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SONIC EXPERIMENTS IN TEXT ![]()
21 JULY
![]()
SONIC EXPERIMENTS IN TEXT ![]()
21 JULY
SONIC EXPERIMENTS IN TEXT 
BLURT
ALAN FIELDEN
FLO RAY
HUGO HAGGER & EVELYN WH-ELL
NO
TACO! presents blurt, an evening of sonic experiments in text, with new performances by Alan Fielden, Flo Ray, Hugo Hagger & Evelyn Wh-ell, and NO. We invite you to an evening of live polyphonic encounters, failed duets, vernacular enquiries and other weird waves.
blurt is an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast on rtm.fm. In this testing-site for testing text, four artists and artist-groups consider radio broadcast as an expanded form of publishing. We perform to publish, which is to say, to make public. And our moment of thinking is live on air!
runway by Alan Fielden is a performance for choral voices and one musician, exploring human communication during catastrophe. Structured yet improvised, runway makes use of overlapping choral narratives and live music to consider alternative treatments of text, voice, and storytelling. With words and phrases diverging, converging, repeating, and iterating in a procession of characters and images, runway uses polyphony to evoke networks of tenderness, overwhelm, and hysteria. runway will be performed with Jemima Yong, Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, and Nat Norland.
Alan Fielden is a Korean-British writer, performance maker, and poet. Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award for Marathon, with JAMS, co-produced by the Barbican. His writing has been published by Prototype, If A Leaf Falls, Monitor Books, Minor Literatures, Broken Sleep Press. Associate lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UAL, and Worcester University. He co-runs event series 'Feature' at Cafe Oto.
§
No Internal Thing by Flo Ray is a feverish collision of sound and voice that performs what is known as ‘inner speech.’ It’s a solo headscape, a play for one, a mental score as lithe as language itself. When speaking of the ‘inner voice’, our limited vocabulary is also misleading: Thought, says Denise Riley, is no internal thing. Just as authorship is plagiarism and speech is ventriloquy, our thinking derives from elsewhere — so that what is most ‘inner’ is actually outer: social and impersonal. The disparate parts that populate No Internal Thing wonder as they wander, navigating topics as familiar and diverse as self-loathing, aimless desire and eternal damnation. They chatter and clash and chase after narrative, troubling distinctions between inside and outside. What keeps them afloat is what threatens to capsize them: cultural myths, accusations, quotes, wisecracks, song lyrics, moral injunctions, uninvited memories, the pervasive detritus of advertising. Will it never cease?
Flo Ray is an artist whose work is broadly concerned with expressions of multiplicity: fragmentations in thought and feeling that complicate dominant cultural narratives of the singular, cohering subject. Through video, sculpture, writing, drawing and audio, she explores everyday antagonisms within, and between, what we call selves.
§
Double Entry by Hugo Hagger & Evelyn Wh-ell is a love story. Two protagonists play out two parallel storylines of self-alienation and dislocation in a tale about the queer joke that is life and its never-ending. Caught in the misfiring of causation, our protagonists face personal tragedy, missed sexual encounters, failed self-actualisation, and a scam phone call which drives them round in melodramatic circles until they lose the plot. Against the backdrop of a cast of 2-D characters, Double Entry’s duet form is a closed loop of interiority where only transformation is possible, not exit. Images and objects come back around to serve new functions in the narrative economy in which they work, changing substance but not appearance, or appearance but not substance, as they circle. In Double Entry, death is a life sentence.
Hugo Hagger is an artist and writer living in London. He writes about narrative, assemblage, and the politics of legibility. His work has been published in Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers, Coven Magazine - Berlin, and Deleuzine, he has exhibited at Alice Black Gallery, and Arusha Collection, London.
Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer and artist. They write about disappearing acts, doom, the empty promise of self-actualisation, and deferred endings. Their work has been presented at Kaunas Artists' House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project Space, and Kingsgate Project Space. They are the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing, and their criticism has been published by Art Monthly, World Picture Journal, and Cambridge Literary Review amongst others. Music by Haroun Yamou.
§
air sign by NO attempts to ‘speak the world’. It is a feral spell and work of vandalism against the moral imposition of logic, order and virtue held in the worldly crucible of the loving relation and the body as a vessel of the state. Taking place between two departed individuals it examines the locus of the impossibilities and crime of loving. Exploring the line where physical violence is justified, the piece wilfully reenacts harm against real or imagined oppressors where voices are dually victim and perpetrator. It gives voice to mutual longing, objects of nature, and emotions of the unknown. Asking performers to risk betrayal, it disrupts the license of gendered power roles, the language of access and refusal, the totem of what we are able and unwilling to find permissible. Where do we find beauty, safety and recovery? In times of extremity and catastrophe, what are we willing to transgress or sacrifice for love, for grief, for injustice?
