There are 12 new radio drama commissions for Spring and Summer 2021
Each will be broadcast at 5pm on a Tuesday, and again at 11am on the Thursday of the same week, along with a chat with the makers.
22nd March: The Cutlet Sisters of Totnes, by Julie Mullen
Julie Mullen trained at The Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and spent twenty years treading the boards, appearing on telly in adverts, comedy & sitcoms/soaps. She shut the door on acting and took up the pen in 2009. “I was pleased to get these sisters off the page and onto the radio stage. They are the embodiment of everything I aspire to in magic. They would never allow you to let your dream slide…or for you to give up. They mentor you whilst you're sleeping to be brave, take steps and conquer your fears. I think I love 'The Cutlet Sisters of Totnes' for their bold enquiry into all living hearts."
29th March: Brutus of Troy by Will Kemp
William Kemp is a writer and arts professional from Plymouth, who works for Dartington Trust. He studied Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, where he developed an interest in rewriting and subverting traditional narratives, and has since worked on a number of music and literature projects in the UK, including the Charleston Festival, and internationally with the British Council. He has produced and presented radio programmes for Soundart Radio, is treasurer of Brighton-based charity, Music Of Our Time, and his poetry and other writings have appeared in a range of eclectic magazines and literary journals. https://williamkemp.org/
6th April: together, unrestrained and grieving: a future memoir by An*dre Neely
An*dre Neely is a Berlin-based artist working at the intersections of performance, writing and digital practice. Prioritizing non-hierarchical encounters and process-driven collective practices, they play with hybrid-forms, political narrative and speculative fiction to expose and complicate the way we organise bodies, we organise work, desire, communication, and identity.
Recently, they have received an AXISWeb Micro Commission for their collaboration with Moa Johansson and their writing has been published by Montez Press and the Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater.
13th April: Tales of TRAYE
Young people at Totnes Rural Area Youth Engagement project tell their stories of lockdown and imagine a better world.
20th April: Landlines, by Femi Oriogun-Williams and Dominic Biddle
Dominic and Femi met 10 years ago, performing in an adaptation of Elektra.
Dominic is a director and performer, currently developing audio and visual works that are theatrical in experience.
Femi is a writer, musician, radio producer living and working in London.
27th April: Robyn Hoode, by Kerry Priest
Kerry Priest is a poet, sound artist and playwright. She was named one of Eyewear’s best new British and Irish poets 2018, while her poem, ‘Medicine Wheel’, was nominated for the forward prize 2019. Her pamphlet, ‘The Bone Staircase’ was published by Live Canon in 2020 and her sound poem ‘Mirror’ was played on BBC Radio 3 in 2021. Kerry has also worked as a DJ/producer. Her sound pieces have been played on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Introducing and reviewed in DJ and computer music magazines. She has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Latitude, Bestival, Xoyo, Thekla etc. She was a founding member of the legendary London club night, Twat Boutique and also a resident at Itchy Feet, Hodgepodge and Disco Mutante. Her musical output currently focuses on experimentations with the spoken word and voice, notably polyphony and opera.
4th May: A History of the World in six-and-a-half Cauliflowers, by Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka and Arne Glöckner
A live radioplay / soundcollage conceived and performed by Arne Glöckner and Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka. A piece only based on voices and sounds from kitchen utensils and vegetables that are played / processed live, resulting both in a sonic story as well as in a delicious veggie soup (after performance). In "a history of the world in six and a half cauliflowers" they meditate on the shrinking of daily life during lockdown - the centre being the kitchen, from where life & the whole universe starts to unfold, resulting in dramatic and ironic accidents, switching and subverting social and gender roles from cook to housewife, chemist to butcher.
11th May: Tuning to the Bird Body, by Kate Donovan
In the 1930s, over the course of two natural history expeditions to Tibet, Sikkim, and adjoining provinces in China, the German SS officer and zoologist Ernst Schäfer and the American naturalist Brooke Dolan II killed roughly 3,000 birds and transported them back to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where they remain today. The poems of Jan Verberkmoes explore the imagined subjectivities of these birds, both as creatures and as artifacts used for human edification. Written in a hybridized, fragmented language composed of English with threads of German breaking through, the poems seek to linguistically map the transformation of the birds bodies from living beings into scientific specimens. Here, radio refers to its own mottled history and reflects the power dynamics involved in colonial acts of claiming, of taking. The bird body and the radio body interweave to reveal a complex relationship of movement through space and time.
18th May: Johnny and the Covidworldly Beings, by Johnny Pavlatos
Johnny Pavlatos is a socially engaged radio artist, public artist, radiophonic producer, sound artist, and performer. Johnny's work takes the form of interventions, public performances, installations, social sculptures, compositions and radio transmissions. Johnny's practice focusses on explorations into the ways in which social and economic fragmentation affects gender performativity and how queer theoretical ideas may disrupt this production. Johnny's practice is both political and timely. In addition to teaching, activism and radio production, Johnny co-founded 589 Plateaus and Avelo Space with Lee Ingleton; operating as independent art making spaces in 2006 and 2019 respectively. They hosted activists, artists, discusssions, performances and researched various topics and issues, including the role of queer feminist art in crisis situations.
25th May: The Fierce Urgency of Now, by Wolf Close
Thanks to Dartington College of Arts, Victoria and Gareth met at the inaugural Soundart Radio broadcast 15 years ago. They have made theatre and other arts and community projects under the name Wolf Close ever since. When possible they love to work with their daughters: sound FX by Martha and Rosie. Featuring Martha. First broadcast on Soundart Radio, 25th May 2021
3rd June: Crumbling, by Niki Matita
Crumbling - an expression that has a variety of meanings and oscillates between positive and negative associations and experiences. Thrown at people, it bounces back and reflects a multitude of disarrys and aspects of life in big cities today. Places to live (and to work) under permanent construction and reconstruction, uncertain labour arrangements, losses of friendships and relationships, local hangouts, cultural and social gathering stations. The loss of the autonomy of creating one's own living space among other debris. Imaging it all as sound, layers of past and future permeated by the sounds of surveillance, the noise of everlasting building activities and a crumbly cookie gives comfort even if it can expose the bite to decay.
8th June: Moon over Small Heath, by Catherine Guy and Nina Karacosta
Catherine and Nina remember drama school in the 1990s and reenact fragments of student productions. Can they tunnel between Paris and Bristol to find one another again?
