Daniel Oliver, Lois Weaver and Martin O’Brien to appear at The Sick of the Fringe 2019

Our Drama staff are hitting The Sick of the Fringe festvial this weekend with their performance and conversations on topics around arts and health.

The Sick of the Fringe | Wellcome Collection | 5-7 April 2019

Read more about their appearances below…

Frauke Requardt and Daniel Oliver Dadders – 6 Apr

Performance

An interactive performance for 5 people at a time. Audience-participants are invited to join Daniel and Frauke in a series of awkwardly intimate and strange actions, rituals, dances, games, and other dysfunctional activities brought back in time from a post-neurodivergent revolution family fun-time future. 

Daniel is dyspraxic and is too slow. Frauke has ADHD and is too quick. They are married and have kids. This interactive performance is rooted in their experiences of their bodies as neurodivergent lovers, parents, and weirdo performance makers. It is a space in which clunky experiences of bodies and actions can be discussed, explored and ultimately celebrated through ritualisation and play. 

Frauke Requardt and Daniel Oliver The Rong Table –6 Apr

Discussion

Frauke and Daniel invite audiences to explore these themes through conversation events that use Daniel’s ‘Rong Table‘ set-up. ‘Rong Tables’ are events for exploring and discussing the key themes of the performance. They are a development of Lois Weaver’s ‘Long Tables’, in which the audiences are invited to take part in a discussion by leaving their audience seats, and sitting at a large table. Daniel has been regularly using this format to discuss neurodiversity and art over the past three years. . Recently he has been experimenting with adding different elements and bending the rules in order to create a space that is more accessible, diverse and engaging for a broad range of neurodivergent audiences. This means the table is no longer the only place to talk, getting rid of the audience/participant divide, allowing for smaller, more discreet conversations to happen around the space, and for more ways of expressing thoughts to be offered.

For Dadderrs, the Rong Table is something modelled on a chaotic family dinner time rather than a more formal grown-up dinner party. Alongside den-building, and playing with dressing-up, there would also be the opportunity to make objects out of Lego – a prop used in Dadderrs – to explore and express ideas related to the themes of the performance.

Lois Weaver The Situation Room  – 6 Apr

Performance

The Situation Room is a format for public discussion created by Lois Weaver that combines theatricality and informal conversation and encourages us to think about the interdependencies of anxiety and desire. It’s inspired by the War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb where a group of people sit around a circle of tables and hold a discussion that is moderated by a ‘President’ and monitored by ‘General’ who reminds us we are ‘running out of time.’

In The Situation Room, members of the audience will be invited to form a Council determined by loosely held affinities: a Council of Elders, an Intergenerational Council, a Council of Queers or Intersectional Feminists; a Council of Agnostics or A-politicals. They are invited to the table to share what is worrying them, from the personal to the geopolitical; to discuss, listen, and then reach a consensus on a single topic of conversation- the ‘Situation’, and finally to consider their desires, ambitions and fantasies as playful and creative solutions to the issue at hand.

Martin O’Brien – Who Cries Wins

Discussion

This discussion event questions if there is an increase in artists identifying closely, and leading with, their own histories of trauma and/or painful autobiography. To what extent is this true, and if true, what may have instigated this?

As festivals, live platforms and opportunities begin to focus on the support of these current questions and seeking out artists’ trauma, we pose the question now: what is the tense line between raising visibility and exploitation. Additionally, another consideration: Is there such a thing as competitive trauma?

This is a public discussion hosted and facilitated by performance artist and scholar Martin O’Brien, with contributions from artists in the Care & Destruction programme.

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