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Uninvited Guests

UNINVITED GUESTS

  (1998 - )
Nationality:    English
email:    Click here to contact     Website:    Click here

Literary Agent:    n/a

Formed in 1998, Bristol-based Uninvited Guests operates in various contexts and constellations, focusing mainly on performance but also making gallery installations and working in digital mediA. Currently Arnolfini Associate Artists, the company produces entertaining and provocative work that investigates our media-saturated culture; explores the relationship between real and on-screen, live and mediated spaces; and attempts to represent contemporary reality, in which virtual interactions and memories of TV or movies are as much part of our experience as intimate personal dialogues.

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below is a list of Uninvited Guests's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

         Aftermath         Film         It is Like it Ought to Be         Last Judgement, The: A Descriptive Lecture at Intervals         Last Tempest, The         Live Chat         Love Letters Straight from the Heart         Make Better Please         Offline         Pastoral, A         Ring a Ring O' Roses         Schlock         Society of Friends

Aftermath

Synopsis:
Trained by a TV make-up artist, we lovingly fabricate bloody wounds on each other's bodies. Clothing is cut away, not to tend to an injury, but to create a fake wound and apply the blood that would have run from it. Over 6 hours these fake cuts multiply and proliferate across our skins. We become surfaces marked by real and on-screen violence, that has happened or is yet to happen, both a living memorial and a warning of what might be to come. In Aftermath, tenderness produces cruel effects, and fake gashes carry the memory of their careful creation. In the room with us, you share in the intimate eroticism of wounds, getting up close and personal, confronting your desire both to look and look away. the immersive and visceral soundtrack is produced live, by sampling the performers' internal body sounds. the wounds begin to migrate from the performers onto the surfaces of the room, and are offered to you to take away with you on your skin, out into the real world. Likewise you will be invited to hold a stethoscope to your body, to contribute the rustles and murmurs of your blood-flow to the live score. Aftermath pushes at the limits of aesthetic taste, to question the ethics of the pleasure we take in both documentary reports and movies that fetishise violence. We perform fake suffering for you, atoning for the cultural commodification of pain, the visual pleasures taken collectively in images of accidents and violence. Stay with us for as long as you like. Witness as much or little as you want. Feel free to sit or stand where you choose, to come and go.

Notes:
A Collaboration with Duncan Speakman. Aftermath was performed As part of Arnolfini's Inbetween Time Festival in 2006. It is the durational sequal to Schlock, which toured nationally in 2004-5.

1st Produced:
Arnolfini's Inbetween Time Festival, Bristol    2006

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Film

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It is Like it Ought to Be

Synopsis:
Come join us, share some ale and stay awhile. Let's found Arcadia in the theatre, a rural idyll amongst the city's hubbub. In the guise of some ragtag band, Uninvited Guests invent fakesongs and fakedances for our green and plastic land. they declaim hip romantic poetry, conjure epic landscapes and attempt a return to some simpler life, a golden age. they give thanks for what we've got, and offer prayers to make better please, make better. they take refuge in pastoral romance and the search for an impossible utopia.

Notes:
It Is Like It Ought To Be: A Pastoral, was first shown As A work-in-progress At Arnolfini in January 2006. the show previewed As part of BACs BURST festival in May 2006, And premiered At the Nuffield theatre, Lancaster. It toured nationally in Autumn 2006 And spring 2008 And was part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2007. It toured to Beijing And Shanghai in November 2008.

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Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  5 performers

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Last Judgement, The: A Descriptive Lecture at Intervals

Synopsis:
Uninvited Guests are creating an installation as part of the John Martin: Apocalypse exhibition at Tate Britain which opens on 21 September 2011. Uninvited Guests recreate the lectures presented in public halls across the land, when these popular paintings toured in the late 19th Century, with reference to contemporary apocalyptic blockbusters . This is Uninvited Guests second collaboration with Tate Britain. Previously the company performed Society of Friends as part of BP Saturdays: Going Public.

