Sound & Image Festival, Centre for Creative Futures (University of Greenwich), in partnership with the Institute for Inclusive Communities & Environments, presented:
ZU-UK LONDON SEASON: Binaural Dinner Date, Radio Ghost and Within Touching Distance. (11th November – 17th December 2023)
A rare 6-week season of ZU-UK works is landing in London this November. Included in this season, we are presenting the London premiere of Within Touching Distance, as well as Binaural Dinner Date and the 2022 Lumen Prize Winner Radio Ghost.
Symposium: Do As You’re Told?
On 12-14 November at the University of Greenwich, we hosted Do As You’re Told? – A Festival of research into audio-led & instruction-based performance practice in public and non-public spaces at the University of Greenwich – a 3-day programme of free talks, workshops and performances on instruction-based performance practice and human touch and sound as main mediums of participation.
WITHIN TOUCHING DISTANCE
London Premiere
| Mixing real life with virtual reality in a synchronised one-on-one experience with headset and performer, the London premiere of a new immersive show exploring touch
Exploring the importance of touch, Within Touching Distance takes one audience member at a time through a journey from childhood to adulthood and old age through the medium of a bedtime routine. Within Touching Distance combines an immersive VR and spatialized binaural audio-world with a live, intimate one-on-one performance, in which a caring choreography of touch is received from the performer and synchronised with the VR experience. The artwork has been designed through a patient-led process, informed by ZU-UK Artistic Director Persis Jadé Maravala’s lived experience within a mental health unit. It asks audiences to consider the ways that we interact at a sensory level with the world and how the decisions we make can shape our lives. At the start of the 35-minute production, a motherly figure guides each participant gently through a bed-time routine, and into a VR headset, where they are immersed in an interactive dreamscape exploring childhood memories, life journeys and mortality. Each stage asks us about the nature of touch and the unquestionable depth of human connection. Within Touching Distance is a ground-breaking experiment in using art and participatory performance to inform and change healthcare research and practice, and in using live art experience as a starting point for therapeutic and healthcare training strategies. ZU-UK is working in collaboration with the Centre for Creative Futures and GLASC (Learning & Simulation Centre) at the University of Greenwich, as well as Liverpool Cares, to explore ways in which elements, methodologies and care/participation strategies developed can be utilised and transposed to therapy and healthcare training settings. Together, we are pioneering co-creative, patient-led approaches in the under-realised areas of touch and empathy for nurses and carers, co-designing binaural sound and 360º video. The project has recently been awarded one of the first ever ‘Inclusive Innovation Awards’ and received a special mention by the Jury at Sheffield DocFest Alternate Realities Competition for the courageous application of its “innovative multidisciplinary approach to challenge audiences in a way that is specific to its form”. Writer and director Persis Jadé Maravala, said, “Post-pandemic, we couldn’t be better placed to talk about touch. Touch starvation is real. Skin hunger is real, and the consequences in terms of a loneliness epidemic are real. We have been working closely with neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, and nurses to understand how, beyond the functional, there is something extraordinary in the act of resting one’s hands on the skin of another. As someone in recovery from mental illnesses, I wanted to explore how touch is of huge benefit to physical and mental ailments. There is no care, there is no cure, without touch. We wanted to explore this through Within Touching Distance, combining touch with the synchronised use of VR to invite audiences to experience empathy through human contact. Inspired by the words of Margaret Atwood, ‘touch comes before sight, before speech, it is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth’ in a touch-averse society, this piece is an imploration to recognise that our bodies are made for touch.”
Written and directed by Persis Jadé Maravala Creative team Sneha Belkhale, Hayley Hill, Ross Flight, Persis Jadé Maravala, Jorge Lopes Ramos, Elisa Moriconi, Alex Peckham Production team Sel Ertas, Ana Gillespie, Kesia Guillery, Hayley Hill, Marnie Nash, Sanjay Pandey, Carlos Eduardo Pires, Jorge Lopes Ramos Cast Georgia Carnaby , Katy Daghorn, Hayley Hill, Khadijah Islam, Persis Jadé Maravala, Kayja Zisels Machado Maravala, Alice Motta, Sara Paz, Sarah Klvanova, Thelma Sharma |
BINAURAL DINNER DATE
**** TIME OUT Magazine
Recommended by Evening Standard and Guardian Close Encounters.
