The work of London-based artist Marianna Simnett incorporates video, performance, music, and fantastical literary parables to investigate the body and its limits. FD13 residency for the arts presents The Midden, Simnett’s first fully live work and very first work for stage.
The Midden
Tuesday, May 22, 7pm
TEK BOX stage at the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts
528 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55403
Book your free ticket here.
Written for three characters – a girl, a witch, and a sorter – The Midden is a contemporary fable about a young girl who wakes to find her voice is rotten. Set in a fictional dumping ground, the play mines voices of the living and forgotten, calling on myths, allegories, and a swarm of intoxicated bees to examine noise, filtration, and systems of controlling waste.
Over the course of three weeks, Simnett has been drafting a script and cacophonic sound collage which pulls from babbling exercises, objectionable and honey-sweet sounds, interwoven with hard categorizations of material (corrosive, ignitable, radioactive, pesticides, sharps, batteries, oil…). The production casts actors and employees from a local, hazardous waste center. It incorporates newly composed songs, fabricated costumes, salvaged props, and handmade instruments – produced by Simnett with the help of the FD13 team.
Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) lives and works in London. Trained in classical music and theatre from a young age, its influence on her work endured as she turned to film, installation, and performance during her BA at Nottingham Trent University in 2007 and her MA at the Slade School of Art in 2013. Simnett’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions including a current exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK); Wing-sleepers (Art on the Underground, London, UK) in 2018; Worst Gift, Matt’s Gallery (London, UK) in 2017; Lies, Seventeen Gallery (New York, NY) and Valves Collapse, Seventeen Gallery (London, UK) in 2016; Park Nights, Serpentine Pavilion (London, UK) and Blue Roses, Comar (Isle of Mull, Scotland) in 2015. Simnett was a winner of the Jerwood/FVU Award (2015), the Adrian Carruthers Award (2013) and the William Coldstream Prize (2013). She was shortlisted for the Jarman Award and Paul Hamlyn in 2017.
Image courtesy the artist and Jerwood / FVU Award. The Udder, 2014 (video still).