Platformed

GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN 

GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN is a young experimental performance company with an interest in failure, amateurism, improvisation, found objects, found texts, duration, the art of lying, communicating across distances, and mess (to name a few things!). They will be throwing themselves into events at Arnolfini responding to The Apparatus theme and developing a new work for presentation in June. Look out for impromptu activity from March to June in addition to the events listed here.

You cheatin’ pillagin’ word embezzlin’ bandit

GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN will write each other a series of letters from March to June. Each letter will be no longer than one A4 side and will be published here, with a hard copy in the Arnolfini Reading Room and downloadable below. They will open the doors on a private discussion about where the company stands today in the artistic community, and in the more immediate context of having been Platformed at Arnolfini. Read over their shoulders as they push each other to consider the company's heritage and its potential legacy, in an honest and uncompromising correspondence.

The Live Art Development Agency will maintain a full set of the GITBOTV letters in their archives at the close of the project.

www.getinthebackofthevan.com/residencies/letter-project/

Letter 1 Download
Letter 2 Download
Letter 3 Download
Letter 4 Download
Letter 5 Download
Letter 6 Download
Letter 7 Download
Letter 8 Download
Letter 9 Download
Letter 10 Download
Letter 11 Download
Letter 12 Download
Letter 13 Download
Letter 14 Download
Letter 15 Download

Sylvia Rimat 

Sylvia Rimat is a performance maker from Germany, currently based in Bristol. She has shown her work (inter)nationally at venues and festivals such as Inbetween Time Festival Bristol, The Basement Brighton, Factoria de Fuegos in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), EPAF at Centre for Contemporary Arts Warsaw (Poland) and Grimmuseum in Berlin (Germany).

Sylvia's projects often revolve around the process of remembering, personal histories, lived places, risk and how we orientate ourselves. She is interested in the live moment of performance and how to interact with an audience, while applying low-profile methods for creating places, situations and interactions in space.

For her residency at Arnolfini Sylvia worked on the development of her most recent performance I guess if the stage exploded..., which premiered in April this year at the Barbican London as part of SPILL Festival 11 and was later on presented at Arnolfini as part of Mayfest 2011.

In I guess if the stage exploded... performance maker Sylvia Rimat follows the aspirational and possibly impossible goal to present a show never to be forgotten by its audience members - not a single one. By introducing memory tasks and techniques and applying them to the stage situation, the audience is systematically trained to remember - hopefully forever. I guess if the stage exploded... aims to explore and interlink ideas on memory, presence and sight, whilst trying to understand our urge to be commemorated.

‘A wonderfully inventive performance, that not only questions the nature of performance spectating but also offers a tantalising 45 minutes of theatrical joy' A Younger Theatre

‘There is such a strange menagerie of ideas brought into play in this show that it would be hard to forget'  Total Theatre

‘If I squint, I can see a serious dancer from the last century. She occupies the stage along with an owl, an elephant, a deer, and pieces of screwed up paper with audience members' names on them - some of it real, some imagined. The images float somewhere between a memory and a dream, but they're always collective. It's not that I am remembering something, but that we're remembering something together'  Mary Paterson, critical writer SPILL Festival 2011

I guess if the stage exploded... was commissioned by SPILL Festival 2011 at the Barbican, London. Supported by Arts Council England

Last year Arnolfini worked with our friends at Theatre Bristol and IBT Productions to bring you Bristol Live Open Platform - a weekend of new experimental live practice. New works went on to be developed for the Inbetween Time Festival, and this Spring Arnolfini will be working with two exciting artists / companies from 2010's Platform to support the development of new work. GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN and Bristol based Sylvia Rimat will be 2011's Platformed artists. The next Open Platform will take place at Arnolfini in 2012.

Read more about  their residency at Arnolfini.