Yorkshire Dance, Leeds
Friday 29 May, 7.30pm
Box Office 0113 243 8765
Book securely online www.yorkshiredance.com
Tickets £9.00, concessions £7.00
Suitable for ages 14+
Yorkshire Dance, in collaboration with Compass Live Art, is excited to welcome back to Leeds Wendy Houstoun, winner of the TMA Award for Achievement in Dance and the Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Female Performance (Modern), on Friday 29 May with her new work Stupid Women.
Five guests of high calibre and low pay attempt the impossible and quite probably fail in this live directed improvisation.
Combining idiocy with skill, anarchy with meaning and costumes with music, the Stupid Women performing in Leeds are all experienced performance artists based in, or with strong links to, Yorkshire – TC Howard, Rachel Krische, Lucy Suggate, Grace Surman and Sophie Unwin. Moving in and out of the stage, Wendy herself becomes a performing director of the action.
Stupid Women’s live improvisation is based on tasks and ideas coming from both Wendy and the performers – a kind of organised mayhem. It reveals the way performance is made – the impossibility of repetition, the absurdity of the director, the heroism of the performer, the chaos in the brain and the difficulty of making sense of anything at all. It combines as many elements as it can – music, text, movement, props, scenery – all in a very makeshift manner, and based on the skills and personalities of the performers, who differ from venue to venue.
Working for four or five days with experienced and emerging artists primarily from a movement background, Wendy works with the performers using tasks and methods of working culled from her time both as a soloist and as a performer with DV8 Physical Theatre and Forced Entertainment.
Initially performed as a work-in-progress at Yorkshire Dance’s Juncture 2014 festival, and a tribute to the late and great Nigel Charnock whose piece Stupid Men irritated and annoyed most audiences who saw it, Stupid Women, with its all-new (well, mostly new) cast, hopes to achieve something similar.
Wieke Eringa, Artistic Director & CEO of Yorkshire Dance, says, “We were very proud to play a part in the creation of Stupid Women in 2014, and it’s an enormous pleasure and privilege to be able to present it again, in Leeds, in its newly-developed state. Wendy is simply one of the UK’s most interesting, intelligent and entertaining performance artists, and we’re thrilled to be able to bring her and her work to the Yorkshire region.”
Anne Lloyd of Compass Live Art says of this collaboration, “Compass Live Art is very happy to be collaborating with Yorkshire Dance to develop Stupid Women. We are big fans of Wendy Houstoun and great admirers of Yorkshire Dance’s work in championing contemporary dance practice in Yorkshire, Compass and Yorkshire Dance share the ambition of widening the appreciation of contemporary, experimental work and creating the conditions in which it thrives.”
Tickets are available now from Yorkshire Dance:
0113 243 8765 or www.yorkshiredance.com