Writing Bodies.

Diana Hope Tegenkamp.

Diana Hope Tegenkamp is a Métis poet, writer and artist working with text, language, voice, music, body and image. She lives and creates on Treaty 6 Territory, Homeland of the Métis. Diana’s first book, Arterial & Quarry, completed with Canada Council for the Arts and Saskatchewan Arts Board grants, will be published in Fall 2021 by Thistledown Press. "Birthmark" and "Motherfield," two poems from Arterial & Quarry, were longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. And in February, 2021, Diana received second prize in the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Contest, for her poem, “My father as rhythm in lakewater.” Many Good Places: Rediscovering the Métis and Settler Place-Worlds of My Parents, her second, in-process poetry manuscript, is supported by a Marian Hebb Research Grant.

For more information about Diana’s practice, take a look at her website.

Camilla Nelson.

Camilla Nelson is a British language artist, small press publisher, creative programmer and freelance academic.  She has a PhD in Performance Writing from University of the Arts London (2013). Her work explores the materiality of language in page-based poetry, soundwork, installation and performance.

Reading Movement is an extended treatment of John Hall's "Reading (il)legible Pages" ("On the Page", Performance Research: Vol. 9; No.2, June 2004) by Camilla Nelson. This performance physically and sonically disrupts, extends and transforms the act of reading, liberating the body from the social restriction of normalised reading behaviours. This solo emerges out of collaboration with the Palestinian dancer, Khaled Barghouthi (2015-2016), mentoring by Maja Jantar, Katrina Brown & Suzanne Scott (2016-2017) and ongoing training with The World is Sound. The draft script was long-listed for The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers in 2016.

For more information about Camilla’s practice, take a look at her website.

2 for a fiver.

2 for a fiver (Alice Esmė + Luis Amália) are two misunderstood freaks creating absurdities to comprehend the absurdities of modern life. Fascinated by how people use and pervert spaces. They highlight what mainstream society has told them they are defects or design flaws and they give them voice. They put themselves at the front and they let themselves play and be naughty. With silence, with sweat, with hair, with tangos. Let’s Polka the Salsa.

Alice grew up on a vegetable farm and spent her summers working the land. She trained as a dancer and as an engineer and works across multiple disciplines including movement and sound. Luis always wanted to be Ingrid Bergman. A performer, maker and actress. Also an architect. Freak, Passion, Onion. Seeking for collaboration and ways to find a place for their migrant non-binary queer voice. 

In their Writing Bodies piece ‘High Noon’, 2 for a fiver will be collaborating with writer, performer and educator Keith Jarrett and experimental singer and animator M@artadelas.

For more information about 2 for a fiver visit their page here.

Ekaterina Luzgina & Mike McShane.

Mike McShane and Ekaterina Luzgina are an artist duo originating from the UK and Russia respectively. At the core of their work together they are interested in how text can exist beyond a purely linguistic sign: How it can be broken down into a pattern forming an image, as a shape forming a sculpture or as the rhythm of sound in space. Through sculpture, performance and film the duo seek to create spatial poetry where fragments of words float in and out of consciousness, transcending fixed meanings within language. Combining the aesthetics of architecture and industrial design they animate and transform typographic forms into actors in space. These Hybrids create meaning through the interaction of their robotic bodies. They aspire to create an uncontrolled ballet of automata, a world where cybernetic theory is inverted from a controlling mechanism to one that encourages dissonance and chance.

For more information about Mike & Ekaterina, take a look at Ekaterina & Mike’s websites.

Jenn Kirby, Robbie Blake & Sinead Hayes

Jenn Kirby is a composer, performer and music technologist. Her output includes contemporary instrumental composition, electroacoustic music, sound art, noise music, experimental-pop, laptop orchestra performance and solo live electronics. She builds software and re-purposes controllers as musical interfaces to create and perform theatrical live electronic music. 

Robbie Blake is a composer-performer working in the contexts of music, live art, dance and theatre. They create new work that expands musical possibilities through a distinctive interdisciplinary focus. As artistic director of Tonnta, they champion new and experimental work created with the voice.

Irish conductor Sinead Hayes is in her seventh season as conductor of the Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble (HRSE) in Belfast. A specialist in the performance and realisation of complex contemporary scores and opera, her current work includes facilitating online performances with HRSE, exploring the possibilities of geolocated audio as a bridge between live and recorded performance, as well as the establishment of virtual conducting lessons tailored for composers. 

For more information about their respective practices, take a look at Jenn Kirby, Robbie Blake, and Sinead Hayes’ websites.

Niya B.

Niya B is a transfeminist artist, working at the intersections of visual art and performance to explore themes related to ecology, posthumanism, (trans)gender politics and equity in mental health. She uses video, soundscapes, text, voice-over, live image feed and live acts to create a meditative space of vulnerability, affect and interdependence.

Selected recent shows include: From Tomorrow (Tate Britain, London, 2020); WIP: Work in Progress/Working Process (online, 2020); Cultural Institute commission (Leeds, 2020); Futureless (Somos Art, Berlin, 2020); Ekdysis, solo (Enclave, London, 2020); NEoN festival (Dundee, 2019); Unfix (CCA, Glasgow, 2019); Eco-futures festival and Disorders (London, 2019); Emergency (Manchester, 2018); And What? (London, 2017 & 2020), Fringe! (London, 2016); Trans:plant, solo, (London, 2016). Niya was awarded with an a-n bursary and a Jerwood bursary in 2020 and is currently working on her ACE-funded project ‘Ekdysis’.

For more information about Niya’s practice, take a look at her website.