TO BOOK FREE ACCESS TICKETS PLEASE EMAIL

accessfatr@gmail.com

FOR GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS CLICK HERE

‘If suffering purifies the soul / then I’m as pure as one could hope

A beauty bordering on the obscene…’

Join multi-disciplilary artist Nwando Ebizie and enter a liminal space for a sonic exploration of myth, fairytale and archetypes. A playground of dream soundscapes where influences of experimental dance meet Klezmer, new music meets romantic ballad. The poetry of British Sign Language is danced to create visual music and the space vibrates to create an analogous haptic experience.

This is a multi-sensory theatrical music experience, oscillating from romantic songs to nightmarish visions, intimate reverie and lucid horror.

The music/English text/theatrical BSL was created symbiotically in order to give multiple possibilities for access and understanding whilst creating a unique art-music experience. 

Created, directed and composed by Nwando Ebizie, co-produced by Atelier Nwando and London Sinfonietta and supported by Southbank Centre - ‘Fall and then Rise on a Soft Winter’s morning’ is a multi-sensory immersive orchestral/live art experience at Colour Factory (London, UK) happening on 15th Nov 2023 and it is part of Nwando’s approach in creating Accessibility as Innovative Creativity and dismantling and inverting entrenched structural prejudices.

There will be two time slots - people can attend at 7 pm or at 9 pm and the show is one hour long

TO BOOK FREE ACCESS TICKETS PLEASE EMAIL

accessfatr@gmail.com

FOR GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS CLICK HERE

Access information:

This takes place in Colour Factory, a nightclub which aims for inclusivity and diversity

The piece lasts for one hour. This is a relaxed performance

There are 3 parts to the music with roughly 10 minutes break in between each one

In the breaks you will be offered warm herbal drinks and popcorn 

The audience is invited to explore the immersive environment

You can choose to sit/lie on platforms that vibrate with the music - this is an additional idea to give Deaf people a sense of the music, however hearing people have found this to be relaxing as well

You can choose to sit on beanbags, chairs or stand

You can feel free to move at anytime

There is step-free access to the space

Latecomers are permitted

The performance includes music, captions, a theatrical BSL performance, spoken word

Each show is the same - one ticket covers one show

Lighting: 

There are no flashing lights

There is video projected onto giant balloons that you can watch that contains Chisato's signing and captions

Nwando will be performing a solo version of her 2022 album The Swan at She Makes Noise 2023 in Madrid. The festival invites an audience to discover without prejudice the work done by female artists and non-binary identities in electronic and experimental music, as well as in contemporary audiovisuals. The programming continues - in line with previous editions - with an ecofeminist approach, addressing other forms of thinking, listening, learning and dancing.

This 2023, the festival also focuses on artists who bring their magic from Latin America , as well as others from Nigeria, Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom .

Nwando will be performing at 9pm on 19/10

Tickets available here

19.00

26.08.23

Centre for Contemporary arts, Glasgow. Tickets are on sale cca-glasgow.com  Pay what you can from £0 to £8

Broadcast live on 87.9FM in the Glasgow area and online at radiophrenia.scot

The Great Unravelling

Two artists - Nwando Ebizie and Tom Richards come together and move apart - entangling themselves and their idiosyncratic polymathic practices (including Black Atlantic ritual cultures, minimalism, formalism, rave cultures, analogue synthesis and machine building, performance art, neurodivergent led sensory design, neurophenomenology)  and unraveling again - revealing the core of a constantly expanding Venn diagram. A multisensory, psychedelic, polyrhythmic mythic feast of movement, light, poetry and sound unfolds and you are invited into this liminal space for a spiraling cyclic ritual.

An hour-long exploration of radical care, pleasure and transformation for BIPOC bodies – a binaural audio journey, for headphones in a darkened room – followed by a 30-minute cinematic coming-together to regroup, where you will feel heard, supported and held.

We invite you to join us in recognising the urgency of care, of pleasure, of transformation, for BIPOC bodies. We present a revolutionary journey into the psyche, a washing away of our supposed shared reality, a gathering together of the fragments of which we’re comprised, transmuting into something rich and strange and new. Diving deep into our unconscious desires, our buried joys, the top/bottom of our collective to-do lists. This is a cleansing, a preparation, an opening for the new cycle: the universal cycle of life-death-life. Decide what your transformation will be. Prepare for the liberation of pleasure, for viridity, for new life.