NO is an experimental research project, spoken-word choir and theatre group run by artist and writer jamie lee. They employ polyphony, gendered speech and exhaustion to explore the personal and political implications of silence and rage, and the relationship between legality, morality and the sacred. NO is composed of bella aleksandrova, bhāvinī j, dan rhys wakefield, sidney jones, sydney radclyffe, svetlana rakočević, hal hockney and jamie lee.
§
blurt is an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast on rtm.fm. In this testing-site for testing text, four artists and artist-groups consider radio broadcast as an expanded form of publishing. We perform to publish, which is to say, to make public. And our moment of thinking is live on air!
§
runway by Alan Fielden is a performance for choral voices and one musician, exploring human communication during catastrophe. Structured yet improvised, runway makes use of overlapping choral narratives and live music to consider alternative treatments of text, voice, and storytelling. With words and phrases diverging, converging, repeating, and iterating in a procession of characters and images, runway uses polyphony to evoke networks of tenderness, overwhelm, and hysteria. runway will be performed with Jemima Yong, Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, and Nat Norland.
Alan Fielden is a Korean-British writer, performance maker, and poet. Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award for Marathon, with JAMS, co-produced by the Barbican. His writing has been published by Prototype, If A Leaf Falls, Monitor Books, Minor Literatures, Broken Sleep Press. Associate lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UAL, and Worcester University. He co-runs event series 'Feature' at Cafe Oto.
§
No Internal Thing by Flo Ray is a feverish collision of sound and voice that performs what is known as ‘inner speech.’ It’s a solo headscape, a play for one, a mental score as lithe as language itself. When speaking of the ‘inner voice’, our limited vocabulary is also misleading: Thought, says Denise Riley, is no internal thing. Just as authorship is plagiarism and speech is ventriloquy, our thinking derives from elsewhere — so that what is most ‘inner’ is actually outer: social and impersonal. The disparate parts that populate No Internal Thing wonder as they wander, navigating topics as familiar and diverse as self-loathing, aimless desire and eternal damnation. They chatter and clash and chase after narrative, troubling distinctions between inside and outside. What keeps them afloat is what threatens to capsize them: cultural myths, accusations, quotes, wisecracks, song lyrics, moral injunctions, uninvited memories, the pervasive detritus of advertising. Will it never cease?
Flo Ray is an artist whose work is broadly concerned with expressions of multiplicity: fragmentations in thought and feeling that complicate dominant cultural narratives of the singular, cohering subject. Through video, sculpture, writing, drawing and audio, she explores everyday antagonisms within, and between, what we call selves.
§
Double Entry by Hugo Hagger & Evelyn Wh-ell is a love story. Two protagonists play out two parallel storylines of self-alienation and dislocation in a tale about the queer joke that is life and its never-ending. Caught in the misfiring of causation, our protagonists face personal tragedy, missed sexual encounters, failed self-actualisation, and a scam phone call which drives them round in melodramatic circles until they lose the plot. Against the backdrop of a cast of 2-D characters, Double Entry’s duet form is a closed loop of interiority where only transformation is possible, not exit. Images and objects come back around to serve new functions in the narrative economy in which they work, changing substance but not appearance, or appearance but not substance, as they circle. In Double Entry, death is a life sentence.
Hugo Hagger is an artist and writer living in London. He writes about narrative, assemblage, and the politics of legibility. His work has been published in Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers, Coven Magazine - Berlin, and Deleuzine, he has exhibited at Alice Black Gallery, and Arusha Collection, London.
Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer and artist. They write about disappearing acts, doom, the empty promise of self-actualisation, and deferred endings. Their work has been presented at Kaunas Artists' House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project Space, and Kingsgate Project Space. They are the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing, and their criticism has been published by Art Monthly, World Picture Journal, and Cambridge Literary Review amongst others. Music by Haroun Yamou.
§
air sign by NO attempts to ‘speak the world’. It is a feral spell and work of vandalism against the moral imposition of logic, order and virtue held in the worldly crucible of the loving relation and the body as a vessel of the state. Taking place between two departed individuals it examines the locus of the impossibilities and crime of loving. Exploring the line where physical violence is justified, the piece wilfully reenacts harm against real or imagined oppressors where voices are dually victim and perpetrator. It gives voice to mutual longing, objects of nature, and emotions of the unknown. Asking performers to risk betrayal, it disrupts the license of gendered power roles, the language of access and refusal, the totem of what we are able and unwilling to find permissible. Where do we find beauty, safety and recovery? In times of extremity and catastrophe, what are we willing to transgress or sacrifice for love, for grief, for injustice?
NO is an experimental research project, spoken-word choir and theatre group run by artist and writer jamie lee. They employ polyphony, gendered speech and exhaustion to explore the personal and political implications of silence and rage, and the relationship between legality, morality and the sacred. NO is composed of bella aleksandrova, bhāvinī j, dan rhys wakefield, sidney jones, sydney radclyffe, svetlana rakočević, hal hockney and jamie lee.