Bloomsbury Mystery Play

Saturday 14 July, 3.00 – 6.00pm
Brunswick Square
London WC1N
Map

An echo of Bloomsbury’s radical and creative heritage, the Bloomsbury Mystery Play will be a living tableaux of costume, pageantry and song conceived by artists J&K / Janne Schäfer and Kristine Agergaard, and The Errorists / Hilary Koob-Sassen and Andreas Köhler taking place on and around a sculptural platform created by FOS.

As a theatrical form, mystery plays were traditionally used to embellish biblical stories but the Bloomsbury Mystery Play will narrate a more secular journey through ideologies of contemporary living; the rituals of daily life, our interactions with others and the possibilities for arranging the world around us. This is an eccentric celebration of the peculiar and the visionary: a platform for voices crying out how things might be.

This event is organised by Camden Arts Centre in the spirit of Bruce Lacey’s ritual performance works of the 1980s and to accompany his exhibition.

It is free to attend and will go ahead come rain or shine. Supported by Love Camden, Camden Council and The Danish Arts Council.

The Programme

The Bloomsbury Mystery Play will be staged around a specially commissioned stage by FOS and presented in two parts:

3.00 – 4.00pm
Calling for water, calling for nettles, calling for gold, calling for dreams
J&K / Janne Schäfer and Kristine Agergaard present a series of vignettes that take the form of living tableaux, merging performance and installation, appropriating symbols and imagery from magic rituals and alchemic processes. Each scene is a ritual marking an essential element of life, with an appreciation of the natural passing and cycle of time, featuring a text piece by Neal Brown and guest performers Nissa Nishikawa and Jonathan Bonnici. Their work investigates the mechanisms behind the cultural production of belief; ideas of identity, spirituality, utopia and, ultimately, civilisation.

5.00 – 6.00pm

The Errorists: A Syntax Octopus At The Axes Of Pattern And Phrase
The Errorists / Hilary Koob-Sassen and Andreas Köhler present a concert of excursions into a model of social desire with cello, vocals, percussion, ink and steel. The songs begin with stagings of sculptural drawings twisted from steel rod like bigger beggars' gift to tourists. Sitting on a little dance floor with a little proscenium up above to welcome you on the tour are an octopus seeking handholds in the ink and also Dante and Virgil before the wall of history in purgatory. Narrations of these sculptures assign meaning to the X,Y and Z axes of the song and dance moves. From these stagings of desire – thrashing for traction on the larger background – patterns of words emerge.