Postcards Festival 2012

Following on from last year’s successful inaugural season, Jacksons Lane’s Postcards Festival returns with a selection of “short vivid snapshots from some of the most astonishing acts on the planet.” This year’s festival showcases work from over 30 companies and performers. Highlights include Scottee’s new show in which audience members are invited to share their talents onstage, Marcella Puppini’s new rock’n'roll-art-punk band The Forget Me Nots, and NoFit Stage’s Simone Riccio combining acrobatics, juggling and dance.

The festival was established by Adrian Berry when frustrated at the lack of opportunities for new and established circus and performance artists to establish short, new pieces. Tickets for all Postcards shows are priced at £10 (including double and triple bills) and tickets for the Late Night Cabaret (eight artists, late bar and DJs) are £15.

Adrian Berry says, “Last year’s Postcards Festival was just the start really, where we began to experiment and find new ways of curating circus and contemporary cabaret. This year we’ve come of age, and genuinely feel that Postcards is a unique festival for London. Cabaret and Circus have entered the mainstream, which is really great, but through Postcards we are finding alternative ways to present and re-invent the genres. It’s a pretty exciting time to be an audience member at Jacksons Lane.”

The festival is accompanied by the exhibition The Domestic Burlesque (showing until August 30th). Elsa Quarsell’s  photographs feature burlesque artists in full paraphernalia in domestic settings.

Jacksons Lane’s Postcards Festival runs from June 7th – 30th 2012. For more information and tickets, visit the website.

The Festival of Belonging 2012

The Festival of Belonging takes place this week at various venues in Gateshead and Newcastle. The week-long festival consists of workshops, literary events and gigs, all designed to explore ideas of what it means to belong. Questions of immigration, identity, and social inclusion and exclusion will all be up for discussion.

The Festival begins with a Fringe Programme curated by Trashed Organ, a Newcastle-based literature, music and events collective, and will cumulate with Weekend Programme of work produced by the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts (NCLA). The Festival Fringe brings together some of the North East’s most exciting writers, musicians and artists. Highlights include The Lake Poets, following a sell-out gig at The Sage Gateshead last week and Siddhartha Bose’s evocative Kalagora (recently seen at CPT, during the Sprint Festival), which splices theatre, poetry and video.

The Fringe Programme closes with I Don’t Think We’ve Met, a night of collaborative work which will bring together writers, poets, visual artists and musicians to explore the idea of ‘un-belonging’ and the role the outsider.

Jackie Kay will be in conversation with Sapphire, author of best-selling novel Push, and there will be readings and workshops from authors including NCLA writer-in-residence Helen Oyeyemi, Tahmima Anam and Hari Kunzru. The Festival closes with a screening of Tina Gharavi’s feature film I am Nasrine, which will be followed by a chance to hear the filmmaker in conversation with Jackie Kay.

The Festival runs from 30th April to 6th May 2012. For further details visit the NCLA website.

Tate Tanks at the Tate Modern

The Tanks at Tate Modern, the powerstation’s former oil chambers, will be open for the first time to the public as part of a four-month long festival running from 18th July- 28th October as part of London’s Cultural Olympiad. The East and South Tanks will be the first museum spaces permanently dedicated to exhibiting live art, performance, installation and film works. In addition, The Transformer Galleries next to the Tanks will showcase recent major acquisitions of film and performance, including Suzanne Lacy’s Crystal Quilt  and Lis Rhodes’ Light Music .

The East Tank will be solely dedicated to a commission by Korean video and performance artist Sung Hwan Kim sponsored by Sotheby’s, weaving Korean culture, folklore and history with personal fantasy through storytelling. The South Tank will be dedicated to a rolling series of projects exploring the history of interdisciplinary work- including performance and film- as well as symposia, a micro-festival by and for young people and artist-led participatory projects.

Highlights include Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s reworking of her seminal piece Fase, a residency by artist Tania Bruguera in which she will be developing a political party Immigrant Movement International as well as commissions from artists Eddie Peake, developing work exploring sexuality and voyeurism, and Haegue Yang’s new series of mobile performative sculptures. Boris Charmatz will be presenting a new act in his series A History of Performance in 10 Acts, and there will be a series of curated events exploring Filmaktion’s radical cinema work.

Art in Action: Materialising the Social will explore the role of performance art in social relationships, questioning the ways in which performance’s ephemerality establishes the field within art history, featuring presentations from Claire Bishop and Dorothea Von Hantelmann. Performance Year Zero: A Living History will consider how the museum might engage with performance art history, challenging Peggy Phelan’s construct of performance as an art of the present tense, and featuring contributions from Pierre Bal-Blanc, Rose Lee Goldberg and Yvonne Rainer. Last in the series of symposia will be Playing in the Shadows: Film Action, exploring liveness in cinema and the notion of projection as performance, with contributions from Lucy Reynolds and Aura Satz.

The festival will also feature a large-scale event for six hundred teachers, a collaboration between the Tate, Royal Shakespeare Company, British Museum and the National Theatre in the form of an international conference dedicated to exploring the value of arts in young people’s live from Shakespeare to the digital age as well an artist-led live action for five thousand participants.

The Tanks provide an opportunity for the gallery to respond to developments in modern and contemporary art practice, providing equal focus to forms of participation and engagement as well as performance, sound, installation and film work. The Tanks also aim to be a space for art which engages with social play. Following the festival, they close for construction work, due to re-open in 2016.