Visual Arts & Performance artists revealed for Liverpool’s Threshold Festival
Following the release of the full music line-up for this year’s festival, Threshold have now announced this year’s packed programme of visual arts and live performance.
Throwing a spotlight on the North West’s grassroots music and arts, the festival will return to Liverpool from March 31st to April 2nd.
Threshold Festival 2017’s Exhibition is entitled Darkness and Light; an exploration of contrast, in society and the world around us.
Reflecting a year of incredible change, challenges and conflict around the world, this year’s exhibition will explore contrasts, journeys, transitions, and is intended to hold up a mirror to our better and worse natures, to our contradictions and our paths through life.
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VISUAL ARTS
Highlights from the Visual Arts programme include:
Anthony Lavender
Anthony’s practice stems from the desire to create work that asks the viewer to give reverence to emotional positioning and find a place by engaging the collective shadow. Influenced by the work of photographers Robert Mappelthorpe, Francesca Woodman, Hans Belmer, Joel Peter Witkin, Les Krimms and George Dureau.
Dudley Edwards – ‘Ringo’s Mural’
Exhibiting a unique print of the 1967 original artwork produced for Beatles legend, Ringo Starr. The mural illustrates literal and symbolic transitions from day to night, darkness to light.
John Elcock – ‘Agpalilik’
Agpalilik is a dramatic sculptural intervention that reproduces in full-scale a cross section of one the largest meteorites ever recovered. Produced in collaboration with The Danish Geological Museum, Copenhagen; the work will be hoisted and displayed in a traditional warehouse in the Baltic Triangle.
Julia Neubauer
Julia is an abstract artist who will be creating a series of photographic prints for Threshold, exploring paint, experimental photography and digital manipulation. Her work will represent darkness as reality and light as dreams; a dance between the colours of reality and textures of dreams.
Verisimilitude
A collaborative project between Mexican artist Pilar Cortés and Bristol-based UK digital artist Marcus Dyer. Verisimilitude consists of a polyptych of nine oil paintings by Pilar Cortés, accompanied by a virtual reality application and generative music composition by Marcus Dyer. The installation examines the potential impact of future digital technologies on ‘traditional’ landscape art-forms.
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Visual Arts Co-Curator, Jazamin Sinclair, said “I’m really looking forward to seeing everything come together for this year’s festival. We are once again working with some really varied spaces including the new Northern Lights Space (Solstice) which is essentially like a blank canvas – a warehouse space that we at Threshold Festival and the artists are responding to. This will happen whilst also curating at two more traditional spaces that we have worked in before, Baltic Creative (Unit 51) and Baltic Social (Post Room), as well as working with another new exhibition space within Red Brick Vintage and finally seeing John Elcock’s ‘Agpalilik’ installed and revealed at an outdoor space within the Baltic Triangle.”
“It is always amazing how all the venues are transformed from empty locations into exciting new gallery spaces, especially as our more site-specific artists respond to them. I am also excited to be working more closely with Frankii to transform our venues – the visual arts and performance arts programming will be more closely linked this year with more cross-over, chance encounters and new experiences for our festival goers.”
2017 List Of Participating Artists
Andy Minnis / Anthony Lavender / Baltic Clay / Chloe Gallagher / Dudley Edwards / Eimear Kavanagh / Graham Smilie / Ian Costabile / James Lockhart / Jazamin Sinclair / Jim Sharp / Johana Hartwig / John Elcock / Jon Gregson / Jonny Seven / Julia Neubauer / Kate Chesters / Lee Booth / Leon Jakeman / Mark Chapman / Max Da Silva Willis / Michael Stevenson / Pam Sullivan / Philip Ob Rey / Road Studios / Ruth Dillon / STWilliams / Suzy Vanezis / Verisimilitude
Enquiries / sales: art@thresholdfestival.co.uk
THEATRE & PERFORMANCE
The theatre and performance aspect of this year’s Threshold Festival is arguably its strongest to date with a whole host of artists exploring the event’s theme of ‘Darkness & Light’:
ALINE COSTA – ‘’Along Streets Paved with Apples’’ is a movement piece that explores the concept of woman through myths and perceptions created by societies, cultures and religions, as a parallel with the concept of darkness and light.
Glitch Theatre – Minutemen – Minutemen is an exploration of modern male characters in extraordinary situations. These short monologues by local young writers will make you question what “Being A Man” is really about. Join us on a journey to hear different voices each living with their own Mental Health.
BirdMoon – Out of the Dark – “..explores the desire to escape from darkness, both physical and mental, and it’s propensity to linger and echo into the light as repetition or distortion of memory. The artists work to create clarity out of chaos, harmony out of passion, create light within the dark.”
Mimmi Harding – Choreographer – Mimmi Harding returns to Threshold Festival with her newest live dance duet and dance film installation
Lord & Slater – Thatcher May Trump Farage – Lord & Slater are a collective of performers creating touring promenade and theatre works. Artistic Director Matthew Harrison-Lord has toured internationally as a solo artist creating live art and theatre works. Josh Slater is a Dance Theatre artist based in Cheshire who has toured internationally with enCompass Collective. For this exclusive Threshold performance they have invited guest artists to join in a unique work. A staged debate of 4 world figures explaining Brexit, Presidencies, Campaigns and Policies. Expect a fight, stupidity and unexpected elegance and eloquence.