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1st Produced:
Tate Britain, London    21 Sep 2011

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Fuel

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Last Tempest, The

Synopsis:
This Last Tempest is a sequel to The Tempest and begins where Shakespeare left off. Caliban and Ariel are left alone on the enchanted island, as Prosperos ship sails over the horizon and out of view. In the hours that follow, the magicians former servants, the savage and the airy spirit are free to tell their unheard versions of the story. They use the magic of the words their master taught them to conjure-up their own brave new world, where spirits and monsters are people and inanimate things are alive. They perform a tempest and, as the wild waves roar around them, they begin again together. Working with composer and musician Neil Johnson, Uninvited Guests fill this strange yet familiar island with guitar noise, evocative sounds and sweet airs. Part theatre, part gig, This Last Tempest draws on the companys collaborative approach to devised theatre and is a show for both those who know Shakespeares play and audiences new to The Tempest.

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Fuel

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Live Chat

Synopsis:
Live Chat took place simultaneously in Arnolfini Bar, Watershed Digital Cafe and online, over 2 nights in December 2002. Two performers hung out in Arnolfini bar, speaking text face-to-face that was being written live online in Yahoo chatrooms. Sound and image from the bar was transmitted wireless across the quay to Watershed's Digital Cafe, where it was projected. Participants at Watershed could join in the online chat, via the Digital Cafe's computers, and hear their text spoken at Arnolfini after a certain amount of lag. To complete the loop, video was also streamed back to the web so that people could log on and participate remotely. Arnolfini Bar, a real social space located in Bristol, was networked into the virtual architecture of the web, that is everywhere and nowhere - though mainly focused in the U.S. the artwork was a network, its contents authored by knowing and unknowing participants. It produced a complicated social space that raised questions about the realness of chat both on and offline, and generated playful dialogue between these contexts.

Notes:
A Collaboration with Duncan Speakman. Live Chat was remade for tEXt Festival, Exeter Phoenix, bar And digital media centre, 14th May, 2005

1st Produced:
Arnolfini Bar, Watershed Digital Cafe and online    Dec 2002

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Love Letters Straight from the Heart

Synopsis:
Using dedications contributed before the event, the performers recite words exclusively written by those in the audience, creating unique content for every show that is then interspersed with back-to-back songs played in an amateur DJ battle. Uninvited Guests attempt to express the inexpressible without irony and question whether 'I love you' has become a cliche hijacked by romantic comedy and popular music. Audience and performers are seated at two long tables, where cava is served, toasts are made and speeches given, continuing the company's practice of blurring the lines between theatre and social festivities.

Notes:
Love Letters Straight From Your Heart was devised At Leeds Met Studio theatre And Arnolfini, Bristol. A Scratch version of the work was performed At BAC's Burst Festival on 18th & 19th May 2007. Since then the show has toured to National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Arnolfini, Leeds Met Studio theatre, Alsager Arts Centre And Latitude. We trialled A version of the show for elderly people At the Peel Centre in Islington, in Association with the Clod Ensemble's Extravagant Acts for Mature People programme, And the Lyric Hammersmith in January 2009.

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Make Better Please

Synopsis:
Uninvited Guests are in town. they call on the people to gather together and read the day's newspapers, to speak and to listen. Delve into the topics close to your heart and at the centre of your community. Make Better Please draws upon the news of the day, creating a unique show each night shaped by the audience. Possessed by the spirits of corporate fat cats, cabinet ministers and media tycoons, Uninvited Guests will speak the unspeakable and do the unthinkable.

Notes:
devised by Richard Duffy, Lewis Gibson And Jessica Hoffmann

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Fuel

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Genre:
piece 70 min

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Male:  2            Female:  1            Other:  -

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Offline

Synopsis:
Whatever you want it's out there: sordid stories, bad seed secrets, lost love and good clean fun. Categories for the organised voyeur. Come on in digital dandy. Snoop around you dirty little sneak. Browse through a store marked 'No Guilt No Shame'. Get caught in the act of what comes naturally. Uninvited Guests pull the plug and work offline. We've seen too much and can't take anymore. After shut down we're left in a room with only an index of where we have been, trying to recall our digital heaven. If you tell me yours I'll tell you mine. . . talk dirty to strangers that glow in the dark. Offline is also available as a 6hr durational version. This intimate event is performed within a carpeted room built in a gallery context. Join the company offline, lounge with us on our carpet as we whisper others' textual confessions to you, close-up and breathy. . .

