BAC Presents Innovative New Work at Scratch Festival 2009
This September the Battersea Arts Centre will be overrun by innovative live
art, dance and theatre practitioners taking part in Scratch Festival 2009. Taking
place over three long weekends from 10 to 26 September, Scratch will feature BAC
favourites including spoken word artist Polar Bear and interdisciplinary
company Curious, as well as many companies making their debut at the respected
South London venue.
Evening festival tickets cost £5 and grant holders access to
events happening all over the building, from studios and office spaces to
attics and cupboards. This eclectic mix of work has been created with reference
to three key themes: “Reasons for Living”; “Democracy”; and the work of
filmmaker David Lynch. During the
first weekend (10-12 September) visitors to Scratch will also be able to see
work from graduating artists and companies as part of The Graduates
Festival.
In addition to the wide variety of work going on over the
three weekends BAC will be presenting Little Bulb’s Crocosmia, winner of a Fringe First and
Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Fringe 2008. The show, which will be
taking place every night of the festival, tells the story of a set of siblings
seeking to make sense of the world through puppetry, singing, slide shows and
music.
During the
final weekend (25-26 September) there will be the first ever
London staging of Rules and Regs, a practice-led development for makers of Live
Art. Artists David Hoyle, Deborah Pearson, Sharon Smith and Swen Steinhauser
will be creating work in response to ‘rules’ devised by BAC over the whole
period of the festival and presenting it over the final two evenings.
Scratch
tickets holders can pay £3 to upgrade their tickets to see each of these shows,
or alternatively tickets can be purchased separately for those not attending
Scratch.
BAC has a strong history of scratch-produced work, creating
critically acclaimed shows including Punchdrunk’s The Masque of The Red Death and 1927’s Between the
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and more recently, Nic Green’s extraordinary
Trilogy, which has received five star reviews and won awards at this year’s
Edinburgh Festival. The venue is committed to this style of
development process, believing it key to the creation of what artistic directors
David Jubb and David Micklem call “the theatre of the future”.
