tim Etchells wrote an introduction to the book which is pretty much better than the book itself, and which you can read here.