YARMONICS 2021. 25th & 26th September.
Saturday 25th September features a day of site specific performances and installations running throughout the day. Sunday 26th September features a single participatory performance led by Bill Drummond with installations running throughout the day. Festival programmes will be available throughout the weekend featuring text from participating artists commissioned for the festival.
Thanks to the generous support of the Greater Yarmouth Tourism & Business Improvement Area all performances and installations will be recorded and available to listen to via an interactive map after the festival. We hope this provides an opportunity for audiences not able to make the weekend to revisit the sites and listen to the performances at a later date or at home.
To prevent the spread of coronavirus all events will follow the guidelines current at the time, and all precautions will be taken to ensure the safety of our audiences. Information will be shared nearer the festival.
A PDF read easy version of the full festival programme can be downloaded here, a JPEG version of the schedule can be found here.
Tickets are free but must be ordered before the event here: YARMONICS 2021 tickets. There is an option to add a donation to your ticket if you which will be used as seed funding for YARMONICS 2022.
Abbas Zahedi / c l a y h e m / Colin Webster / Conny Prantera and Alice Colley present: THE SEER / Elaine Mitchener / Geo:Flux / hymn / Ligia Macedo / Lotte LS / Michael Page / Pedro Cassimo / Roy Claire Potter / Ruthie Collins / Sarah Kenchington / Tazelaar Stevenson / Our Seventeen led by Bill Drummond
Abbas Zahedi
Abbas Zahedi’s interdisciplinary practice blends contemporary philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics with performance, sound, sculpture, and moving-image. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, Zahedi makes connections whenever possible with people involved in the particular situations upon which he focuses, to invite others into the conversation.
Weaving together sounds taken from Saint Abdullah's sound archive, field recordings from Great Yarmouth, and meditation app soundscapes, this new sound piece, in the form of a meditation, will build upon Zahedi's recent research into the commercialisation of affect and practices of surveillance innate to modern forms of ‘escape’ — be these fantastical or holistic. Through performative processes, the work will in part be developed though a performance situated in the Empire Theatre. The performance will be a simple gesture. The initial meditation sound track will play aloud in an enclosed space, to an audience comprising of both corporeal humans and paper puppets. The artist will sit peacefully in the space, wearing headphones, meditating as the sound track plays for all to hear. Echoing gestures Zahedi has explored in previous performances (image attached), the performance in the Empire Theatre will invite audience participation. The headphones worn by the artist will be linked to a microphone into which audience members will be able to speak/to direct Zahedi's meditation. These audience enunciations will be recorded and subsequently mixed into the initial meditation sound track by Zahedi. The final sound piece, a mix of the initial meditation and the site-specific responses from audience members, will then be shared by the artist for YARMONICS to feature online.
What: Performance
Where: The Empire
When: Sunday 26th, 6pm
Bill Vine and Liam Roberts present Geo:Flux
Geo:Flux is a new audio/visual work from Flux:Intermedia’s Bill Vine and Liam Roberts. The sound is made up of raw and manipulated field recordings from different sites around Norfolk, whilst the visuals explore live video synthesis and experiments with real-time glitches that respond and take cues from the live audio. This will be the first live performance of the work, following a recorded version for Norwich Arts Centre’s ‘Digital Tilted East’ festival in March this year.
What: Performance
Where: The Empire
When: Sunday 26th, 5pm
c l a y h e m
C L A Y H E M are a group formed by members of the Herring House Trust and photographer, Jason Evans. The members met during a mutual trip to Primeyarc and came together through improvising with small and percussive sounds created by the large collection of ceramics as part of Pot Rescue.
What: Performance
Where: Primeyarc
When: Saturday 25th, 1pm
colin webster
London based saxophonist Colin Webster is quickly establishing himself on the European avant-garde scene. Collaborating with some of the key figures in improvised and experimental music, Webster is known for working from extreme sonic palettes – from minimal to maximal, constantly pushing boundaries.
What: Performance
Where: Sunken Garden
When: Saturday 25th, 12pm
Conny Prantera and Alice Colley present: THE SEER
Alongside her illustrator activity, Conny’s work has expanded into the field of live performance, exploring the use of video projection, live music, costume and set design.
Conny Prantera’s installations have been hosted by an array of music festivals and art galleries, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, U.K.), Supersonic Festival (Birmingham, U.K.) and Vermillion Gallery (Seattle, WA, U.S.A.).
Her video work has also seen application in Theatre, through her collaboration with Cristiana Morganti, soloist dancer at the Pina Baush Tanztheater, on her acclaimed choreography titled Jessica And Me, winner of the Danza&Danza Award 2014.
What: Performance
Where: Hippodrome
When: Saturday 25th, 3pm
elaine mitchener
Elaine Mitchener is an experimental vocalist, movement artist and composer, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre and performance art.
Born in East London to Jamaican parents, Elaine studied voice at Trinity College of Music, London and currently studies with Jacqueline Bremar.
