In time for my performance ‘Live Letter’, I took some photos. It was chucking it down, a really shitty Manchester day with bad lighting- the perfect backdrop! So me, my wonky tripod and pink camera hung out by the derelict pub in front of my flat and shot some pics. Here’s an exclusive preview!

More details about the show here

It is a brilliant, fun project that I deliver in Manchester. The workshops involve taking in a box full of sensory and thematic props, costume and music to stimulate games, improvisations and worlds of make believe. We are currently working on an activities guide for carers, building a website, investigating how to evidence the impact this project has on the participants’ well being and planning training days for artist facilitators and carers later in the year.

I do this at Library Theatre for three days a week, it is funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Photo taken by Roshana Rubin-Mayhew
Courtesy of Library Theatre 2011

I am making a new experimental performance, which I will be videoing as it is at an unsociable hour.

The challenge is to make a new performance based on an orange. I like the juicy, stingy and squirty properties of fruit.

This is my influence:

Today I gave a talk called ‘What is Performance?’

I tried to answer with a five minute performance, a navigation through the history of performance, an exploration of the edges of performance, theatre and art, and then talked about my work and where it fits into all that!

It was good to spend the sunday evening before to reflect on the journey of my work.

Photo by Steve Oliver.

A performance for one person. I got really fed up when on Valentine’s Day, of all the days, I couldn’t find my nail clippers. I found a pair of nail scissors and then realised I could only cut my left hand. There I was with long nails on one side and short nails on the other. Alone. So the next day I took my nail scissors and waited patiently in a room with a sign that said ‘Right handed manicure wanted. Enquire within.’

Eventually a nice woman called Hannah came over with her boyfriend and cut my nails, she had never cut someone else’s nails before and thought it was strange. She was worried she might cut my skin by accident. I hadn’t had my nails cut by someone else since I was a child. We chatted about being alone and how a bus ran over her foot and destroyed her bike completely. It was a nice way to get to know someone and that the performance can only happen about every three weeks (based on average nail growing time). Thanks to Hannah, and to Roshana for taking photographs.

Last time was an all night job for an Agent Provocateur window display. A dozen ‘Pecker Tins™’ arrived on my doorstep one day and I knew it was going to be an overnight gig.

The window looked alright in the end, mannequins in underwear sitting at a tea party surrounded by these nuisance cakes- complete with a Betty Crocker semen fountain that my ex-boyfriend devised at four in the morning- I won’t take the credit for that, it was a gravity defying flash of structural and artistic brilliance.

Anyway, the pressure of so many sponge peckers going in and out of my oven (sorry) before sunrise & in time for the summer season, did put me off baking. It’s associated with mess, and stress, and those ridiculous tins. Which I took clattering to the charity shop, in a frightening mix of disdain and relief, into the arms of an old woman in a tabbard.

Another reason for my absence from baking may be that I didn’t have a cooker for a while (but that’s another story, quite a boring, depressing moment in time, actually).

So back to baking. Tonight I listened to a jazz cd that arrived in the post from a man in Munich. And I baked. It was bliss. To be absorbed in an activity, dusted in icing sugar, measuring things in cups. I found preheating the oven inadvertently preheats the whole kitchen, which certainly gives Economy 7 something to think about. Sieving sugar whilst the crazy shouting man outside is trying to ruin my jazz music and remind me I live in Manchester.

And guess what I did when I was needed to weigh my carrots? I don’t have any scales and my measuring stuff by the cup was working just fine, until the carrots came along. After the human scale didn’t work- you know, clutching carrots in one hand and something else in the other hand to see which is heavier- I referred to my Asda receipt and saw how much they weighed then divided that by the number of carrots. Yes it felt good. Like maybe I could survive on a desert island…

Really I just wanted to post the pictures not tangent-write. So: the ingredients;

the heart shaped cake with passion fruit freckles (does it think it’s an unripe strawberry?);

the kicking cowboy boot cake, if I could ice it I’d write ‘These boots are made for walking’ in swirly red letters;

the left over runt of the litter cakes;

the colossal washing up.

“Dressed in beatnik black they read poems about their ladyparts with an aching sincerity that is simply hilarious. They also give a truly alien point of view on sex from, well, an alien”
Dave Cunningham, What’s On Stage

Performing with the mighty, mad Eggs Collective. Should be a raunchy, raucous pre-Valentine’s do.

Tickets available here

It’s really struck a chord with people, lots of good feedback:

“Made me cry – beautiful”

“Stunning”

“It’s beautiful…I was gripped”

“full of beauty”

“full of humour, heart ache and truth and beautiful drawing”

Emergency Accommodation artists takeover Contact’s studio and secret spaces with surprising encounters and definition-defying performance.

Artists include: Lowri Evans, Krissi Musiol, Gareth Cutter, Julieann O’Malley, Angel Club North, Small Acts, and Fallen Wall Arts.

wowmcr.org

Book tickets here

Here it is: Vegetarian (presumably made from vegetables and not from vegetarians) Strudel, Mozzarella Salad, Soya Farofa, Rice and Coleslaw. Eaten at 1am on Christmas Eve / Day in Sorocaba, Brazil. Thank you Ani, it was delicious.

I think there’s a universe inside a piece of fruit. Everytime I bite in I think; what colours to behold, what complexities and simplicities,what sweetness to salvate. The colours of this plum (and others) would make a juicy palette for a painting. A painting of the sun.

Perfect afternoon, drawing and drinking in the breeze. I used to be scared of eating out alone, now I absolutely love it. It feels a real treat and somehow slightly mysterious.

A page from my latest book of words and pictures made in Brazil. The telenovela continues…

Look at these pomegranates growing in my friend’s garden! In my top ten things about Brazil is the abundance of fruit and seeing it grow and letting juices run down your arms.

The unforgotten joys of drawing in the sun with chalk…

The first few days have been epic like the mountains that I’ve been flitting around, with elephant highs and lows (Brazil is the perfect country to have an affair of the heart in by the way) (Also I will warn you right now this a post about love, not about a country).

Being with someone you love again. Ridiculous, rushing reunions that ebb into real life in waves of relief and disappointment. Being apart for long periods of time means that you have big gaps of experience that sometimes need filling in and sometimes don’t. Sometimes what you both imagined was in the gaps isn’t there at all.

So there you both are, constantly re-navigating a sprawling sea of two lives in a puddle of a month, in two languages you both don’t fully grasp, trusting that the other one is still searching for the same thing you are.

Maybe this is true of all relationships. Little leaps of faith in gaps of misunderstanding.

I’m making a book whilst I’m here too, a document of time unravelling.

I’m cramming in all my christmas socialising into one week, as I’m off to Brazil on Wednesday. (Expect numerous posts on love, misadventure and misunderstandings). (You’ve been warned). Anyway at my pseudo xmas-office-party-style do tonight I might make a christmas cake (can’t be that hard, right?) as I found my grandmother’s recipe book from 1940 this week. It was a wedding present, left blank for her culinary discoveries. It’s remained blank for the last 71 years, bar ‘Wartime Christmas Cake 1940′. So today I might honour the recipe. Honour the unfinishedness of the book and think of her being a new wife 71 years ago, trying to be a good one.

Come and see me tell a story at an open mic with a difference. Last performance of 2011.

Find out more here