the new Curious short film Landfill made as part of the What On Earth film series commissioned by Artsadmin and Xenoki Films can now be viewed online and will be shown on the big screen as part of the London Short Film Festival in January - details coming soon!
curious
curious will be performing as part of the British Council Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival 22-27 August as part of the BAC programme at Summerhall
the moment I saw you I knew I could love you is the current touring performance by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris made in collaboration with film-maker Andrew Kötting, composer and sound designer Graeme Miller and performers Claudia Barton and Joseph Young. The piece is about ‘gut feelings’; fight, flight and freeze reactions; impulse, love and undefended moments. Designed for life-raft sized groups of audience members at a time, the performance is set in the belly of a whale.
"There are a thousand beautiful moments: my favourites include a film of a woman floating adrift at sea projected onto a tiny Sealegs packet and a harrowing story of a childhood terrorised by a sword-swallower’s accident. It’s a rich and rewarding experience being immersed in this watery world." Total Theatre
"Film and live performance, soundscape and installation combine in this love story to offer glimpses of an endless horizon as well as intimate close-ups.... There is something immensely wistful about a piece that demonstrates that we are merely chemical compounds, and yet also shows us how to discover equilibrium." The Guardian (4 stars)
Gut Feelings Trilogy DVD includes:
- full length documentation of the performance the moment I saw you I knew I could love you;
- the film Sea Swallow'd by Curious and Andrew Kotting;
- interviews on 'Autobiology' workshops - in which Curious worked with 56 artists across the UK using 'gut feelings' to generate text, performance, video and installation work;
- and a special bonus track on the creative process in making the performance and film.
Curious and Live Art Development Agency, 2010, PAL-DVD, 93 minutes. £10.00
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FOUR STARS Lyn Gardner The Guardian, Sunday 21 March 2010
Until I saw this exquisitely delicate show, created by Curious, staged here as part of Scotland's National Review of Live Art, I had never considered that when you are cast adrift on a lilo, you are, in effect, floating on nothing but your own breath. If your breath gives out as you float out to sea, you will certainly sink and drown. You might be swallowed by a whale and find yourself sitting in its belly and bleached white by its gastric juices, like the sailor who tumbled overboard from his ship and was found by his crew inside the whale's stomach: white, frozen with fear but still breathing.
The lure of the sea is strong in this beautiful, watery show where the spectators becomes immersed, too. You have to find your sea legs in a performance that places the audience in jelly-like structures recreating the experience of sea sickness or that lurch in the stomach that comes with sudden love or terrible fear. This is all about gut feelings.
Film and live performance, soundscape and installation combine in this love story to offer glimpses of an endless horizon as well as intimate close-ups. A pack of sea sickness pills becomes a miniature movie screen; we pry into the stomach of a member of the audience to find a surprising place where boats lurch on storm-tossed gastric oceans.
There is something immensely wistful about a piece that demonstrates that we are merely chemical compounds, and yet also shows us how to discover equilibrium. At the end, we are paired up and dance, an apple balanced between our foreheads. Like every second of this show, it is fragile and intangible.