Kevin Egan

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Projects

Binary Opposition (2025) by Reckless Sleepers

Enter a world of mirror-image rooms, shifting logic, and playful disruptions of identity with Reckless Sleepers brand-new work Binary Opposition, their most visually and conceptually ambitious project yet. Commissioned by Lowry, this new work offers a bold reflection on symmetry, collision, and theatrical possibility.

At its heart, Binary Opposition is an investigation of duality. On stage sits a large construction: two adjoining rooms separated by a dividing wall. Within this space Reckless Sleepers explore entrances and exits, mistaken identities, and the collision of time and space.

Drawing on threads from their earlier works the company remixes their past, allowing moments to spill, overlap, invert, or mirror each other. If in one side it's dark; the other would be light. In one room it's full on the other side empty.

Binary Opposition is more than a performance--it has been evolving through workshops with children and young people both in the UK and Europe, installations of the wooden frame structure (that defines the two rooms).

It is a culmination of over 20 years of Reckless Sleepers' exploration of form, structure, rules, logic and space. The project builds on earlier works, Schrödinger (Black) and Negative Space (White) and bringing these two performances together. But is not simply retrospective; it is a living, breathing experiment, one where past meets the present.

It's Hot, It's Not (2019) by Reckless Sleepers

Reckless Sleepers is an extraordinary company who make work between visual art, dance & theatre. This surreal, funny & carefully crafted physical performance explores the weather in all its forms & takes delight in discovering the world anew & how we experience it differently, wherever we are. In the summer we produced a text. "It’s hot" referring to the ambient temperature, "it’s not" referring to a cold glass of water. In the autumn we advanced this word play assimilation into gestural assimilation so that a simple action would evolve & grow into something bigger. A relaxed stretch (as if on a sun lounger) becomes a two man rowing race, a fan becomes a wave, a wave becomes a sequence of swatting an imaginary fly. And so It's Hot, It's Not was born. We’d found a new process of generating performance materials. Something playful, something familiar to the worlds that we create, but different enough to be a challenge. It's Hot, It's Not is inevitably about the weather; we've experienced the hottest, wettest & coldest temperatures on record and of course we cant ignore this. But it's not what a project is about that interests us, it's about what it does. It's Hot, It's Not plays with the idea of accumulation and cause and effect. Gestures, movements and objects move in and out of focus; they get collected, they get bigger, they get smaller, they get used in different ways. Ideas and stories appear and disappear, like a child looking up at the clouds and noticing what they look like, what they imagine them to be, what they could be - and then the wind changes and the next formation appears, and the game begins again.

A Unicorn Production in association with Reckless Sleepers

Presented at Unicorn theatre from 2nd February - 10th March 2019

Created in Polverigi, Gent and London

Director Mole Wetherell

Devised and performed by Mole Wetherell, Kevin Egan, Tim Ingram, Leen Dewilde, Alex Covel, Rachel Piekarczyk, Rebecca Young, Olivia McGrath.

Made with the support of INTEATRO Creative Residency

Presented at:

Quarterhouse - Folkestone
Dartington Arts - Totnes
Spark Arts for Children Festival - The Curve Leicester
The Egg - Bath
Bronks - Brussels
The Lowry - Salford
MA Scène Nationale - Montbéliard
Theatre by the Lake - Keswick
Déda - Derby
bOing Festival - Gulbenkian Canterbury
Hakawy International Arts Festival for Children - Cairo
SWOP Festival - Roskilde Denmark
SPOM Internationales Musik & Theaterfestival

Matchstalks Remastered (2023) by Egan and Pinchbeck

Kevin Egan & Michael Pinchbeck apply their approach of devising contemporary performance from musical stimuli to the 1978 hit, ‘Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs’. They translate the track, inspired by the paintings of LS Lowry, into a series of theatrical motifs. Following the song’s structure, the piece is broken down into scenes exploring the visual language of Lowry’s paintings and the song’s lyrical poetry. Egan & Pinchbeck question how painting becomes music, music becomes theatre, people become performers. The project draws on the history of Lowry, with access to Special Collections, Manchester School of Art, where he studied painting. Presented at Future Flares Festival and Contact Theatre.

Negative Space (2014) by Reckless Sleepers

To begin, Reckless Sleepers built a room-sized wooden frame and lined it with plasterboard. For several weeks they started smashing it up, smashing it down, then piecing together the fragments of their destruction back together. The result is this show, Negative Space. From a blank architectural canvas, something fantastical emerges. It's a love story. It's a slapstick comedy. It's slasher, action, melodrama...and not a single word is spoken. Soon different possible stories are spiralling around, hurtling towards an ending.

Created in Gent and Canterbury in the summer of 2014

Project premiere Compass Live Art Festival Leeds

Director Mole Wetherell

Devised and performed by Alex Covel, Leentje Van De Cruys, Leen Dewilde, Kevin Egan, Tim Ingram, Mole Wetherell, Rebecca Young & Rachel Rimmer-Piekarczyk.

Dramaturg SJ Bailes

Producer Kate Perridge

Presented at

Compass Live Art Festival Leeds
Axis Arts Centre Crewe
Gulbenkian Canterbury
Theatre 140 Brussels
Contact Manchester
Nuffield Theatre Lancaster
The Arts Centre Edge Hill University Ormskirk
ACCA Sussex University Brighton
Aberystwyth Arts Centre
The Capstone Theatre Liverpool
MA Scène Nationale Pays de Montbéliard
Cast Doncaster
Circomedia Bristol
Southbank London
New Adelphi Salford
Wonderland Festival Brescia Italy
FIMP Festival Aveiro Portugal
La Manufacture Avignon (off) Festival
​​T-Werk Potsdam Germany 4th November 8pm Unidram Festival

Schrödinger (2011) by Reckless Sleepers

In 1933 Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to Quantum Mechanics. He theorized a box in which a cat exists as living and dead at the same time. In 1998 Reckless Sleepers built that box – and now over a decade later, they are climbing back inside. In one of the company’s most celebrated performance pieces the impossible is probable, and truth and illusion are inseparable. Laws are made, bent and then broken. Schrödinger is a visually mesmerizing performance that sways between question and answer, chaos and order, what we can measure and what we cannot.

Schrödinger was commissioned by CC Brugge in 2011.

Based on the original Schrödinger's Box 1998 - 2001

Director Mole Wetherell

Perfromers Alex Covell, Leen Dewilde, Kevin Egan, Leentje Van De Cruys, Mole Wetherell, Rebecca Young.

Presented at:

CC Brugge
The Curve Leicester
The Lowry Salford
Arnolfini Bristol
Warwick Arts Centre
Axis AC Crewe
The Nuffiled Lancaster
The Place London
West Yorkshire Playhouse/Compass Live Art Leeds
The Point Eastleigh
The Gulbenkian Canterbury
Falmouth AC
Exeter Phoenix
The Basement/SE Dance at The Old Market Brighton
A.E. Harris Birmingham
Arc Stockton
Sherman Cardiff World Theatre Design Symposium
Theater140 Brussels
Neat14 at Nottingham Contemporary
Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg
Contact Manchester
Axis AC Crewe
New Adelphi Theatre, Salford