Jyll Bradley Mr Roscoe's Garden
Visual artist Jyll Bradley lifts the lid on one of the most extraordinary stories in British botanic history as artist in residence at the Liverpool Botanical Collection. The vision of a Liverpool founding father, William Roscoe (1753-1831), the Collection is now among the largest in UK municipal ownership. In May a garden conceived by Jyll - Mr Roscoe's Garden opened at the Chelsea Flower Show and will tour the UK in the summer, culminating in September with the launch of the artist's book of the same name. The Botanic Garden, a new photographic installation will open from 20 September at the Walker Art Gallery.
Download Jyll’s FREE guide to Liverpool Botanical Collection
Order Mr Roscoe's Garden
Commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company for European Capital of Culture 2008
Tim Hopkins Give Me Your Blessing For I Go To A Foreign Land
A multimedia adventure about love in an era of technological change
This new collaboration between director Tim Hopkins and Russian born composer Elena Langer features performers from the Pokrovsky Ensemble, Moscow.
The project brings together live music for piano, violin, voice and folk percussion, dance for folk and ballet performances, moving image, historic technologies and online virtual space. The event incorporates fragments of folk music, Wagner, Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky himself.
The project has been developed in association with OperaGenesis, the opera development programme of ROH2 at the Royal Opera House London
Greta Mendez Plum Flower in the Snow
Designed by Martina von Holn
Performers Nina Baden-Semper, Jacqui Chan and Inder Salim
Live artist and raconteur Greta Mendez fuses her Trinidadian roots with Asian cultures. Plum Flower In The Snow is an artist residency and performance installation at HOME as part of China Now which traces Greta’s recent travels in China and India. Through image and recital, Greta deconstructs moments, rituals and encounters that left their mark. Join her for an oriental bite and a cup of chai as Greta interprets the cultures she once only knew as a child. A feast for the senses.
Co-produced with HOME, London and presented in association with China Now.
Bette Bournei Rock
Rock Hudson was the biggest screen idol in 1950s Hollywood – the ultimate Tinseltown hunk. But his career was perpetually under threat from Confidential Magazine and only one man stood between stardom and oblivion. Rock is the story of Henry Willson, the man who made stars of Rock, Tab Hunter and Troy Donaghue; the most unscrupulous agent in LA who would do anything to protect his money-spinning protégés… Written by Tim Fountain, Rock is a brand new play that brings the seamy world of 1950s Hollywood to vivid life.
Watch Homotopia TV’s film of The Making of Rock: www.homotopia.tv
Co-commissioned by Homotopia and Glasgay!
Rose English Ornamental Happiness
Take your seat inside a small but perfectly formed jewel box. In this crystalline salon setting, seven consumate performers lift a shimmering vessel brimming with all the promise of the sublime.
Written and directed by Rose English in collaboration with Luke Stoneham (composer), Simon Vincenzi (designer), Chahine Yavroyan (lighting designer).
Performed by Claire Bessent, Rose English, Jennifer John, François Testory, James Orrell and members of the Zhejiang Acrobatic Troupe of China
The whole piece distils a delicate, disciplined beauty
The Sunday Telegraph
Ornamental Happiness is a celebration of the purity of unadorned performance and capacity for its essential spirit to resonate within us
Realtime, Australia
Commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company for the Unity Theatre in association with Liverpool Biennial
Tim Hopkins Elephant & Castle
Two children venture far from home and lose themselves in the energy of a new experience in a strange place. A frantic parent searches for them…
This new opera incorporates film, digital sounds, installations and live performance to project an urban vision into a rural landscape.
Directed and devised by Tim Hopkins with Mira Calix and Tansy Davies (music), Blake Morrison (text), Pippa Nissen (designer), Zerlina Hughes (lighting designer) and Julian Warburton (music director)
Brutal requiem for London
Evening Standard
Developed through Aldebugh Residencies for Snape Maltings site and Concert Hall
Marisa Carnesky Ghost Train
A large-scale interdisciplinary performance installation. Hurtle through a disorientating journey, and marvel at the astonishing collage of images, sounds and spectacular illusions. Enter a world where the phantasmagorical collides with fragmented stories of broken journeys, shifting borders and disappearing women. Carnesky's Ghost Train is a real ghost train which blazes with the thrill of the fairground and the excitement of live performance. Climb aboard and don't look back...
Devised by Marisa Carnesky in collaboration with Paul Kieve (illusionist), Laura Hopkins (designer), Jonathan Allen (digital media), Nigel Edwards (lighting designer), Rohan Kriwazcek (soundtrack), Lance Dann (sound designer)
The most talked about piece of theatre this year, Ghost Train is a marvelous mix of technical wizardry and sheer heart and soul
The Guardian
London Artists Projects, Warwick Arts Centre and Fierce co-commission for Truman Brewery, Zomer van Antwerpen and Glastonbury Festival
Oreet Ashery Welcome Home
Welcome Home was a site specific performance looking at intimate and political aspects of returning, non returning, dislocation and disappearance. The performance included middle eastern food, music, Palestinian folk dance and a film programme selected by Reem Fadda, director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Arts.
Performing Rights Festival PSi#12 commission in association with Live Art Development Agency for Queen Mary University London
Bette Bourne Read My Hips
Hold on to your asps, come up the Nile and into the queer world of Constantine Cavafy, the celebrated poet. Joined by friend, novelist EM Forster, Cavafy explores the underbelly of Alexandria in Egypt circa. 1915. Part documentary, part tissue of lies, Read My Hips is a new play that combines the sublime erotic poetry of Cavafy with the cheapest laughs in town!
Bloolips serve up a marvellous, vaudevillian goulash…lush, evocative glamour worthy of Ken Russell’s fever-dream best!
QX Magazine
Written by Ray Dobbins
Directed and performed by Bette Bourne with Lavinia co-op, Sebastien Teller, and John Gould
Designed by Robin Whitmore
Marisa Carnesky The Girl from Nowhere
Made as the pre-cursor to Carnesky's Ghost Train, The Girl From Nowhere explores hidden stories from 100 years of immigration from Eastern Europe told through the female body, filmed testimony, spectacular magic illusions, text, and music.
A mixture of tat and exotica with illusion and magic, (Carnesky) offers the audience hard truths about centuries of dispossession and displacement… The piece’s ragged quirkiness is all part of its power, as is the way that Carnesky presents a startling body of evidence about Europes invisible people
The Guardian
Riverside Studios London, Warwick Arts Centre, City of Women Festival Ljubljana
