CLAYground
CLAYground provides a welcoming space for local artists CLAY to perform and test new work that is in its experimental phase. For our audiences, it's an opportunity to experience live art in its raw form in a relaxed and curious enviroment
LADS LADS LADS
Johnny The Biblical Rapper
05/11/2021
Lads Lads Lads
Your lad Johnnys out for the night, it’s gonna be a good night…roamin about prowlin. Your local amateur spoken word hero is with you for one night only with a small bag of mints and a Greggs bap in hand, and he’s brought his mate Ross.
They aren’t gonna fight, it’s all gonna be good, a good laugh is what it’s gonna be, as long as everyone keeps they're heads and the drinks keep flowin it’s all gonna be fine…just fine.
Johnny the Biblical Rapper is Tessa Parr and Ross is Rosa Postlethwaite.
Lads Lads Lads is about tenderness, about violence, about the words we say replacing the things we mean.
SIT WITH US
Mafwa Theatre
03/09/2021
SIT WITH US
Mafwa Theatre presents Sit with Us, an interactive installation where women from different migration backgrounds invite you to sit, make yourself comfortable and listen.
Sit with Us is created by and with Kuluhenna Drama, a group of women from refugee, asylum seeker and settled Leeds communities who have worked with artists to create the set design and performances to be delivered in the space.
The installation came from a desire to create a tranquil oasis and explores what it means to be comfortable in a hostile environment.
INVISIBLE, WITHOUT BODIES
Ro Hardaker
06/08/2021
Ro Hardaker’s invisible, without bodies.
With deliberate slowness, Hardaker studies haptic configurations and negotiates new processual terms, bodies and sites as they are being realised. Here, leaking and slick with prophecy she fills, holds and empties vessels; testing their capacities to tolerate and producing instances in which language and violence are extracted, then redistributed as intense affective encounters. Content notes: anal insertion, nudity.
Ro Hardaker (She/They) works at the blur between discursive, visual and embodied practices. Addressing access as the ability to enter or as an outburst of emotion, their practice is emergent, necessarily interdisciplinary and undisciplined. In the absence of their live work they provide texts, conversations, videos and objects which layer or complicate other ways of viewing their work.
01/10/2021
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OPEN STUDIOS
Resident Artists
CLAY Open Studios
For the first time you're getting a peek behind the curtain...
The CLAY studio subsciber family are opening their doors to show you what they've been working on recently.
The our studio artists include:
Hannah Wilk// Rich Tea
Ellie Harrison// Grief Series
Samra Mayanja & Sam Lanchin// SamOneSamTwo
SOCKETHEAD
PEPETUATION SERIES
Tom Cassani
01/04/2022
Tom Cassani's Perpetuation Series
Using hair suspension as a medium for physical exploration, this durational performance work expands the space and time in which almost impossible images occur. A body remaining suspended by the hair above broken glass. A body vanishing in slow motion flying through the space. This performance is part of Cassani’s ongoing research into durational acts of illusion that map new territories in practices of magic, sideshow and Live Art.
Tom Cassani is a performance maker and artist based in the UK. Tom writes text and performs actions in theatre, circus, cabaret, live art and club spaces. Tom’s work sits within lineages of both performance magic and live art and draws on physical skills from the circus sideshow. Tom is currently undergoing a Masters by Research at The University of Huddersfield with a focus on the body as site of deception in contemporary performance practices.
CHIPPERLARTERART PARTY
Daniel Oliver
06/05/2022
CHIPPERLARTERART PARTY: The Board Game
During lockdown Daniel Oliver had a bawdy anxiety dream that he got stuck in a board-game about performance art and time travel. This is the live game of the performance of that board-game from that dream.
It will be like that cartoon about dungeons and dragons called Dungeons and Dragons where they all got stuck on that fair ride, but with less encounters with wizards and more encounters with half-imagined transgressive performance art.
It will be like those online Escape Room games that you see advertised on the internet but made by a dyspraxic who doesn’t really know what they are. It will be like that amazing performance art festival that you went to that changed your life probably in a good way.
Who’s that mysterious playdough person in the bar? Where has Andy Spinkle gone and why has he stolen the projector? What’s at stake if you pretend to take your clothes off for an imaginary large-scale immersive performance? What’s at stake if you say that you pretend that you won’t but you actually pretend that you will anyway? What’s in that cupboard? What’s Daniel really up to?
Open Studios
03/06/22
Diamante Jubilee Edition
The Court of CLAY cordially invites you to experience the work of our amazing studio-holders, in honour of the Queen’s Diamante Jubilee, to show you the real royalty.
Elevating these peasants to the status of KINGS, CLAYground presents our second edition of Open Studios. This time we’re putting process on a pedestal and placing these performers in the palace.
Doors will be left unlocked for your peeking, all jewels hung out to bare and Crowns evenly distributed among the asses. Apologies, Massess.
Come and see what our place looks like when we scrub up well!
Featuring art works from studio holders including:
Hannah Lawless
Ellie Harrison & The Grief Series
Sam Lanchin
George Moody
Jessica Sweet
Marie Koehl
Freddie Willis
'Secured'
01/07/22
Claye Bowler
Addressing the erasure of queer and trans narratives and objects in museum collections and archives, this work recitifies; exploring accessioning, packing and body as archive.
Claye uses his experience as a Museum Registrar (with roles at Leeds Museums & Galleries, the Royal Armouries and Tate) to inform his art practice aesthetically and politically, as well as stealing all the skills. His recent work has focused on his transitioning body but he’s bored of that so archives are back baby.
Milk & Honey
02/09/22
Alex Billingham
It’s time to drink up all your milk dear.
How do you be yourself when you don’t know what that is?
Let Live artist Alex Billingham drench you in trans crip desire. Celebrating the misshaped, misfired,
misfits by awkwardly hurling their Frankenfixed body into space and time.
Cabaret never tasted so bile.