Notes:
the show premiered At Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Germany And Arnolfini in Bristol, UK. Offline toured in the UK And to Germany, Denmark And Slovienia. Offline was commissioned by Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt As part of their Plateau Festival And Arnolfini Live As part of their 2001 season. the 6 hour durational version was performed At Arnolfini's Inbetween Time Festival, 16th February 2003

1st Produced:
Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Germany    2001

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Pastoral, A

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Ring a Ring O' Roses

Synopsis:
This event draws on ideas we began to explore in Aftermath. A white-painted room will be built within the black commissions space. the bare-wood of the outside of these walls resembles the back of a movie set facade. the gap between the fake walls and the real walls of the building will encourage the audience to imagine what/who might be walled-up there. the audience enter through a velvet curtain, a trace of Victoriana at the entrance to this brightly-lit space, the aesthetic of which will collide the contemporary with references to Poe's era. the central feature will be a "chandelier" made-up of a cluster of 80 lightbulbs with black fixtures. the two performers, Uninvited Guests' Associates Simone Kenyon and Cath Dyson will wear Victorian mourning dresses with their faces covered by black veils. We will work with an SFX make-up artist to design the symptoms of a fictional plague or pestilence. these symptoms will be manifested on the performers' skin, will spread to the walls of the room itself and will also be made-up on our guests, the audience. Posing in prone, consumptive postures, the performers will lift their veils or skirts to reveal plague sores, buboes and cutaneous hemorrhages, bubonic rings of roses. Two or three audience members at a time, will share this enclosed space with Uninvited Guests, having an intimate experience, getting close-up and personal. the mourning women, the plague-carriers, will work tenderly on the task of making-up sores, which will produce fearful effects. the tenderness and intimacy of their actions and the revealing of hidden skin will be charged with eroticism: the appearance of the hemorrhages will be beautiful, attractive as well as repulsive. Over the week sores will proliferate across the white walls, starting from one point and spreading outwards to infect the whole room, as though the building is plague-ridden. the room will begin to bleed profusely from its pores and ooze pus. We like the idea of the durational installation growing over the week, that each person will witness a different moment in the spread of the fictional disease and the progress of the performers' infection. the references are as much to contemporary horror, like Kubrick's 'the Shining' (in which the hotel lift bleeds) and the parasites in Cronenberg's 'shivers'/'they Came From Within', as to Poe.

Notes:
A weeklong durational installation, As part of Punchdrunks Masque of the Red Death, BAC, London, 2007.

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Schlock

Synopsis:
Not for the faint hearted, Schlock collides the real with the really fake. Personal experiences of bodily trauma and fears about accidents or violent attacks encounter the erotica of TV hospital Dramas and horror flicks. the result is a darkly comic and disconcerting mix of poignant confession and B-movie meloDrama, real acts of violence and pints of fake blood. Schlock asks if we can we sit at the bedside of a loved-one in hospital, or hear the beeps of a heart monitor, without thinking of endless scenes from film or TV? What is it in horror that holds us, makes us want to look at accidents as we drive-by? Uninvited Guests explore our desire to look and to look away. Duncan worked with Uninvited Guests to explore the performers as acoustic instruments, using a stethoscope to live-sample noises from their bodies and soundtrack the show. Custom-built software enables us to process each others' voices with pressure sensors, to increase our sampled heart-beats to impossible rates and trigger plundered samples through body contact.the performers speak directly to the audience through a clear Perspex screen. It's as if they possess a kind of second-sight as they retell others' accidents and injuries as though they happened, or will happen, to them, or to you.

Notes:
Uninvited Guest: written by Paul Clarke, Richard Dufty, Jessica Hoffmann with Neil Callahanin collaboration with sound Artist Duncan Speakman

1st Produced:
BAC , London >>>    2005

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Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  1            Other:  -

Further Reference:
http://www.Theatrerecord.org/, Theatre Record Vol XXV (2005) Page 0215; http://www.Theatrerecord.org/, Theatre Record Vol XXV (2005) Page 0532

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Society of Friends

Synopsis:
As at a Quaker meeting, we wait attentively in silence, for someone to feel moved to speak. In these times of crisis we make a collective ministry with you, Tate Britain's secular Society of Friends. Uninvited Guests convene a one-off Meeting of Sufferings, to voice stories from the news, to do the business of listening to attendees' current concerns. Seated in concentric circles in the gallery, we are joined by faces from the past looking down from portraits. the news is cast locally, with the public as collective newsreaders, transmitted to radios between Room 5 and the outside world. Collaborate on this work-in-progress performance, a social sculpture made specifically with you, for Tate and for this day.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Tate Britain, London    20 Mar 2010

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