Reclaim: Happenings — Live Art Evening

Reclaim Festival is delighted to present an evening of bold and innovative new performances across live art, spoken word, moving image and experimental music. Expect a thought-provoking line-up of work that celebrates the women who are breaking the mould of mainstream theatre in the South West. The evening is curated by Kerry Priest, one of the originators of Plymouth’s acclaimed SOAK Live Art events.

Babes in arms are welcome at this event.

Featured artists:

Chhaya Youth

Revolutionary Grace: A Finishing School for Activists tackles themes of female leadership, raising female voices, women’s lack of faith in politicians and steps it takes to be an activist and start a rebellion.

Rachel Gippetti

Rachel Gippetti is a multimodal poet, artist and researcher from Boston, Massachusetts who now lives in Plymouth, Devon. Her work explores the spaces that sit between illness and health, and memory and material. Her current work is set to soundscapes and music created using cassette tapes from her childhood. Exploring the experience of carrying a BRCA2 genetic mutation, this work reimagines inheritance, tradition and ceremony while challenging linear notions of time.

The Meadow Verse

The Meadow Verse presents Hags and Heartbreak.

17th Century poet Robert Herrick was vicar of the Church at Dean Prior, a small village on the outskirts of Dartmoor National Park. His thousands of poems reveal the country rituals of the time, from crude theatre and folk dancing, to drinking, plant symbolism, favoured domestic animals, farting witches and fertility rituals. This treasure trove of magical, hedonistic texts are being dragged back into the light by The Meadow Verse (pronounced metaverse), a loose collective of musicians and artists living in Herrick’s corner of England, re-inventing his work through sung rituals, with music by Lucinda Guy.

Hags and Heartbreak is a solo performance featuring recordings Lucinda made in Herrick’s Church, and during a recent residency at Klangendum Studio, Worm, Rotterdam. She will also sing, and play bells and whistles.

Veronica Aaronson

In Veronica Aaronson’s Inanna Reimagined, 12 poets and two musicians, through the voices of the main characters and non-human bystanders, retell the ancient myth of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess. Listen as the Holy Fly negotiates his way into the beer-houses, find out why the Royal Meat Hook is ecstatic, accompany Inanna as she descends to the Underworld to meet Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below…

Bryony Gillard

Bryony Gillard is an artist, curator and educator and a PhD Candidate at University of Plymouth (School Art, Design & Architecture). Situated between writing, workshops, performance, moving image and exhibition making, her practice reflects on events, states of being, materials and organisms that refuse or resist normative capitalist structures and temporalities. This can include thinking with/through grief, sickness or erotic autonomy, engaging with materials such as sewage, seaweed or auto-fiction and working with genealogies of feminist labour that are elusive, messy and entangled in contemporary concerns. Her current research centres the politics of waste — as matter both in and out of place.

This event is part of Reclaim Festival: a week-long celebration of women in the arts. Click the link below to find out more.

VIEW THE FULL PROGRAMME