The Living Record Festival 2022 Begins This Month

Following its successful launch in 2021, The Living Record Festival returns with a programme of original pieces of digital art. Bringing together independent companies and freelance artists from all over the world, the five-week long multidisciplinary arts festival will be available to stream globally.

Spurred on by the catastrophic effect Covid-19 has had on the theatre and live performance industry, The Living Record festival was launched in 2021 to build a virtual space for audiences to safely enjoy a range of digital culture and for artists to safely and cost effectively present their work. After the run-away success of the first festival the company also presented digital works in their own mini Living Record Roots festival in April and as part of the Brighton Fringe.

This year's festival includes Tree Confessions, a site-specific audio play to download and listen to under your favourite tree; Chronic Insanity's All The Kings Men, an interactive immersive online experience about political corruption where your choices influence the outcome; and Sandy by Periteia Theatre Company which explores an encounter between a woman and a "female" object.

Artistic director Ross Drury said "After such a positive response in 2021 we are delighted to be running the second ever The Living Record Festival this January and February. Regardless of pandemic and the rules surrounding it we believe passionately in the power of digital to bring great art to wide reaching audiences in the long term. This year we have built a whole new platform in house to better support our artists and audiences, think of it as a combination of streaming and social networking with the kind of fresh, out there and genre defying works you'd expect to find at any Fringe festival - plus at home you don't have to drink your beer out of plastic cups!"

Living Record Productions is an award-winning production company established in 2015, creating relevant, dynamic new writing and binaural sound theatre experiences, committed to supporting artists from working class backgrounds. Alongside Playwright Neil Smith Living Record staged Sisters, Creditors by Neil Smith at the Brockley Jack Theatre, Reunion and Echoes at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Jodi Gray's THROWN a boundary pushing exploration into binaural sound and performance toured across the UK to venues including Vault Festival; The Mill Arts Centre, Banbury; The Place, Bedford, and was selected as part of the REACH showcase 2018 at ARC Stockton. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner said "Terrific performance...Looks great and sounds even better" and THROWN was awarded the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence at Edinburgh Fringe 2018. Thrown was live streamed in 2017, beginning an in-depth exploration into how binaural sound enables theatre to be highly effective for audiences at home. In partnership with Age UK, they found binaural sound performances and workshops were very effective for older people's groups, bringing a high-quality cultural experience to them in non-theatre spaces. Living Record Productions were invited to run workshops in Bedford prison and an international school in Kuala Lumpur. Most recently Living Record have created the an interactive platform for digital arts and produced the children binaural audio series Mr Cleverly's Transcontinental Delivery Service. The Living Record Festival, a month long celebration of digital arts, was launched in January 2021, presenting over 40 pieces, followed by The Living Roots festival of seed commissions in March and the Living Record Brighton at the Brighton Fringe during the summer.

https://stream.thelivingrecord.com