‘Pay What You Decide’ for EXPERIMENTICA 2018,
Cardiff’s live art and performance festival
Wednesday 11 – Sunday 15 April 2018
Chapter Arts Centre have announced the full programme for this year’s Experimentica, Cardiff’s live art festival, and almost all tickets will once again be Pay What You Decide.
Experimentica, which will be taking place from Wednesday 11 – Sunday 15 April, is an annual programme of genre defying experimental arts from home and abroad: an opportunity for audiences to experience new trends in contemporary performance and for artists to try out new ideas that speak to a world beyond the mainstream.
The title of this year’s festival is About Time: Duration, Action, Space and Perception. The theme is inspired by a new commission by Peilot (Chapter’s Associate Artist programme) artist Rhodri Davies which investigates differing notions of time as experienced by an international ensemble of collaborating musicians.
Rhodri’s Davies’s creation Transversal Time (Friday 13 April, 8pm) is inspired by Davies’s childhood spent surrounded by watches and clocks all stating different times (his father and grandfather repaired and sold watches), and takes as its starting point different time systems, including Standard Time, Decimal Time, and Hex Time. The piece draws upon the writings of Francois Jullien, in particular his book In praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics, exploring the ancient Chinese notion of the richness of a bland sound; a bland meaning; a bland painting; a bland poem. (Please note this event is not Pay What You Decide – see website for details.)
The rest of the programme includes: a performance event featuring local residents specially designed for Cardiff by the Vancouver-based Theatre Replacement; Playing Up, a performance art game for all the family; off-site performance; dance; hypnotism; immersive sound experiences and sensory journeys; from artists including Jo Fong and Sonia Hughes, Beth Greenhalgh, Nahum, Angus McLean Balbernie, Megan Broadmeadow, Greg Wohead, Mike Pearson and Fern Thomas.
With support from the Arts Council of Wales, the festival has gone from strength to strength over recent years and is the only festival of its kind in Wales. Experimentica 2018 promises to be entertaining, challenging, surprising, life-affirming, playful, provocative, thoughtful, witty, engaging, risk-taking and everything in between. For more information, visit www.experimentica.org
