A few months back, I was invited by Maddy Costa and the Dramaturg’s Network to speak on a panel about “Diaspora Dramaturgies”. I still don’t really know what that term means (and perhaps it’s intentionally open) but I always trust an invitation from Maddy, so I said yes, and found myself on a panel with… Read more »
On tourism, and a tourist’s job. I’ve been working in Sri Lanka for the last 6 weeks, although my visa is technically correct when it says I’ve been here on holiday. I haven’t been paid for what I’m doing in the country. Tanuja and I have made a short album of music and played… Read more »
It’s late in Week 4 of our Sura Medura residency. If last week was all about beats, tunes and noise; then this week’s been all about orchestral composing, performance text and the sea. Also a whole bunch of getting tangled up with wires, battery packs, live relay, headphone variants and playback devices in order to… Read more »
So we’ve come to Sri Lanka, and we’re staying right by the sea, and now we’re working almost entirely on laptops with headphones. Our fellow artists here must think we’re nuts. To be clear, there’s no way we’d be inside our laptops like this if we hadn’t already had lots of experience in Sri Lanka… Read more »
Horse God The pantheon of gods in Sri Lanka is a complex hierarchy of beings ultimately subject to the cycle of birth and rebirth in the same manner humans are; a process that in Theravada Buddhism is widely accepted to last millions of lifetimes or more, until, after much suffering, enlightenment – and therefore the… Read more »
One of the main drives of these Sura Medura residencies is to push and take risks with our practice. The residencies are hosted by Neil Butler, who’s got strong form in making and producing radical art, and we’re all experienced artists, so it feels like a really supportive environment for embracing that challenge. We had… Read more »
Hikkaduwa 2018 On the beach a tourist couple are ankle-deep in the surf, and she’s performing the kind of frolicking you only perform at the edge of the sea if you have a camera’s gaze upon you. The boyfriend, a man in his late thirties, is insta-framing the early sunset behind his partner… Read more »
I think it was 2014, at the caravan showcase, when Bettina Linstrum first mentioned the Sura Medura residency project to us. Now it’s February 2018, and here we are, towards the end of Week 1 of a 6-week residency in the town of Hikkaduwa, SW Sri Lanka. It’s an extraordinary gift to be offered –… Read more »
The film above is edited from footage we shot in Normandy this summer, around a screenplay I’ve been writing called Utah. I’ve been writing it for about 7 years now, on and off. Well I say ‘writing’. It’s mostly been heavy research and worrying. Then last July, a sudden two-week burst of frantic typing…. Read more »
We welcome your ears to the second What The Found Sound, where we delve into bits of our sound archive we’ve most likely forgotten about, and liveblog our reactions. A few footnotes at the bottom of the page, but otherwise what you see is what it was. For best results: press play, and read the conversation…… Read more »