Sunday 3rd May 2015

The Tetrad Collective

presented Us And Them

at Embrace Arts

Us and Them was a platform for new emerging artists and this was its third night at The Attenborough Arts Centre that presented tasters of new work by local artists.

The evening formed part of the Hand Made festival programme this weekend. See below for a link to a report on the music side of the HMF.

Tetrad is a collective led by artists, dedicated to engaging with the creative discourse of performance practices through the bringing together of local artists, thinkers and citizens.

The collective was founded by four Leicester based artists: Comedian Daniel Nicholas, Performance Artist Jack Britton and Dance Artists Lewys Holt and Katherine Hall (who performed at the UK Young Artists festival in Leicester November 2014). The collective, in partnership with Attenborough Arts Centre, are presenting a series of events throughout 2015 with the aim to foster performance and networking opportunities for emerging artists in the East Midlands.

The third Us and Them event will feature six local artists including De Montfort University student Nicky Daniels, Leicester-based dance artist Fern Chubb, Leicester-based artist Heather Forknell and Leicester based comedian and live artist Lindsey Warnes-Carroll.

Tonight, the audience gathered in the cafe/bar area of the arts centre at the opening of the evening; members of the company illustrated the theme Lost In Translation in this way: a member of the audience was asked to say something which was then communicated from one actor to the next by means of semaphore-type messages. various other actors then passed on the message to the next station until the communication arrived at its end point where the presenter announced what he had heard from the others – not what the audience member had said, presumably, a play on Chinese whispers.)

In the main hall (The Diana Princess of Wales hall), we watched a show that featured the story of an inflatable crocodile called Terrance and a mannequin called Julia.

This was the invention of Daniel Nicholas and told the story of how these unlikely creatures met, formed a relationship and married. It was a sort of soap-opera storyline that involved extra-marital affairs and Terrance touring the country as a Ukulele player and night club entertainer. Amusing, whimsical, satirical, it was party comedy sketch, partly fringe frolics but very funny.

Daniel Nicholas’s Reverb was part of Dave’s Leicester Comedy festival this year where it as nominated ‘best Festival Debut.’

Reverb (the love story of Terrance the crocodile and Julia the mannequin) was billed as ‘a surreal anti-love story, in reverse. Mixing story telling with comedy, draft surrealism was coupled with honest autobiographic discourse’, the programme notes explained. The story explored the highs and lows or a struggling performer and the strains that an obsession of a dream can have on loved ones.

Fern Chubb and Lily Thomas presented their dance sequence Who We Are. The girls’ gymnastic ballet was a visual into which you could read what you like. The choreography suggested a playful meeting of two children with duos and solo sequences reflecting their feelings and reactions to each other. The programme notes said ‘The work is semi-improvised with a set structure and material that we ‘riff’ off in performance.’ It was a performance that was richly poetic.

The evening was a really rewarding event that added something extra to the main festival programme of Hand Made.

We listed this event on our What’s On page; here is the entry:

3rd May

A night for emerging artists

Us and Them at the Attenborough Arts Centre

New performance platform night Us and Them will have it’s third night at Attenborough Arts Centre on Sunday the 3rd May (7pm) presenting tasters of new performance work created by local emerging artists.

Us and Them is brought to you by Tetrad, a collective led by artists, dedicated to engaging with the creative discourse of performance practices through the bringing together of local artists, thinkers and citizens. The collective was founded by four Leicester based artists: Comedian Daniel Nicholas, Performance Artist Jack Britton and Dance Artists Lewys Holt and Katherine Hall (who performed at the UK Young Artists festival in Leicester November 2014). The collective, in partnership with Attenborough Arts Centre, are presenting a series of events throughout 2015 with the aim to foster performance and networking opportunities for emerging artists in the East Midlands.