Compass Festival of Live Art, November 2011

Friday 25 November 9pm - 12am
Leeds Gallery (Munro House) York Street, LS9 8AG

Compass Late was a work in progress platform, on which artists and companies in Yorkshire and the Humber making live art and contemporary performance, showed their work informally for a regional and national audience of artists and other arts professionals.

Six artists and companies presented an array of new ideas, and the evening was split between short extracts of new performance  from the selected artists/companies, and time left open for a drink, a ‘hello’ and a chance to meet with colleagues and friends new and old.

Compass Late aimed to provide a helpful platform for regional artists making experimental shifts in their practice, as well as offering a welcoming celebration for all those interested in the Compass Festival of Live Art and Compass Symposium Programme.

The artists and pieces presetned were: Tarnish by Indivisible, Silos by Northern Creative Theatre, PLaY’s Real Life Super Heroes, Freakazoid by Sara Zaltash, Trance  by Ultimate Dancer,  and Cat in Hell by Ollie Smith & Phoebe Walsh.

Images of the Compass Late event can be seen on our image archive on Flickr

Cat in Hell
Ollie Smith & Phoebe Walsh 

A performance about getting the cream and choking on it. It’s about sleek whiskers, snazzy pyjamas, conjuring tricks and confetti. It’s about having nine lives and wasting them all. It’s about getting bagged up and waiting to drown. It’s about fate and fortune and luck and sleaze and shuffling about in the dregs. It’s about hell on earth.

Silos
Northern Creative Theatre

Silos explores the absurdity of isolation and the cacophonies and silences of our internal worlds. It will explore what emerges in the apertures of words, story or character, the un-nerving, anticipatory qualities of unspokeness, and how to inhabit the space opened up by stillness and silence.

Real Life Super Heroes (Working Title)
PLaY

Real Life Super Heroes explores a growing movement of ordinary members of the public who create alternative “superhero” personas and “patrol” the streets in their own personalized costumes, often performing acts of charity or kindness such as giving food to people living on the streets. These people are grouping together and holding regular meetings to share their experiences and draw strength from each other.

This is a show about facing your fears. This is a show about how I faced my fears and became a super hero. We invite you to join us at a meeting of the Honk Avengers.

Freakazoid
Sara Zaltash

Freakazoid is a lecture-demo mashup that explores the boundaries between art and information whilst interrogating the creative relationship between London and the rest of the Contemporary/Live Art, with specific focus on Yorkshire and the Humber.

TRANCE
Ultimate Dancer

TRANCE is the second part of a trilogy with Ultimate Dancer and based around questions of authorship and authorities. Ultimate Dancer will through techniques of hypnotism and subliminal messaging find methods to communicate with the audience and reassure them that the power of the performance lies within their presence and engagement. TRANCE wishes to create a power-shift from performer to audience and in this shift construct “the true death” of the choreographer and its authority.

Tarnish
Indivisible

The title of the work Tarnish is used as a framing tool to explore the idea that we are at once corrupted by the influence of others and also preserved by that influence. We as performers strive to shed our personal identities and embody the cloak of gender. By depicting such contrast in our image we then set about dissolving the lines between. In a world of Black and White we attempted to create a mesh of Grey.

Our hope is to find the balance between two individuals (one male/ one female) through a direct and brutal mode of perfomativity.

About Peter Reed
Curator of Compass Late

Peter is a producer and curator of Live Art, Contemporary Performance and Visual Arts.

He graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama, London in 2011 and now works for venues, artists, festivals and development agencies in Yorkshire and London with an enthusiasm for Live Art and Site Specific Theatre.

He was the Lead Programmer and International Coordinator of the Accidental Festival 2010 at BAC (London) and the Assistant Producer of Scenofest and The Prague Quadrennial 2011 (Prague). He now works for Compass Festival of Live Art, The Carriageworks and Emerge Leeds as Associate Producer. He recently became the Arts Programmer for The Yorkshire Business and Arts Festival 2012.

Peter produces the projects of a number of artists and companies. These include two installations for Malaysian performer and artist Jemima Yong: Safe Keeping 2011 (Bowery Gallery, Leeds) and Primary 1 2011 (M1 Singapore Fringe Festival). He also produces the Grief Series projects by Leeds-based artist Ellie Harrison. Etiquette of Grief is a solo show currently touring the UK and Europe whilst The Reservation, a show for hotel rooms, is touring Yorkshire and the North East.

Peter also works as a producer with London-based Live Art company, LEIBNIZ on their DNA Archive and Living Room Theatre projects and performance company Kings of England on their SPILL Festival of Performance commissioned show “In Eldersfield: Chapter 1: Elegy for Paul Dirac”