Ciarán Hodgers – Spoken word – Winner of the 2015 International Pangaea Poetry Slam, Irish born Ciarán Hodgers has been described as “One of the most exciting new faces to appear on the North West’s poetry circuit in a long time” and “talented as feck.” He writes passionately about the arts, hope, people and like all poets, love. Widely published and performed around the UK in venues such as The Royal Albert Hall, he’s shared the stage with some of the UK’s foremost poets and artists. Guaranteed to make you think, feel and leave happily flustered.
Douglas McCormick – Shifting Landscapes – Douglas McCormick is an emerging Dance Artist based in Chester and is currently creating work which investigates the audience and performer relationship.
Impropriety – Liverpool’s premier improvisation company return to Threshold with anarchic antics that will literally be let loose all around the festival. With no fixed stage and abode, the terrifyingly talented mob that is Impropriety will be accosting audience and leading us all a merry made up dance. You couldn’t make it up…..or could you?!
Le Lucciole – The Breath of the World – A musical dream where darkness and light sing in duality as your senses encounter the nonsense.
Nelson Brett – Telekinetic Room – A member of the world renowned The Magic Circle, London based Nelson Brett performs at some of the city’s top cabarets and venues such as The Black Cat Cabaret, the Hippodrome Casino. Now with his eyes on Liverpool, he makes his mystical debut at Threshold Festival.
Failed to Prepare – Trial or Error – an interactive, live action, improvised mystery drama. – Everyone is guilty, but of what? Dare to find out?
N.I.C…E (Nothing in Common…Except) – Special Encounter – a work in progress merging the experiences of the three core members – Annalaura Alifuoco, Silvia Battista and Angelo Madonna – with experimental theatre, sonic art and performative writing. Coming together around the idea of the human encounter with the non-human, the three artists experiment with the possibility that apparently disconnected actions, sounds, texts and movements may construct meaningful encounters. In Special Encounter, N.I.C.E. will share with the audience a multiple platform of intersecting performance activities lasting approximately one hour, where language meets object, body and sound.
BeArte – Reflections of the Muse – A voice from the inside coming out. From the dark into the light.
Laura Sullivan – The Paint Room – Live painting workshops to music brings an immersive activity to Threshold where you will encounter an interactive set that invites the audience to record and express their experience of music in a visceral moment.
Beija Flo – Songs that make your daughters cry and your mums wonder why – Beija Flo brings the theatrical to bring alive her songs and stories told in vivid sound, sight and song.
Lucy Hutson – An emerging performance artist and agitator whose work questions human nature and social order through interventions, installations and intimate encounters. Hutson’s practice often engages with capitalism and gender, working with found objects and unloved artifacts. She is an Associate Artist at Steakhouse Live and an Escalator East Live Artist.
LUMA CREATIONS / OLC PRODUCTIONS – Drum Clash – LUMA Creation’s new performance is a cross fertilisation of rhythms and movement, bringing together fire and drum, within a journey of life, with the Clash of the Drums bringing darkness into light. Conceptualised by OLC’s Creative Director, Francisco this piece shows the power and versatility of the drum. Bringing top artists together Camino (the journey) will explode in passion and Fire.
Operation Lightfoot – Gift from Prometheus – Operation Lightfoot are developing an original short theatre work inspired by Threshold 2017’s theme of “darkness into light”. The thought provoking piece will explore ideas relating to society’s dependence on technology, human interaction and mortality. There will also be performances of musical collaborations as part of the performance slot.
ANOIKIS – Anoikis is a contemporary dance company dedicated to experimental choreographic and electroacoustic research. They are committed to performing radical new works that seek to explore the sense of rhizomatic shadow-space that exists between the accepted boundaries (cultural, social, political, economical, historical and psychological) of traditional artistic practice and consumption. The company has presented work internationally since 2002.
Rachel Sweeney – A contemporary artist whose work spans over twenty years of collaborative practice across movement composition, digital media and sound art. Sweeney’s work necessarily seeks out socially progressive methods within interdisciplinary arts/science models and that situate a bodily approach to engage current global debates surrounding adaptation and sustainability. Her physical performance language has been mainly fostered through immersive training in contemporary Butoh and its related form Body Weather, and she has written and published widely on cross cultural performance pedagogies, somatic training and site based performance praxis.
The Secret Circus – Variety Showcase – Liverpool’s favourite band of freaks and freakettes is a home grown wonder that’s fast developing to have included Circuses in London and LA!
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Following a shortfall in funding this year, organisers turned to the festival’s fans to help raise the £9000 needed for this year’s event to be fully realised. To the delight of everyone involved, the campaign not only hit its target but by far exceeded it, raising over £11,400.
Emilia Eriksson, Development Director for Threshold, said “We are grateful for all the support given to the festival and absolutely made up that not only did we hit our target but exceeded it. People Power at its finest, we couldn’t have done it without you, thank you!”
The full MUSIC line-up can be found here, with artists playing in venues situated across Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle – March 31 – April 2, with weekend tickets costing just £20 via Skiddle.
Read about the return of ‘Mad Pride’ – Threshold’s partnership with Liverpool Mental Health Consortium here.