BAC Announces Autumn 2018 Shows With Apples And Snakes, The Paper Cinema, Sue MacLaine And Miriam Sherwood

Battersea Arts Centre announces nine additions to its autumn programme, including spoken word, live cinema and cabaret.

· Apple and Snakes mark 35 years at the forefront of poetry with Rallying Cry, a protest themed journey with the UK's leading spoken word artists

· The Paper Cinema's vividly original take on Macbeth transforms intricate ink illustrations into over 400 individual puppets and stunning landscapes

· Sue MacLaine Company explores banishment and personhood throughout the ages in vessel

· Rendezvous in Bratislava sees Miriam Sherwood collaborating across the years with her cabaret performer grandfather, through the objects, jokes and songs that he left behind

· Total Theatre Award winners Two Destination Language explore masculinity, expectations and work in Manpower

· Musician and theatre-maker Dom Coyote presents his brand new solo work We Can Time Travel

· Somewhere between stand-up and an astrophysics lecture, Third Angel presents 600 People, a simple show about huge cosmic ideas

· Ross Sutherland asks - if a haunted house is basically a temporary gallery, full of terrible demonic art installations, then is the role of The Exorcist to be the most vicious art critic imaginable?

· Don't Forget the Birds by Open Clasp and Live Theatre tells the true story of a mother and a daughter separated by prison and their journey to find each other again

· Skate Hard Turn Left by The Pack is a tough, tender exploration of space, gender and resistance, colliding the progressive female sporting world of roller derby with political theatre

These shows join the Phoenix Season in the Grand Hall this autumn, which celebrates the hall's reopening and Battersea Arts Centre's role as a developer of inventive artists. Shows include Missing by Gecko, Adam by the National Theatre of Scotland, the world premiere of I'm a Phoenix Bitch by Bryony Kimmings, Frankenstein: How To Make A Monster by BAC Beatbox Academy, I AM NEXT, the UK Beatbox Championships, Chekhov's First Play by Dead Centre, SUPERBLACKMAN by Lekan Lawal, Little Bulb's Orpheus, and Return to Elm House.

HIGHLIGHTS

Rallying Cry

Apples and Snakes 35th Anniversary

Apples and Snakes | 4 - 6 Oct | 7pm, 8.30pm | Press Night: Thu 4 Oct, 7pm or 8.30pm

The world is revolting. People are angry. A storm is coming. This is a protest. This is a call to arms.

Poets declare their rebel yell as Battersea Arts Centre is plunged into a rabble rousing ruckus.

Apples and Snakes, the UK's leading organisation for performance poetry, celebrate their 35th anniversary with Rallying Cry, a unique immersive spoken word event showcasing poetry as a force for social change. Audiences are thrust into the midst of protest and encounter the UK's leading spoken word artists as they journey across the building.

Poets are often the social commentators of the age and for 35 years Apples and Snakes has been at the forefront of where the spoken word intersects with the political - from poets on the miners' picket lines to artists speaking out about the injustices of today.

Directed by Rob Watt

Spoken Word Artists to be announced soon

The Paper Cinema's Macbeth

The Paper Cinema | 9 - 27 Oct | 7:30pm | Press Night: Thu 11 Oct, 7:30pm

The Paper Cinema conjures a vividly original version of Shakespeare's Macbeth this autumn. Intricate ink and pen illustrations, cut out of cereal packets and pizza boxes, become over 400 individual puppets of characters and stunning landscapes. These are masterfully manipulated in front of video cameras and projected in real-time to create a silent film, set to a live score, before the audience's eyes.

The Paper Cinema's Macbeth is the company's latest co-production with Battersea Arts Centre combining the language of animation, music, film and theatre. It follows the critically acclaimed The Paper Cinema's Odyssey, which, since 2012, has toured to over fifteen countries worldwide.

The action performed by three puppeteers is accompanied by a pair of exceptional musicians who create an undulating and rhythmic score using over a dozen instruments. Haunting musical saw, electronics and percussion are played alongside a medieval stringed psaltery, a guitalele and a croaking frog güiro. From the slam of a miniature door to a creaker box mimicking steps on old floorboards, cunning Foley tricks add to the atmosphere.

Supported by Omnibus Theatre

vessel

Sue MacLaine Company | 6-24 Nov | 7:45pm | Press Night: Thu 8 Nov, 7.45pm

vessel takes the medieval practice of Anchoritism - living an acetic life confined within a locked cell - as its starting point to explore containment, banishment, occupation and sovereignty across the ages.

Performed by four diverse female voices, the piece asks who has agency, who has privilege, who is represented, who is silenced and who is reading that silence as consent?

Embracing multiplicity, vessel derives poetic musicality through layering and repetition. vessel deepens MacLaine's commitment to creatively re-interpreting forms of access and accessibility to build, stretch and illuminate the themes of the work. To this end the company is working with digital artist Giles Thacker to create bespoke, creative captions, with set and lighting design by Ben Pacey.

Sue MacLaine's previous work Can I Start Again Please is winner of a Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation & Playing with Form. vessel continues the creative collaboration between Artistic Director Sue MacLaine and Producer Jane McMorrow.

Co-commissioned by Battersea Arts Centre and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts

Funded by Arts Council England with support from University of Manchester, The Place & Unity Theatre Trust.

Rendezvous in Bratislava

Miriam Sherwood | 13 - 24 Nov | 8pm | Press Night: Wed 14 Nov, 8pm

Miriam and her granddad are making a cabaret together. They're the perfect double act: he's got the stories, she loves telling them, and they both have a flair for the theatrical. The only problem is they've never met. (He's been dead for 37 years.)

Jan 'Laco' Kalina was a dramaturg, satirist, collector of jokes and writer of cabarets, born in Czechoslovakia in 1913. A Slovak Jew, he survived the fascists only to be imprisoned by the communists, who believed him a threat to the regime.

Digging through objects and stories from Laco's remarkable life, Miriam searches for her granddad's voice through his own jokes, skits and songs, conjuring up an archival cabaret that reverberates with laughter from a very different place and time.

With original music and a live band of Slovaks, Rendezvous in Bratislava traces family connections across national, historical and political borders, and celebrates the power of laughter in troubled times.

Developed at Battersea Arts Centre and supported using public funding from Arts Council England and by JW3.

Rendezvous in Bratislava is performed during the 50th anniversary year of the Prague Spring, the seismic political events of 1968 that changed the course of Czech and Slovak history.

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