Future Flares Festival 2026

Curatorial Statement

Liveness as an idea may seem so obvious as a constituent of theatre that it doesn’t need much consideration. But of course, in-person encounters with performing bodies can be as varied as there are conceptions of performance, from admiring a skilled actor to a visceral experience, where the performer’s activity meets our passivity in a way that it is felt as much, or more, in our bodies as it is understood in our minds. Performance encounters can also be intimate or self-conscious ones, fraught with an awareness of the politics of the encounter, where the audience knows that their act of looking, and the performer’s experience of being looked at, means something very particular in the world. We witness the performer - who they are, how they deal with our presence, how they articulate their shared humanity, what them being there seems to mean to them, as well as to us.

Watching Verona Vebakel and Anemona Valcke, I was struck by how much conventions of social interaction determine how they interact with the audience, and how embedded these are in the gender politics the piece explores and dismantles. WilL Dickie’s performing, meanwhile, is committed to what seems a responsibility to reinvent itself, to reconfigure his physicality to embody the predicaments of our time.

The performance skills in Jeremie Cyr-Cooke’s work bring text and performance together as visceral representations themselves, encouraging us to reflect on the mental health crisis in young men, whilst Andrea Maciel and Patrick Campbell ‘refuse easy legibility – queering divinity, gender and mortality’ in their new thriller/ritual/cabaret scratch performance. Elsewhere in the programme, the body is actively displaced – used just to provide text as Brigitte Jurack’s work examines the remoteness of drone warfare, confined to a real dressing room (Pinchbeck and Smith) caught between a haunted past and ‘stage fright’ about what happens next, or encountered amongst the varied arts practices of the ‘An Image is an Act Not a Thing’ group collaboration.

And we feature two ‘performance lectures’ (Peader Kirk and Patrick Campbell) both bringing surprising creativity and skills to the sharing of information and ideas, as well as an extended physical workshop (led by WilL Dickie) promising to also share the embodied discoveries of its participants. There’s variety certainly, but the liveness of the encounter is distinctive in each, and a big part of what makes it all essential viewing. I hope you agree.

Neil Mackenzie
Future Flares Festival Curator
Senior Lecturer, Drama and Contemporary Performance