She has performed at numerous UK and European festivals, venues and galleries including Aldeburgh Music, London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF), 56th Venice Biennale, Wysing Arts, Café Oto (London), Bluecoat (Liverpool), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Purcell Room (Southbank Centre, London), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, ULTIMA Festival (Oslo), OCCUPY (St John’s Smith Square), SPILL Festival (Ipswich), La Monnaie (Brussels), Block Universe (London), White Cube (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Weserburg MOMA (Bremen), Wellcome Collection (London), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London).
What: Installation
Where: Market Gates Multi-Story Car Park
When: Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th, 11am - 4pm
hymn
hymn are a group exploring spacious improvisations informed by simple composed material. They include Chris Dowding’s breathy trumpet playing and looping, George McKay’s deep and dark double bass playing, and electronics improviser David Ross playing percussion processed through analog electronics.
hymn also operates with guests and in improvised configurations. This has included with Graham Dunning (vinyl improvising) and Sylvia Hallett (violin and electronics).
What: Performance
Where: The Empire
When: Sunday 26th, 7pm
ligia macedo
Ligia Macedo was born in Beira, Mozambique, an African port city bathed by the Indian Ocean. In the late 70s, her family fled the Civil War and went to Lisbon, Portugal, where she grew up, studied and worked. Life circumstances carried her away once again to another shore, and she ended up in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, UK, where she made a life for herself and her family. She fell in love with the town and its people and finds its community spirit, diversity and resilience very inspiring. Ligia works with migrant communities and has worked in different Community Projects since 2014.
What: Text
Where: Festival programme
LOTTE LS
Lotte L.S. is a poet living in Great Yarmouth, the furthest easterly outlier of England. She is the 2019 recipient of the C.D. Wright Memorial Scholarship to the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley. She keeps an infrequent portfolio and tinyletter, Shedonism.
What: Text
Where: Festival programme
Micheal page
Micheal Page makes odd synthesisers. A common thread in his work is designing tactile interfaces to allow sensitive gestural interaction with the brittle boolean logic of audio electonics. Conciously employing the contradictions and tensions between these hard / soft systems to create cybernetic post-human machine noise.
What: Installation
Where: Minster
When: Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th, 11am - 4pm
pedro cassimo
Pedro Cassimo is from Mozambique and currently lives and works in Great Yarmouth. He performs across musical forms, specialising in song-writing, musical production and poetry. In 2017 he performed as part of the UK Tour of 'Following the Fleet: Drifters', and featured in 'Don't Drop Carry On' presenting the best of Portuguese speaking Hip-Hop at The Mariner.
What: Text
Where: Festival programme
ROY CLAIRE POTTER
Roy Claire Potter makes performance and experimental art writing. Much of their approach to making visual, auditory or written artworks is influenced by pragmatic linguistic theory—how physical and social contexts contribute to intended or received meaning. This is extended to audience encounters with 'voice' across staged and improvised performance, installation, broadcast and audio or print publication. Their narrative works are iteratively produced, across form, over long periods of time and address subjects such as domestic sound, bodily comportment, spatial and group dynamics with a focus on interpersonal communication and violent affect.
What: Performance & text
Where: Hippodrome
When: Saturday 25th, 3pm
ruthie collins
Ruthie Collins is a writer and arts practitioner born in Cambridge, East Anglia. She specialises in socially engaged arts, making the arts inclusive and accessible. Inspired by the way writing can cross disciplines ‘off the page’ and into life, her writing and cross-arts text-based work has been broadcast on TV and radio, been published in The Guardian, and appeared as installation, texts, posters and critical writing.
What: Text
Where: Festival programme
sarah kenchington
Sarah Kenchington lives on a farm in the Campsies, and for the past 10 years has been developing an elaborate and constantly evolving semi mechanical orchestra. Made from strictly human powered, mechanically assisted, acoustic instruments, this orchestra is designed to be played by one person and creates music that is dictated, in part, by the uncontrollable nature of the instruments in this set up. These include a pedal powered double ended hurdy gurdy/banjo, a pyramid structure that plays crystal glasses, a mechanical sequencer, and a brass band section which uses balloon membranes.
What: Performance
Where: Hippodrome
When: Saturday 25th, 5pm
tazelaar stevenson
Tazelaar Stevenson is an artist based in Norfolk.
He has been birdwatching for roughly the same amount of time as he’s been drumming. Perhaps a bit longer. Both play a huge part in his life and work.
Tazelaar has prepared a short sound performance in response to bird song and field recording samples taken from a walk earlier this summer at Burgh Castle.
This performance is supported by Arts Council England as part of Natural Wonder, a project celebrating connection to the natural world.
What: Performance
Where: Minster
When: Saturday 25th, 11am
our seventeen led by bill drummond
Bill Drummond is a Scottish artist, musician, writer, and record producer. He was the co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde pop group The KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation.
As part of his show ‘Who Ate My Uncle?’ at Primeyarc, and his ongoing project, The 17, Drummond will be leading a large scale participatory performance.
What: Performance
Where: Announced on the day.
When: Sunday 26th, 4pm
YARMONICS 2021 was funded by:
