Following the success of current show We Dig, Ovalhouse will continue its final season, dubbed the Demolition Party season, at its Kennington home with a series of shows set to leave the building with a bang. Book your tickets now!
The season, which kicked off earlier this month with Emma Frankland‘s We Dig, runs until 14 December 2019 and features Christopher Brett Bailey‘s This is How We Die, Greg Wohead and Rachel Mars‘ Gaping Hole (Story #3) and Carolyn Defryn and Abigail Bouher‘s Kissing Rebellion.
Ovalhouse’s Demolition Party Season has been created as a collaboration between engineers and companies, allowing artists to dismantle parts of the building as part of their creative process. This has created a truly unique opportunity to take apart the physical structures that so often contain creatives and performers. Ovalhouse is giving its artists the freedom to take risks on stage, off stage and with the very stage itself. In current production, We Dig, this has led to the excavation of a massive hole as part of the performance.
Running from 25 October to 2 November, Bailey’s This is How We Die is a motor-mouthed collage of spoken word and storytelling. Tales of paranoia, young love and ultra-violence; a spiraling odyssey of pitch-black humour and nightmarish prose. With echoes of Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs, beat poetry and B-movies, This is How We Die is a prime slice of surrealist trash, an Americana death trip and a dizzying exorcism for a world convinced it is dying…
Gaping Hole (Story #3) follows it, running from 8 to 23 November. The third part in Mars and Wohead’s nonlinear trilogy about radical narrative explores what holes are we prepared to overlook in order to stay comfortable? In The Shawshank Redemption, wrongly convicted Andy Dufresne spends years digging a tunnel to freedom from his prison cell. He hides his work under a large picture of Rita Hayworth. On the day of his escape, Andy crawls his way towards the outside world and perfectly replaces the poster on the wall to mask his escape route. We’re so emotionally satisfied when Andy rips off his prison uniform in the rain that we forget to ask how he could possibly have replaced the poster from inside the tunnel…
Exploring the impact of global crises and personal heart breaks, Kissing Rebellion (15 to 30 November) is a new dance theatre performance inspired by the social media message that followed the Paris attacks in 2015: “Il va falloir beaucoup, beaucoup, beaucoup d’amour”- “It’s going to take a lot, a lot, a lot of love.” Hosting dinners over the last three years in London, Paris, Chicago and Los Angeles, its co-creators audio-recorded their guests’ humorous, passionate and sorrowful stories that began with a kiss. With connections to family, friends, lovers, identities, places and histories, these original recordings are woven together with live performance to investigate the capacity to heal and care in the wake of what has been shattered.
Speaking about the season, Owen Calvert-Lyons, Ovalhouse’s Head of Theatre & Artist Development, said:
“As Ovalhouse prepares to relocate to Brixton and to mark the end of this extraordinary space, we wanted to do something special. We have brought together inspirational artists to create a unique season of work in which artists are given licence to demolish elements of the building as part of their creative process. It is not the walls of this building that have given Ovalhouse its unique position in London’s cultural landscape, but the artists who have filled it with acts of revolution and the audiences who have witnessed them. It is the natural order that from destruction comes new growth. So put on your dancing shoes and pick up a sledgehammer: Welcome to The Demolition Party.”
Ovalhouse has existed as a community venue in Kennington for 80 years, and as a theatre for 55. During that time, it has built a reputation for supporting for artists and young people, commissioning new work that responds to today’s social and political issues, and staging work that reflects the cultural diversity of its local community. In 2021, it will re-open at a new, purpose-built venue in Brixton.
Before that, the Demolition Party season culminates with a series of actual parties, with Bar Wotever, Brazilian Wax and Cocoa Butter all hosting parties before Inua Ellams ends the season with an R.A.P. Party.
