Karaoke brings strangers together in a room to watch one another become stars for the moment. Sometimes prepared, other times spontaneous, a great number of us have found ourselves at least once looking through the karaoke catalogue in a bar and begrudgingly singing in front of expectant friends. Inevitably along with the screens that display the bouncing ball or the words turning yellow on cue is a simple, tasteless, and more often than not kitschy video. These videos vaguely support the song but are actually non-entities.

[2 hrs]

“It is the transformation of substance that is my concern in art, rather than the traditional aesthetic understanding of beautiful appearances. If the creativity relates to the transformation, change, and development of substance, then it can be applied to everything in the world, and is no longer restricted to art…” – Joseph Beuys about his work Bathtub (1960)

The new solo of Fernando Belfiore, AL13FB<3 investigates the idea of body-sculpture. Fernando (per)forms an encounter with elements to construct a physical experience, body states and retranslate emotions. While leading his audience through poetic and futuristic worlds, he explores the potential of transformation and let the body unfold new materiality. Belfiore reshapes the environment as an alchemic relation of re-creation and renewal.

Fernando Belfiore (1983 Sao Paolo, Brazil) is a choreographer and performer based in Amsterdam. He graduated at the SNDO (School for New Dance Development – AHK) in 2011. Fernando is artist in residence at the production house Dansmakers Amsterdam since 2011, where he created his solo You Must, a dramaturgic collaboration with Ivo Dimchev, and .whatdowefinallyshare., which was selected for Aerowaves as priority company 2013.

[1 hr]

‘Remember the good old days when everyone got along, when life was simple, when our television screens protected us from sex, violence and the discomfort of difference? Remember when politicians were statesmen, mothers were wholesome, the rich worked hard and celebrities were role models? Remember when we knew where we belonged, when no one was gay, no one was black and political correctness was barely a glint in some liberal’s eye? Me neither.

Happiness Forgets is a lecture, an ode and an elegy for our imperfect past, for the people we once were and can never be again, now that we know what we know now. In this piece, Season Butler pins down the past, examines it under a microscope, charges it with electricity to see if she can make it dance. Throwing tradition onto the junk heap of history, Happiness Forgets will try to nudge us into the gaps between rich and poor, comedy and tragedy, celebrities and fans, credibility and doubt, grab the power that these differences generate and grind it into dust. It’s about race, nostalgia and the moment when you see something familiar in a whole new light.’

[1 hr]

Happiness Forgets | AL13FB – 3 | Karaoke (ART)

Sunday 11 October, 12pm – midnight.

£20 / £15  conc.

This pass offers full access to the Sunday ticketed program which begins at The Drum in Aston and concludes at our festival hub, BOM. The pass includes a new commission by Season Butler, Happiness Forgets, a UK premiere of Fernando Belfiore’s AL13FB-3 and Karaoke (ART) by Davis Freeman. PME-ART’s durational performance The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information will also be taking place by The Drum’s exhibition hall.

Please note Happiness Forgets and AL13FB-3 can only be attended with the Fierce Sunday Pass.

Gazelle Twin is the creation of producer, composer and artist, Elizabeth Bernholz. The critically acclaimed debut, The Entire City (2011, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray) and following Mammal EP (2013, Sugarcane) was succeeded by a full length industrial-pop offering UNFLESH (2014).

Over the last couple of years, Sarah Farina grew to become one of Berlin’s main tastemakers in underground bass. Sarah is well recognised throughout Germany and noticed by artists and music heads on each and every continent. Her sets are driven forward through futuristic breakbeats and intense basslines. Not sticking to any specific genre, she defines the music she plays as rainbow-bass.

DEEP AEROBICS by Miguel Gutierrez is a participatory spectacle – it’s a movement, it’s a transformative experience for the mind/body/spirit/genital matrix. Gutierrez asks that each participant come in costume. Please push your imagination beyond the 80’s!

DOORS OPEN: 9pm

GAZELLE TWIN: 10pm – 10.45pm

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ: 11.15pm – midnight

SARAH FARINA: midnight – 2am

Following on from the success of My Stories, Your Emails, Olivier Award-winning performance provocateur Ursula Martinez is back on her dirty soapbox.

In a social media-obsessed climate of self-promotion, Martinez offers up her positive self-deprecation, baring her soul (and possibly more), as she tries to understand the absurdity of modern living, and celebrate the difficulties of being a human, particularly a human with a vagina.

[1 hr]

A singular experiment in exotic companionship; a meticulous yet playful study of hand bell algorithms; an affective assemblage of Male Breast Feeding… Culture, Administration & Trembling exposes a collection of durational, artificial situations developed collaboratively between dance artists Antonija Livingstone, Jennifer Lacey, Stephen Thompson, and visual artist Dominique Pétrin. Each piece, or “time-based sculpture,” is conceived as a score that prompts a series of rare, endangered practices the public is invited to witness. A collective mode of attention, these choreographic sculptures shift between the human and the animal, the real and the imaginary, the old school and the now to create a series of unexpected contemplative landscapes.

In this intimate yet out-of-bounds choreographic salon, Livingstone proposes a critically joyful and queer study of movement, presence and territory where dance becomes a curatorial practice. Enacting a series of vital tremors, the work unfolds in a collection of sublime, precarious choreographic ecologies.

[1hr or 2hrs depending on 5.30pm or 6.30pm entry]

‘It never ceases to amaze us how important and resonant music can be in our lives. Often connected with childhood and adolescence, it is difficult to imagine the modern world without the songs that form its continuous soundtrack. In The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, the Montreal based interdisciplinary group PME-ART have one hundred and twenty records and stories about each one: historical facts about the bands, gossip, anecdotes, things that happened to them and their friends. Each time they perform, they find themselves playing the records in a different order, creating new, on-the-spot connections between the music they love (and even a few songs they hate.) A loose, improvised, but still surprisingly effective, journey through art, politics, love and work; all seen through the lens of every kind of music. A place to come together and listen, think about where songs takes us and what we take from them.

The public is also invited to a special encounter called Bring your own Record/Listening Party (90 min), where anyone can bring his/her own record and tells a story of her/his own in a casual atmosphere, raising every kind of question on Saturday 10 at Cow Vintage at 3.30pm.

[Saturday 10 Oct, 1h 30 / Sunday 11 0ct, 3hrs]

For All Ears Kate McIntosh sets up the stage as an improvised adhoc laboratory for a series of unusual recordings and acoustic experiments, using everyday objects and materials. Chairs are dragged, paper is torn, glasses are toppled. Sounds are gathered, recorded and played back – the action of one part of the performance providing soundtrack, background or atmosphere for another. Along the way McIntosh – as combination curious scientist, mischievous questioner and eclectic storyteller – leads us on a distinctive journey through a diverse landscape of ideas.

There are parables of human and animal behavior, fragments on crowd control and linguistics, jokes about politics and group dynamics, maps of birds and traffic jams, stories about systems, societies and social interactions. At the heart of the piece – in the silence between the sounds recorded, at the centre of the listening crowd – are questions about who we are alone and how we are together, about what it might take to change a culture and what we could be missing in the push for individual self-sufficiency.

[1hr 15]