Old Dears at Chelsea Theatre – Programme News!

The Red Thread
Saturday 28 November
Chealse Theatre, Bar Area
6pm to 7.30pm
Bookings

A panel discussion and open workshop with leading artists and producers Claire MacDonald, Liz Aggiss, Judith Knight, Geraldine Pilgrim, Nikki Milican and Anne Bean.

This event will address the ways in which feminism has impacted on Live Art and Live Art has impacted on feminism, and also create a space to reflect on the names, encounters and personal stories that connect along the paths we take as artists, producers and audience members. 

As part of the Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three project on Live Art and Feminism, LADA recently invited artists to create home-made maps that represented their personal journey to, or through, Live Art and Feminism. In response, the artist and thinker Claire MacDonald created The Red Thread project in which she literally threaded together the written names of particular women who had made a difference in her life. For Old Dears, Claire continues this project by inviting the panelists and audiences at Chelsea Theatre to join her in telling stories, recounting moments and stringing names along a red thread as a means to retrieve overlooked parts of the past, and to mark them in the present. All materials will be provided. 

The event is an opportunity to explore the feminist threads that connect our lives and the significant encounters that have shaped us. 

‘If a map suggests a potential journey, or a set of journeys, a thread is a tool that helps the traveller navigate her way through it. The thread can be the means through which the journey itself unfolds. The thread that makes links.’ Claire MacDonald

The Red Thread created this evening will then live on in LADA’s Study Room. 

This event is part of Old Dears, a two day programme on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 November on the radical, influential and fiercely feminist practices of an older generation of artists who embody the lived realities of feminist histories and whose work continues to contribute to discourses around gender politics. Old Dears features performances, screenings, and debates with artists including Liz Aggiss, Rocio Boliver, Marcia Farquhar and Anne Bean.

LADA’s programmes Just Like A Woman and Old Dears are part of the 2015 Sacred season at Chelsea Theatre, London, in November 2015 and the culminating events in LADA’s Restock Reflect Rethink Three project (2013-15) on Live Art and Feminism.