Fest en Fest 2024
How to resist

4 - 9 June 2024
Tues to Sun, 12-8pm

Fest en Fest is an international festival of expanded choreography initiated and curated by H2DANCE (Hanna Gillgren and Heidi Rustgaard) in 2018, presenting UK & Nordic artists working across dance, performance, writing and visual art.

Fest en Fest invites artists and audiences to come together for performances and discursive and social gatherings. The program evokes different experiences and expands choreography; what it can be, how it can move, and how it moves other things. By twisting and turning, H2DANCE continues to place the festival in new relations and spatial settings, enabling different forms of entanglements troubling current choreography definitions. It is as much about curating choreography as choreographing the curatorial.

This year’s festival is centred around solidarity, a choreographic coming together of artists to think about the future of the arts in the UK and how we can be a force for change.

Fest en Fest 2024 is a space for artists and audiences to think together about ways to insist on the value of the arts and to resist where the arts is currently heading in the UK - an evolving exhibition of activism, performative events, scores, videos, discursive lunches and podcasts.

Fest en Fest 2024 How to resist

Events Programme

Tuesday 4th June 2024

12 to 5 pm
Front room

Exhibition: The Perfect Flower and Marina Collard
(https://www.marina-collard.com)

Photos and art works

Perfect Flower is a collaborative project between architecture practice what if project, H2DANCE and photographer HenriT encompassing performative actions, choreography, architecture, and curation, designed for and with LGBTQIA+ youth. Perfect Flower was developed in 2023, a collaborative initiative with Stratford YOUTH Zone. It was featured in the TAKE-UP SPACE (TUS) exhibition at the Lethaby Window Gallery, Central Saint Martins, London. TUS examines vanishing queer spaces in London, specifically spaces catering to queer femininities and gender diversity. The young people engaged in workshops to create costumes and set designs using cardboard boxes salvaged from skips. These workshops served as a form of resistance to capitalist norms and the rapid pace of production, emphasising the value of the slow process to uncover deeper meanings and connections.

6 – 8pm
Backroom

Festival opening supported by the Finnish Institute
Heidi Rustgaard & Ross Flight sound installation
Marina Collard Performance:  Skirting around the edges

Wednesday 5th June 2024

12 – 5pm
Front room

Perfect Flower and Marina Collard Exhibition continues

12 – 5pm
Backroom

Angela Woodhouse – Who cares? Film series

https://angelawoodhouse.co.uk/recent-past-work/who-cares/

6 – 8pm
Backroom

Choreographer Solveig Styve Holte (NO)

Talk and workshop presentation: From form to fumbling

(Live streamed event in association with The Place)

Thursday 6th June 2024

12 – 5pm
Front room

Perfect Flower and Marina Collard Exhibition continues

12 to 5 pm
Backroom

H2DANCE/Hanna Gillgren’s film series SKIN in collaboration with Jo Cork

6.00 – 8pm
Backroom

Discursive dinner Ilse Ghekiere BE – On consent

Friday 7th June 2024

12 – 5pm
Front room

Perfect Flower and Marina Collard Exhibition continues

12 to 5 pm
Back room

Collective Drawing Workshop Part 1

Collective activist drawing workshop with architect Ulrike Steven/ what if project

www.what-if.info

6 to 7 pm
Back room

A performance/discussion by Karen Christopher, Tara Fatehi, Omikemi and Jemima Yong 

Questions about interaction: who do you play for?

Karen Christopher and Tara Fatehi (with participation in absentia by co-collaborators Omikemi and Jemima Yong) will present some early material from Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz, including an exhausting list of who we make work for.
 
The early stages of working on Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz are built on an underwater flow, various currents that flow past each other in different directions the way shoals of fish do. We will work with blending and combining, dissolving outlines. We are looking into the deep sea to see what we find. We are looking for simultaneous durations and song-like structures. We are asking: who says time moves in only one direction?
 
Each member of this collaborative group has distinct interests and approaches to making work, and we hope this project will speak to a tolerance of difference around our sensibilities and how to be in the world right now, while sharing a desire for connectedness.

Saturday 8th June 2024

12 – 5pm
Front room

Perfect Flower and Marina Collard Exhibition continues

12 to 3 pm
Back room

Collective Drawing Workshop Part 2- Hang the art work
Collective and activist drawing workshop with architect Ulrike Steven/ what if project . Hang the collective art work.

www.what-if.info

4 pm to 6 pm

Artist conviviality, solidarity gathering
Discursive lunch with artist talks

6 to 8 pm

Bar: donations only

Sunday 9th June 2024

12 – 5pm
Front room

Perfect Flower and Marina Collard Exhibition continues

3 – 4.30 pm
Front room

Sonya Lindfors talk about her activist work and Urban Apa in Finland –

Coffee and buns

2pm - 3pm
Back space

Performance presentation by Adrienne Ming

4.30 – 6 pm
Back space

Nic Conibere 3 films “Care takers”