Off cuts and one-offs
We make lots of things. Many are one-off responses to particular invitations and commissions. This page gathers some of the things we’ve done that we love, but sit outside of our more ‘formal’ portfolio.
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Photo by Jemima Yong
Use it or Lose it (2022)
A one-off performance for ‘Past Works Recycling Plant’, a mix-bill evening curated by Emergency Chorus at Camden People’s Theatre (London, November 2022).
We tried to give away our unused ideas from the past 10 years – one-liners, failed attempts, and neglected projects. We wore of some of our favourite costumes that hadn’t made it into a show, and served the audience leftover drinks from previous projects.
Fatima in Cyber (2021)
A text and digitally-collaged image produced in response to an advert recirculated in 2021 (“Fatima’s next job could be in cyber”) that provoked mass outcry within the UK cultural sector. Rather than bemoan Fatima’s departure from ballet, we imagined what she might have gotten up to in this new field, and looked to Stanislav Lem’s seminal book of science fiction stories The Cyberiad for inspiration.
Fatima in Cyber was a commiseration gift for the applicants who were not selected for our choreography course Letters of Resignation.
Only Losers Left Alive (2020)
In 2020 we set up a free and independent choreography school. We advertised it as a space for “artists, performers, dancers, doubters, loners and losers” to think through “movement, embodiment, gesture, space, friction, possibility and pleasure”.
This project responded to the rising number of practitioners experimenting with performance in the East Midlands, yet few contexts to gather and nurture those practices.
We had a great first session together, in which people made some breathtakingly beautiful works – roller-blading, desk-dancing, table crawling, bathroom-whispering – and then we were hit with Covid-19 lockdowns. Damn.
Furl (2019)
A durational performance, in which a figure meticulously unfolds a billowing sheet of plastic tarpaulin. Once flat, they step onto it and begin to twist. The material curls and knots around their feet; the growing mound looks a bit like a flower, a flag, or a poo. The performer clumsily steps out and kicks their leg to extract themselves. The resulting sculptural mess is left in the space, until a second performer enters to restart the process.
Furl was first performed at Making An EXIT at Chisenhale Dance Space. This 24-hour performance marathon marked Brexit, and featured the work of 24 artists from across Europe. For this context, we described the work as “a study of graceless exits.”
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To mark five years of our collaboration, we made a simple publication that collected a range of our performance scores for large groups of people.
The descriptions of the performances varied between serious proposal, unfeasible ambition, poetic evocation and bitchy satire. One friend described this publication as ‘planting a flag’ in all these ideas; quietly declaring our ownership without ever having to go through the bother of actually making them.
Five texts from peers formed an introduction, that celebrated and denigrated our practice.
Photo by Ilenia Arosio
Here’s to (2018)
A series of six toasts to punctuate an evening, beginning with the phrase ‘Here’s to…’. Each toast is conceived of and delivered by an invited guest, and draws the audience’s attention to different topics. Whether celebratory, bitter, long-winded or deranged, each performer ends their toast by uncorking a bottle of fizz, and demanding the audience to join them in raising a glass.
Here’s to was performed once, at David Roberts Art Foundation’s An Evening of Performances for London Frieze Week. It was a manic night, with a number of last minute revelations and restrictions that ultimately made the whole thing a bit of a nightmare. However, we were glad to get to work with a group of artists and friends we admire: Angela Andrews, Wendy Houstoun, Rukeya, Bruno Roubicek, Esmond Sage and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic (with her guest Sam Pardes).
Footnotes (2018)
We invited 10 friends of ours – artists, writers, performers, thinkers – to contribute essays to this hand-made publication. Each text took the form of a series of footnotes, that hung off a single sentence sourced from another writer.
The publication includes comprehensive accounts of a family drama underlying an antiques listing, a critique of the email opener ‘I hope this finds you well’, and an explanation of a principle of Tai-Chi. These texts were interspersed with drawings of feet.
Footnotes was launched in conjunction with Things For People To Do at our fifth birthday party.
Download a free digital version here.
Just One Thing on Top of Another (2017)
An installation made for the group exhibition Provocations at ICW in Blackpool, curated by Garth Gratrix and Jez Dolan. This dead-pan work presented a collection of pairs of found objects, stacked one upon the other.
Within this survey of contemporary queer art, the work turns an expression of the tedium of life (and a joke about queer sexual position) into a minimalist study in balance, precarity, dependancy, doubling and odd-couples.
Our ‘Meaningless Dances’ was a series of works that responded to a trend in experimental performance prioritising work that explicitly addresses ‘urgent’ socio-political realities. We used this provocative title to develop a range of materials (video, performances and text) that were laboured, flippant, elegant and cartoonish. We wanted to know what it meant to make and present work to audiences while insisting on their unimportance – and to see if it is even possible to make something that is ‘meaningless’.
You can watch Meaningless Dance 18 here. It was filmed in Norfolk, and was made through the generous support of Sue and Imi Maufe. Alongside the Meaningless Dances that exist as stand-alone works (Empty Gestures, This, Some Possibilities), we think it is one of the best.
Floorplan was a durational performance in which two performers took turns to place or remove strips of masking tape on the floor and walls.
Over four hours, this simple proposition moved through various games of meaning, abstraction, clarity and mess. This game of expanded drawing suggested choeographic scores, city planning, as well as im/possible architectural transformations of the performance space.
We developed this project during our very first residency at The New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich. Its only public performance took place at Rich Mix in London.
Partner Dances For One was a solo-duet drawing on clown, improvisation, half-learned dance history and YouTube tutorials.
The ~20 minute performance was a collage of clichés and gestures that were pushed to breakage or abandonment. It started as a more tightly choreographed thing, and then became increasingly improvised. We wanted to address what it meant to perform for a live audience – and the desire for ‘authenticity’, ‘real feeling’, or of someone dancing ‘like nobody is watching’.
It was presented at Camden People’s Theatre (Calm Down, Dear Festival, London, September 2015), Battersea Arts Centre (Freshly Scratched, London, October 2015) and Iklectic Arts Lab (R.A.W, London, May 2016). We pursued this project for a while, but never quite made it work. We think it ended up being recycled into Can You Feel It?.
Here or Now (2015)
Taking place over a single evening, Here or Now was an exhibition of absent artworks invoked or half-remembered by a group of performers. Magic tricks were explained; dances were gestured towards; paintings were printed on dresses.
Here or Now took place at Rich Mix in London, and featured Nathan Blades, Harriet Braine, Alex Fernandes, Ellen Harris, Saskia Longaretti, Andreas Louca, Claudia Marinaro and Kaitlyn Walker-Stewart.
Salamèche 