Deadline: Friday 24 November, 5pm
Experimentica is our four-day live art festival held by Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, that encourages risk, collaboration and exchange – the only one of its kind in Wales. Running for over twenty years, this biennial festival brings a vital moment for radical and experimental live art practices to thrive.
Marking the turn of the seasons towards new life, Experimentica 2024: Call to Spring will gather artists and communities in celebration of the festival’s legacy and the ecologies that sustain performance within and beyond our locality. As spring awakens post Equinox, we gather to imagine collective futures, welcoming the chaos and spontaneity from which newness emerges. We embrace transformation as a fundamental force of this gathering. Call to Spring will sow seeds for future performance ecologies during this moment of heightened vitality – from collaborative partnerships, networks and residencies to scratch nights, parties and writers' circles.
Call to Spring will be a time for unsettling, for gathering and sowing; for emergent forms and relations to unfurl from the dark.
This open call welcomes proposals from artists based in the UK and Ireland that touch on themes of Spring – transformation, emergence, spontaneity, ritual or the act of gathering.
These provocations intend to encourage imaginative thinking and should not dissuade you if your practice doesn’t immediately align with them.
You can propose new work, works-in-progress or pre-existing work. If you’re selected, you’ll be offered a fee between £250 and £2000 which will be determined in conversation with our festival team, depending on the scale and scope of the work.
Our definition of performance/live art is expansive and includes any encounter that performs an action or invites an exchange. This could be a performance involving movement, sound, speech, dance, music, lighting, objects, and visuals, as well as performative gestures such as postal offerings, digital interventions, guided walks, private and public rituals, and acts of rest and nourishment.
We are seeking proposals that are bold and playful, that imaginatively engage with our building, our locality, our communities, and that challenge the idea of what performance/live art can be. What does it mean to be with an audience? How can the encounter or gathering be a space to think critically and collectively.