Responding to the festival’s theme of The Future Perfect, Sam Belinfante will work with the renowned vocal and movement artist Elaine Mitchener to present an evening of performances that unpick the relationships between sound, language and technology. At the core of this event will be a series of improvisations that place Mitchener and Belinfante in direct opposition through a set of formal one-to-one setups, ranging from interview-type situations to the more intimate and intensive arrangements of psychoanalysis and interrogation. In-ear feedback technology will provide private, random directions to each performer, whilst allowing for moments of serendipitous synchronicity. This event will also include a movement of Elaine Mitchener’s extraordinary new work Industrialising Intimacy. Throughout this work, Mitchener investigates the loss of privacy in our society versus the strength of true intimacy in a world undoubtedly hyper-mediated through and by communication technologies. Additional interventions will be provided by composer and performer Neil Luck, whose Selected Poems are musical settings of his most disconnected thoughts and fantasies.

With thanks to Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz and the Wellcome Collection.

Image credit: Arron Leppard