A vibrant new performance showcase coming to Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Sixteen artists based across England have been selected for the Horizon showcase, which will feature at the 2021 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Taking place digitally from 16 to 23 August, seven shows have been supported as part of a residency, which enables artists to play with new performance ideas across a range of formats and genres, and nine new, tour-ready, performance works are to be presented in a range of digital settings.
Commissioned by the Arts Council, Horizon is an exciting new showcase celebrating performing arts work created by artists based in England and delivered by a consortium made up of: Battersea Arts Centre, Dance4, Fierce Festival, GIFT, MAYK and Transform.
The performance programme includes Olivier Award winning choreographer and director Botis Seva, founder of Far From The Norm, with BLKDOG, a haunting commentary on surviving adulthood as a childlike artist, screened live; Future Cargo, a sci-fi dance show performed in a 40-foot haulage truck is the latest outdoor work by Requardt & Rosenberg, filmed for audiences to experience at home with an intimate sound score; and artist Janine Harrington will present a digital online version of her 2018 Screensaver Series, a five-dancer-strong movement and sound installation inspired by the obsolete screen-saving programmes of early computing.
The Horizon residencies include The Dan Daw Show in which artist Daw will look at his relationship to his disability and to kink, and how power, pride and shame all intersect. It is a show about letting go and reclaiming yourself. Jo Bannon’s Blind Magic is a dance piece with two visually diverse/blind performers and one unreliable audio narrator. It explores the imaginative dance between sleight of hand, deception and dexterity present within magic shows, with a canny parallel to the experience of visually disabled people.
The consortium partners are working with several established independent artists to help shape the showcase, including Project O (Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson- Small), Javaad Alipoor, Kirsty Housley, Sonia Hughes and Renny O’Shea. Associate partners reflecting different specialisms and art form focuses have also had input into the process, including Akademi, ATC, Bush Theatre, Circus City, The Cocoa Butter Club and Unlimited.
While the consortium of organisations were chosen to deliver a showcase at the festival, they’ll work beyond the annual event and work to support the development of artists in England, build international practices and offer performance opportunities for the performers. The aim of the collaboration is to bring together international artists and champion ambitious, sustainable and innovative practices for 2021 and beyond.
Nicholas Serota, Chair of Arts Council England said: “Giving England’s artists the chance to perform their work on the international stage is vital for nurturing the ambition, innovation and collaboration that will help our cultural sector to thrive after the pandemic. The Edinburgh Fringe is one of the world’s most important cultural festivals, and we’re delighted to have commissioned Horizon as an opportunity for some of the outstanding performing arts talent in this country to showcase their work to industry professionals from around the globe.”
Tarek Iskander, Artistic Director of Battersea Arts Centre said: “We are delighted to be hosting and supporting so many remarkable artists and projects in this inaugural year of Horizon. We were inundated with so many brilliant ideas from across the country – ideas that really deserved their place in Edinburgh and the opportunity to engage with new audiences - so this group are simply the tip of a glorious iceberg of the remarkable performance being created in England.
“Taken collectively, this group represent what is truly special about our performance practice… our rich diversity, our ambition to take risk and reimagine what is possible, our openness to ideas wherever they generate, our determination, our profound understanding that arts and culture can truly change the world; our playfulness, our taste for experimentation, and perhaps most of all, our boundless determination to contribute positively to the world, whatever the circumstances. The artists in this programme are committed to provoking and starting important conversations, not jumping to easy answers, and in presenting this work we can help them build the fruitful national and international collaborations that will benefit us all for many years to come.”
