Future Flares Festival 2025
Curatorial Statement
For many ‘What’s it about?’ is instinctively the first question asked of a theatre event they have not yet experienced. The assumption seems to be that when you know this, you have grasped the essence of the work, and that all the characteristics of the performer/s and their actions, along with all the visual, audible, spatial and sensorial components of the time spent with them, however carefully created and organised, merely constitute the medium for the communication of this message.
For a long time too, many contemporary performance makers have resisted the hierarchy this question invokes, arguing that whilst several ideas may be at play in the work, identifying a dominant meaning reduces the experiencing of it to an act of passive reception, that both demeans the complexity of the work and disempowers its audience.
But what about theatre/performance made with an acute awareness of its socio-political context, where at least part of the driving impetus to create it has come from the real and increasing challenges of belonging to this world? And what if the artist has responded to a specific characteristic or component of their/our lived experience? Must they just accept the idea that their work is definable by, or reduceable to, a single word or phrase? Or might that initial question be swapped for one or more others, to succinctly identify the experience on offer more accurately.
Much of the performance work being presented at the Future Flares Festival 2025 can be categorised by subject. It’s about the environment, grief, sexuality, migration, art, urban development and gender. But how it engages with these, and how it functions as an experience, is crucial to any attempt to actually describe what it is.
Vigil by Mechanimal emanated from the acquisition of a list of 26,000 critically endangered and recently extinct species, but also responds to the question of how such a thing might underpin an embodied and politically powerful performance encounter. Performance artist Katy Baird’s Get Off foregrounds our encounter with her, her body and her desires as well as the lessons of her lived experience, something that will leave us reeling, laughing, implicated and impacted. Dance and comedy artist Lewys Holt’s work is always an experiment, a practiced but unplanned encounter where they (and us) live in the moment, on the edge, processing it and life for the duration given.
From Gabriela Flarys and Andrea Maciel, Deluge’s exploration of grief and loss employs the performance of live music, comedy and extended physicality to mark its perspective on the subject, whilst Dan Dubowitz’s Night Grit Walk provides a direct and embodied experience of urban development and its impact in Manchester, after dark and on foot. A Seventh Man, an immersive documentary piece by Pinchbeck and Smith, employs the transitory nature of theatrical experience to narrate the experience of migration, and Journey’s End Working Title is exploring art making as a process and a way of life, and how the art that is made can really be accessed in a theatre-type situation.
The live moment of performance is always an encounter, an act of coming together where one party, the artist/s, brings their proposed and performative configuration of time, space and ideas, and the other, the audience, brings their trust, their knowledge of the world and their understanding of the conventions normally applied to a situation like this. Defining what happens in that moment is complex, subjective and largely unpredictable, particularly when the outside world is also, very definitely, on the agenda. But it is also a shared act of faith, founded on a belief held by both parties that a planned and live act of coming together can be an artistic construction of real value, a collaborative piece of art uniquely placed to process or respond to the experience of being alive, together, today.
Neil Mackenzie
Future Flares Festival Curator
Senior Lecturer, Drama and Contemporary Performance
