Home (Bitter) Sweet Home by Joana Cifre Cerda photo credit: Fabiola Paz

YaYW strives to showcase a mix of local, national and international promising, emerging performance artists. At every platform event YaYW aims to present a range of contemporary performance, interventions, site-specific work, dance, games and media-installation. The platforms are not solely aimed to show performers work to artist peers and programmers but also to provide the opportunity for a wider audience to experience high quality risk-taking work and meet with the performers and artists.

You and Your Work was founded by Birgit Binder & Sylvia Rimat and is now co-produced by Sylvia Rimat and Jo Bannon and was first showcased at The Cube Microplex, in May 2007. With three platform events under their belt YaYW4, was recognised and funded by the Arts Council; and by the February of 2008 YaYW had formed a not-for-profit organisation in order to extend its support and development opportunities to emerging artists.

In October 2008, YaYW5 moved to the Easton Community Centre and public sites in Easton, in order to reach new audiences beyond the Bristol arts scene. YaYW5 proved a big success and showed that it was possible to present high quality emerging performance art in a non-specialist community setting.

“What an experience to see it being performed on the outskirts of Bristol… Bringing high profile work to the areas where it is not expected is special, really brings artwork to people… The range of audience and freshness, openness and curiosity of the audience was as important as the work itself.”

Ania Bas, audience member at YaYW5

It is now time for platform number six where YaYW attempts to add and merge with the local cultural calendar of Easton by placing a contemporary arts event alongside a programme of live music, street dance and world food stalls. Sylvia Rimat and Jo Bannon have co-produced YaYW6 and have developed a dynamic and progressive performance programme around the theme of home, identity and orientation. The National Lottery through Arts Council England, Groundwork UK South West and Quartet Community Foundation have all funded and supported YaYW6.

There will be more than ten artists, some emerging, some established and others in performance companies, taking part from as far as Australia, Singapore and Spain. YaYW has also specially commissioned a new outdoor performance piece, and a project facilitated by a local artist working with refugee women of Bristol.

Heading up the line up will be Sydney based performance artist Malcolm Whittaker who is currently on a cultural exchange research trip funded by the Australian government to strengthen his practice through experiencing the thriving British cultural scene and sharing his work. Malcolm’s new show focuses on the performer’s fear and desire for the spotlight, ‘The Red Room’ is a space where the performance is longing to and resistant to take place.

Local artist Folake Shoga will be on hand in her intimate one to one performance ‘Lost Photographs’ where she will attempt to draw for each audience member a precious photograph they have since mislaid. Meditating on travel, relocation and history this work is a poignant reminder of where we come from and what we hold dear.

Spanish artist Joana Cifre Cerda accompanied by her sister will build, disassemble and rebuild elaborate brick houses around themselves, creating an outdoor durational piece called, ‘Home (bitter) Sweet Home’. This work embodies the constant fight to escape, the desire to belong and the need to overcome obstacles.

Reknowned artist Alex Bradley who has been working for over 18 years making innovative developments within live and digital art, sonic practices and installation, will join forces with animator Dane Watkins for their new work ‘Love Match.’ Mixing virtual and real worlds this lecture style performance quickly becomes a search for love and the lengths we will go to find it.

Singapore based performance and installation artist Lynn Lu will show a series of film works that are all bound by their questioning of place, context and humanity. Lu works to create resonant relationships between her live and remote audiences that explore the innate human capacity for empathy.

Aberystwyth based artist Louise Ritchie will front a team of four performers who, armed with notebooks, video cameras and curiosity will attempt to capture the in-between moments of the evening. ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is an event of non-events, a cacophony of overheard conversations, stolen gestures and found objects.

Young performance company, Tinned Fingers, will be taking over the cycle path behind the Easton Community Centre in a new YaYW commissioned interactive performance ‘The Carrier Pigeon Project.’ The Tinned Fingers will invite the audience to entrust them with their messages, to send, deliver and receive.

London based artists Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley will construct ‘Ivory Towers’, an epic table top landscape from domestic cutlery, seeking to create unstable and unfixed images that are fleeting, unexpected and powerful.

Local theatre company Orbita say the end is nigh in their new performance ‘The Stars Below Us.’ That begins with the end of the world, exploring humankind’s relationship with the cosmos, time and the interconnected nature of everything ever. Fusing science fiction and science fact, lecture with animation and live music, Orbita tell a tale of a time when life was simpler and the sun brighter.

Rhiannon Chaloner, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, has been commissioned by YaYW to work with a group of local Bristol based refugee and asylum seeking women. The group will develop a series of art works that explore personal interpretations of home and identity through the various mediums of documentary photography and video as well as hybridised Fair-Isle knitting patterns that will then be installed at the Easton Community Centre.

From 5pm onwards on the 6 June YaYW6 Free Performance Festival will be in full swing at the Easton Community Centre, bringing the latest and very best in innovative contemporary performance, site-specific work, live art, installation and interventions alongside live music and world food.

For more information on You and Your Work & YaYW6
Visit: www.youandyourwork.blogspot.com
or email: cubeyourwork@hotmail.co.uk