Part audio-led interactive performance, part dating agency, BDD invites strangers to get to know each other better through carefully designed experiences. You can bring your own date, or we will find one for you.
BINAURAL DINNER DATE invites genuine applications from individuals looking for love, existing couples who simply want a different dating experience or friends who want to experience the interactive audio performance.
In the experience, participants are set up on genuine dates – with their partners, friends or complete strangers – while a voice in their ears, as well as a Waiter and a Matchmaker, guide them through the curious urban ritual known as dating.
RADIO GHOST
‘Audacious, subversive even’ – The Guardian ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭
‘One of the most striking events in the LIFT 2022’ – Time Out
‘A one-of-a-kind, unique experience’ – North West End UK
Lumen Prize 2023 Winner
IndieCade Live Action Award Nominee
In Radio Ghost, you are a ghost hunter, broadcasting your journey as you reach through portals into the far-away dimensions of a haunted Mall. You and your team of hunters will have to blend in as perfect shoppers to unlock ghost stories in this mission that is part walking game, part interactive radio show, and part ghost hunt.
Radio Ghost happened across November and December on various days and locations.
TAG- The OTHER Market
The OTHER Market is a mini-larp locative media treasure hunt experience that explores meaning-making around objects and collections of objects. What can objects mean when untethered from consumption and/or status?
We all go to markets looking for something (some THING) that might change us, bring us happiness or pride, friendship or love, insight or peace. Come and explore a mysterious market concealed within another market.
In the OTHER Market experience, you and your team work with special tools to discover ephemeral story fragments and uncover the layers of meaning carried by objects around you. Can you find what breathes through apparently inanimate things? What more is there to the world around you?
Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) is an interdisciplinary centre for research and creation in game studies and design, digital culture, and interactive art at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
ZU UK- Make- Up Artist and Shaman (MAaS)
The talent is about to go on air for a live televised interview. But a change encounter with a Make-up artist is about to change the course of their lives forever.
An audio-led instruction-based 20 minutes live experience for 2 people, exploring chance encounters through a light-hearted (slightly-surreal) role-play scenario and bone-conducting headphones.
ZU UK- Deceleration
An audio-led instruction-based individual experience, guiding mind and body through a structured interaction with rhythm, speed and the environment, through a stage-by-stage process of deceleration: an exploration of the embodied process of slowing down as a metaphor for a psychosocial approach to climate change.
Symposium on ‘Do As You’re Told?:
Conversations with ZU-UK About Instruction-based Performance Practice curated by Josephine Machon, Persis Jadé Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos.
Maria Oshodi and Persis Jadé Maravala- Laboratory conversation
Maria Oshodi, Artistic Director of Extant, a performing arts company managed for and by visually impaired professional arts practitioners. Persis-Jadé Maravala, Artistic Director of ZU-UK, a disabled-led and global majority-led interactive theatre and digital arts company, will be holding an event following a 1-week residency on accessible, participatory practice-based research that uses instruction, human touch and sound as main mediums of participation.
Maria Oshodi – Performance
Maria Oshodi worked as a scriptwriter for theatre from 1984-1992, with plays produced by national touring companies such as Talawa and Graeae and later published by Longmans, Methuen and John Murray. She has worked in arts management, for BBC drama production, and as a freelance writer. In 1997, she founded Extant, now the leading UK performing arts organization managed for and by visually impaired professional arts practitioners. As Artistic Director, she has led Extant in artistic innovation around access and debate regarding including visually impaired people in the performing arts. She has directed Extant’s touring productions and led the company’s participation, research and training strategies.
Silvia Mercuriali – Performance
Silvia Mercuriali is an internationally acclaimed theatremaker and artist best known as one of the pioneers of the AUTOTEATRO strategy, which she developed in 2007 with her company Rotozaza, whereby audience members perform a piece themselves, being given instructions in various formats for what to do or say. In her work, the real and the imagined blur in a melange of public & private interactions, comprising both the random-unplanned and the controlled-scripted. She has been commissioned by cultural centres and theatres, including Brisbane Powerhouse (AUS) and Museum of Art of Kochi (JP), as well as UK commissioning bodies such as Wellcome Trust, Fuel Theatres, The Roundhouse, Battersea Arts Centre, and Harrogate Theatre & Yorkshire Festival.