YOUR REALITY IS BROKEN’: A Festival of Abstracted, Ritualised and Embodied Live Art
2nd - 28th February
90% of what you ‘see’ is an internal mental simulation of the external world, informed occasionally by sampling data from your senses. What we conceive of as reality is mental fabrication.
Welcome to the festival....
Perception underpins our sense of reality - it is fundamental to who we are and how we experience the world. This month of happenings, workshops, performances, live music and films will explore perception: altered states, visual illusions and hallucinations, dogmatic thinking, the politics of perception; and how it is linked to the creative act. What happens in that moment of suspension between perceived reality and action? The no consciousness. Is this the moment of trance action? A scientific, philosophical and creative approach to these questions will invite you on journey into your inner and outer experiences of the world.
In the happenings, rituals become gigs. Film screenings open out into practical work sessions. Public science experiments become club nights. This Neurophenomenological approach will create a Temporary Autonomous Zone in Hackney - where extreme impulses, unacceptable identities and prohibited thoughts are permitted. Participate or spectate. Be Scientist or Artist. Allow your perceptions to alter.
Festival curated by MAS productions (Jonathan Grieve and Nwando Ebizie)
For more information/to take part:
www.mas-productions.org
Email: masproductions2@gmail.com
Highlights
The Opening Ceremony - 2nd February
Ritual Gig - Curated by Nwando Ebizie
Featuring Deep Throat Choir, Sam Mackay (LCMF), Lady Vendredi - Master of Ceremonies, Vogue Ballroom, Dr Edward Bracey: Introduction to the Neuroscience of Sense Perception.
Neuroscience of Visual Illusions - 4th February
Science/Art Workshop - Dr Edward Bracey and Nwando Ebizie
This cross-disciplinary workshop will explore rare visual disorders that are like experiencing constant psychedelic hallucinations. We invite people who have HPPD, experience visual snow and Palinopsia to share their experience of reality with those who do not. We will create artist renditions and using virtual reality technology, enable people to see in new ways.
Poetics of the Body: Memory, Decay and Loss - 3rd - 5th February
Workshop - Fabiola Santana
This workshop explores the relationship between body, memory, decay and touch. Different levels of intimacy are explored by asking – how do we relate, experience and respond to loss, decay and grief?
Houses of Decay - 8th February
Interactive Performance Installation - Fabiola Santana
An interactive performance installation made from grief, loss and decay. One by one the participants are invited to listen to an abandoned house as it weeps. The house becomes the site of a communal ritual for the artist, the local community and participants.
The Liberated Voice - 10th - 12th February
Workshop - Ignacio Jarquin
This workshop will unleash hidden, untapped, vocal potential - regardless of the level of experience - and turn this discovered potential into a fine(r) tuned instrument capable of artistic expression. The work builds on the natural sounds that the human phonatory system can produce due to its unbelievable flexibility and range such as shouting, squeaking, hooting and many other percussive possibilities to create an instrument capable of artistic expression. We will explore the question of how the precision of a symbolic image/perceptual image (visual, sound, tactile) causes involuntary and organic changes in the voice through affecting the anatomy of the vocal apparatus. And how this leads to a liberated voice.
Esoterrorist Practices and Pop Phenomena - 17th - 19th February
Live Art Workshop - Moss Beynon Juckes
A live art workshop exploring emotional labour & endogenous encounters
Esoterrorism is the use of highly advanced experimental bio and non-bio technologies to enhance the ability to perceive and manipulate the now. As we are more and more alienated from the very substances of which we are made we shall create esoterrorist practices based on the potential of endogenous encounters with the specific intention to create a ritual to heal global wounds.
20 Minutes of Action - 18th February
Performance Sharing - Nwando Ebizie (Directed by Jonathan Grieve, Choreography by Moss Beynon Juckes)
"That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action”
Brock Turner's Father
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/06/father-stanford-university-student-brock-turner-sexual-assault-statement
A Solo dance piece exploring the empty space wherein anger should exist. A visceral movement and sound piece influenced by Experience, The Red Shoes and Swan Lake.
Lady Snowblood - 22nd February
Film Screening and Talk
The 1973 ‘Pinky Violence’ film on which Kill Bill was heavily influenced.
A young woman (Meiko Kaji), trained from childhood as an assassin and hell-bent on revenge for the murders of her father and brother and the rape of her mother, hacks and slashes her way to gory satisfaction in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan.
Secular Ecstatic Art vs Self Exploitation - 21st - 25th February
Live Art Laboratory - Jonathan Grieve
This week long multidisciplinary laboratory will clash inner and outer worlds. Focussing on the subverting of power structures, participants will create the embodiment of mediated social, cultural and gender based identities through exercises using intimate exploration, props and costumes.
The training will explore the efficacy of symbolic action for performers: looking at whether certain techniques, actions, songs, ritual structures alter the consciousness of the participants.
Higher, Higher, Higher - 26th February
Ecstatic Clubnight
An ecstatic transformation ritual. 8 Hours of the same song played by the house band: When the Going is Good and Strong by 70s Electro synth pioneer William Onyeabor. A dance to destruction or a dance to transcendence.
MAS productions
Mas productions is an experimental theatre collective with an interdisciplinary focus on para-theatrical theories. Their most recent production, The Passion of Lady Vendredi received critical acclaim:
‘Forget everything you know about what a performance ‘should’ look like, or sound like, or even feel like. Leave your preconceptions about music theatre at the door. Because you are about to enter Lady Vendredi’s futuristic, bizarre, psychedelic and sexy mystical world creatively directed by visionary Jonathan Grieve.’
A Younger Theatre
The research of the company is focused on what we term: ‘Secular Ecstatic Art’. Our process incorporates psychophysical training, research with neurophenomenology, voice work, ritual research, music and performance art. We curate events in order to explore group social ritual and intimacy.
Workshops offer a unique opportunity for artists to develop new work in a structured yet free environment, providing frameworks that support productivity and the development of ideas.
Supported by the Artsadmin Artists' Bursary Scheme 2016-17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXMRO7O4kQU
