Event

Improv Night: Threads
Mash Guru, Macclesfield
27 March 2018

About this event
One of a series of experimental art performance nights at music venue Mash Guru, curated and organised by Sabine Kussmaul and Mark Sheeky. The theme of the evening was Threads.

The night began with a video, The Event of the Thread by Hannah Leighton-Boyce, then Sabine Kussmaul and Alix Hyde performed an improvised duet with Sabine on electric sewing machine and Alix on electric guitar. The resulting stitched together chain of A4 papers were then filmed, and at the end of the evening Mark Sheeky, Deborah Edgeley, and Ian Pounder played music to accompany this video.

Alix Hyde showed an abstracted film in stark black and white of a landscape strewn with long threads, the soundtrack of which was a malformation of the sound of the environment. Claire Bassi showed two films evoking nuclear paranoia. Deborah Edgeley read a poem about the threads of history and links between us and the past. Michael Chisholm read a poem made up from the contents of a Facebook message thread, something like a poetic Exquisite Corpse, but he also included the normal comments too, to create a unique work.

Mark Sheeky, Deborah Edgeley and Simon Ross played synthesizer and electric guitars to a video of Sabine running across hills while dragging a thread. We also then hald this thread, and asked a question to someone present, passing the ball of thread to that person. This chain continued, and we traversed most of the place, asking members of the public to take part in this thread of question and answer. Photographer Simon Brown was also present, and presented a stereoscopic animation of digital threads or worms moving slowly through a digital darkness.