Photo Credit: David Gulicuic
ASSEMBLE Festival: Scratch Night #3
Date: Tue 7th May 2024
Time: 7.30pm - 9pm
Standard: £10
Please join us for a post-show dialogue after the show
Want more of ASSEMBLE Fest? Check it out.
Join us for an evening of short, work-in-progress performances and new writing exploring crucial topics. Themes of this evening’s scratch performances include queerness, anti-fascism, working class masculinity, trauma, and explorations of historical events.
The night will conclude with a post-performance discussion in the bar and the opportunity to converse casually with the artists.
Programme Line Up
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Meet a badass Lithuanian teen as they rock the community a(gay)nst fascists by starting an illegal contagious laughter epidemic. Blending lip sync, storytelling, clowning, and mime in a one-idiot show that uses speculative fiction to celebrate revolutionary queerness and provide irresistible, insurrectionary giggles.
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Liam is a sixteen year old MMA fighter with his sights set on going pro. With his biggest fight yet successfully in the bag, he seems well on his way to fulfilling his dreams. In the changing room after the match, however, he struggles to escape his fears about the career he’s chosen for himself, and the kind of man he’d like to be. Written in conversation with former amateur MMA fighters, leglock is a frank exploration of working class masculinity in 21st century Britain, and what is left for young people in a post post-austerity landscape.
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Have you ever felt that visceral desire to mutate your broken, traumatised body and soul into something so sublime, so overwhelmingly omnipotent, that it could annihilate every last tiny little trace of human sociopathy, ecological destructiveness and cruelty from the face of the Earth – even if most of humanity got eradicated in the process?
Because Nancy has.
And she very easily could. If she wanted to.
Go on. Talk her out of it. If you can...
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Altab Ali Zindabad is a one person show that has been developed as apart of The Squint Theatre Playwriting Award. Altab Ali Zindabad explores the historical context surrounding the murder of Altab Ali, a Bangladeshi textile worker who worked in Bricklane. In1978 on the night of the local elections in Tower Hamlets where the National Front took their highest number of seats ever, Altab Ali was brutally murdered by three boys on his way home from work.
Written and Performed by Amin Ali. Directed by Melina Namdar
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This story recounts the Egba people's, a Yoruba subgroup, faith and resilience in their plight and flight to build their nation. Told through a teacher narrating interactively that captures and inspires audience participation against a minimalist backdrop.
Gallery
About the Artists
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Lowri Mathias is a Streatham based theatre maker, trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and the Royal Court writers' group. Her work combines movement with written text to create vivid live performances, and centres on themes of sexuality, the changing role of women, and youth culture. Recent credits include Violence in Mundane Places, changeling (both A Pinch of Vault), and Picnic at Hanging Rock (the Wardrobe Theatre).
Website: lowrimathias.com
Instagram: @lowri.mathias
Twitter: @lowri_mathias -
Dee Majek is a Nigerian-born London-based educator, storyteller, poet and artist acclaimed for giving voice to the experiences of the African and Caribbean diaspora.
His works have been featured in publications like the Asian Times, Caribbean Times and Voice Newspaper from the 1980s through the 1990s. Noteworthy pieces include ""Ashes to Ashes,"" capturing community concerns after the New Cross house fire, and ""The Gulf and Multiculturalism,"" exploring Windrush generation issues.
Dee's compelling narrative poem ""One Million Men"" made him a semi-finalist in the North American poetry challenge. He has crafted commissioned poems including ""Wedding Day"" commemorating Prince Charles and Lady Diana's wedding, which aired on BBC Radio London.
His 1998 spoken word jazz album ""Soul on the Edge"" drew praise from UK Hip-Hop Connection for its lyrical resonance with the legendary US Last Poets. The uplifting ""Positive"" was licensed for the Bop Collective's compilation ""British Original Products Vol 1.""
Dee was involved in the 2000 launch of Stratford Library in Newham. After a hiatus, he re-emerged captivating audiences on London's spoken word circuit with his stories of personal insight and Yoruba-infused cultural consciousness.
Upcoming projects include the audio-visual storybook and album ""Olumo Rock"" about the Egba Nation, and travel memoir ""BOLT"" chronicling his sojourns across Canada and Central America.
Dee is currently Streatham's Festival Poet. He views spoken word as an extension of his 20+ year education career. His aim is to ignite imagination and plant seeds that will fuel future generations.
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Abigail Jacqueline Jones is an autistic, transfemme multidisciplinary artist, writer, independent academic researcher and performer who wields fiction and academia, humour and horror, in the pursuit of justice and socio-political vengeance. Her creative practice twins live disciplines – including cabaret, site-specific intervention, and spoken-word – with the creation of DIY publications, graphic artworks, and archives of primary-source research in order to construct rich, rebellious and radical alt-histories, modern mythologies and speculative futures exploring unexposed forms of marginalisation. She is also the founder of the zine distro and risograph print studio ‘The 50-ft Press,’ whose output has been distributed at events across the UK including during arts festivals at Tate Britain and Glasgow CCA, amongst others.
Abigail’s current long-term creative research project, ‘Nancy//the World,’ has been supported by developmental funding from Arts Council England, and by the 2022-23 edition of the ‘Emergent’ artist support programme for early-career disabled artists, which is organised by Shape Arts and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Academic support has been provided by staff at Goldsmiths College and the Wellcome Collection, and by several established artists and human sexuality researchers in the UK and the United States: amongst them performance artist, sex educator and former adult film actress Annie Sprinkle, and author of ‘Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge’ Katharine Gates.
Abigail’s work has previously been exhibited at Bermondsey Project Space and the ArtWorks Project Space, Walthamstow. She has performed at several cabarets and DIY performance events across London, hosting a special Transgender Awareness Week edition of Hackney Wick live-art night ‘Runt of the Litter’ in November 2023, and appearing regularly at ‘Front Room Spectacular,’ a performance art cabaret hosted by Matchstick Piehouse, between 2019 and 2022. Having originally trained as a visual artist, for which her work was awarded 2nd Prize at the 2020 ArtWorks Open and shortlisted for the 2021 SPACE Studio Awards, in recent years Abigail has begun to transition her creative practice towards interdisciplinary performance, literature and print-making.
Website: beanandqueer.com
Instagram: @abigail.is.nancy -
Sas (they/them) is your friendly multidisciplinary artiste, activist, and access-maker! Their creative practice is a mix of writing, acting, dance, research, clowning, and cabaret performance. Taking a solidarity approach, they work on gender expansive and multi-faith inclusion, rooted in Mad and crip theory, queer mutual aid practices, and ecologically sensitive creativity.
They have recently produced an immersive show at The Saatchi Gallery with Food of War Collective which dove into food culture in conflict. Currently, they have a forthcoming chapter in 'Birdsong from Inobservable Worlds' for The Wellcome Collection, about the asymmetrical relationship between madness and psychiatry. They are also working on a new piece of writing with Tabby Lamb.
Instagram: @saskiakraftowitz
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Coming soon…
Event Information
Duration: 90 minutes
Have a look at our programme notes with content warnings.
A calm, quiet space will be available for anyone who needs it - please ask our staff.
Please e-mail us ahead of the day to ensure we are aware of and can facilitate any access needs
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