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  1. Mind Control Victims Anonymous

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    this is a group performance after all…

    Samiir Saunders is a queer, Black, mixed-media poet based in Birmingham. Samiir is undertaking research to explore mental health, free will, coercion and the relationship between an audience and a performer as part of their Vivid Projects research residency funded by Arts Council England.

    On 20 October, Samiir invites participants to take part in a filmed interactive poetry performance, ‘Mind Control Victims Anonymous’ (MCVA).  An evolving work, MCVA uses scripted and improvisational actions as a starting point to explore mental health, free will, coercion and the relationship between an audience and a performer. First produced for the Supernormal Festival Artists Residency (2019), and since performed in various venues across the UK, the piece contains a mixture of scripted and improvised moments and is designed with the potential to continue indefinitely.

    Due to its interactive nature, each performance is unique. The poem follows a surreal narrative, a dreamlike first-person account of a speaker attempting to understand their place in the world. Various junctions in the poem offer the opportunity for the audience to vote between two narrative paths. The performance-workshop will last for approximately 2 hours, with the second half centring on discussion.

    Please note that the event will be filmed as part of the artist research process.

    Click Here To Book

  2. The Shadow Of Love In A Post-Intimate Space

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    Join Spect. Anon live on Instagram at 16:00, Sunday 28 February for the third streamed performance of their CO(VID) residency, which takes place is a shared creative isolation. Link here 

    “… you remind me of my birth, that was quiet until i was disposed into the world, i gave pain to my mother, my birth was difficult, i, was premature and born backwards and told from a very young age that i would grow up mad…”

    – D.John Briscoe (SPECT.ANON, 1980).

    In this shared isolation we are troubled by the primary subject and malady of our co-existence, bequeathed by my lost lover is the indecipherable archive; photographs, drawings and diagrams. Despite his departure, his contagion – the DNA of his lineage infects the air.  Now there are two of us who inherit the breached birth of his madness and my once shared psychosis of the upper and lower world. We draw breath and give oxygen to our lives, simultaneously breathing into our bodies.  – GS, 2021

    In a short performance action, a Folie Simultanée is played out alongside an audio track of a distorted love song, where longing and desire are framed in the matrix of this space.

     

     

  3. Signals

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    Artists George Saxon and Ryan Sehmar are collaborating under the moniker Spect. Anon during a shared self-isolation, undertaking a year long residency to explore ways in which an archive of personal practice materials might intersect and interact, alongside manifestations of responses to life during the global pandemic. A series of events, referred to as interludes and intervals, are unfolding this spring. At intervals, the audience will be beckoned in.

    You are invited to connect with Spect. Anon for the second in a series of works developed as part of their residency. ‘Signals’ is a choreographed live action performance made in response to a series of constructed sound loops that are triggered for the duration of the piece. It is based on an original set of sketches titled  ‘Broom-Self/Mop-Spirit’ (1980) found in the Spect. Anon book by the late D. John Briscoe. The performance attempts to decipher fragments from the notes, drawings and typewritten texts, taking cues from invocations and litanies from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and suggesting relationships to breathing, air and marriage.

    Performance duration: 15 minutes

    Join us live on instagram at 4pm, Sunday 24 January 2021  here