PLEASE NOTE: This event is only open to Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC.) We understand that not everybody will use this term to describe themselves, please see further detail below:

Please only attend this event if you are a person who is racialized with experience of racism, which may include People of African or Caribbean heritage, People of Asian Heritage (South, East, Southeast, Central) People of Middle Eastern, South American, Islander or Indigenous heritage.

It is important that you do not attend or book this event if the above does not apply to you. You will be asked to confirm this during and after booking the event.

This will be a limited capacity event, and will require booking a space in advance. Booking will open 12 May here.

Supported by Something to Aim For, Buzzcut, Take Me Somewhere, BAC with further support from LADA and University of Glasgow.

Nwando is performing on the at 8pm (GMT) 14th August for an online streamed show as part of Surveillance: Dance Like No-one is Watching Festival for Newham Unlocked, commissioned by Certain Blacks.

Performers will appear in an array of Newham locations, with audiences able to watch from anywhere in the world via newhamunlockedfestival.org and accompanying social media as online observation becomes part of everyday life.

Hildegard: Visions was developed in its early stages during a Residency at Snape Maltings. The Residency programme supports artists and researchers who are in need of development time, are creatively curious, and have exciting, adventurous ideas to explore. 

During this week-long R&D, Nwando and her collaborators created Extreme Unction : a piece for 8 loudspeakers, 3 singers, 2 bodies and water.

(Extreme Unction backing track -  Nwando Ebizie  feat. Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, Lore Lixenberg and Yfat Soul Zisso)

You arrive at the venue. You are directed to the door where this ritual will take place. You are met at the threshold by a woman - the Guardian at the Crossroads. She is wearing an excessively 80s wedding dress. She invites you in with warmth and potential. She sprays the air around with you a citrussy, cleansing spray. You feel the fine mist of water drop around you. 

Around her are large bowls of steaming water filled with scents of cedar wood, chamomile, spearmint and frankincense.

You can wash your hands in the bowls. You can refresh your face.

She advises you that you can sit on chairs, lie (on comfortable beanbags) or stand anywhere. This space is here for you.

You feel you are entering a space both sacred and profane. Both of this world and an alternate reality.

Your eyes take a while to adjust.

So first of all, you notice the perfumed air. You have your own associations with the scents drifting around you. Maybe memories surface.

As your eyes adjust you see a shaft of light breaking through the darkness. This lights figures on the stage - three singers. Each dressed in beautiful outfits that you feel somehow suits each of their characters. Each has an individually crafted crown.

You notice that there is the gentle sound of dripping water all around you.

There are loudspeakers surrounding you - creating the sensation that you are bathed in sound.

The sound drifts around the space, as if chasing itself.

It gives the sensation that you are in a hamam - a marble room with a dome where water is dripping. The room has an odd reverb, making you feel like you are not where you are. The water sounds close, almost like it could be touching the back of your neck and sliding down your spine.

Sometimes it sounds like it is water dripping onto hard stone, sometimes a gentle stream falling into a copper bowl. 

Eventually you notice a final woman in the shadows – let’s call her The Celebrant. She is dancing with the shadows, she is dancing with the light. 

The singers begin to breathe deeply, breathing in the atmosphere.

They dance with the shadows, they dance with the light.

You begin to hear them sing. Softly at first, barely understandable words. Unfamiliar chants. The snatches of song you hear - the words do not matter - what you feel is that they are deeply personal to the singers. Songs that somehow connect with them. Voices that feel intrinsic to them as human beings. 

The Celebrant and the Guardian weave their way through the space, coming together on the stage.

They lay out their bowls and jugs of water. The Celebrant bends over her bowl, allows her hair to fall into the steaming water. She undulates her body, swaying from side to side.

The Guardian takes a piece of cloth and carefully washes it, wringing it out again and again into her bowl.

Their movements are precise and soft. Full of meaning but ultimately practical. The sounds they make connect to the sounds of the hamam around you.

You feel that they are preparing for the rites to come.

You feel yourself drifting into a softer state of being. Here but not here. There but not there.

The singer's voices melt into recognisable fragments of Hildegard’s music - ‘Favus Distilans’. Melisma chases melisma, weaving through the air. One singer moves over to a table and places a new crown on her head. She taps the crown intermittently, sending beautifully distorted versions of her voice out into the air.

The singers fall silent. The sound changes - a rhythmic metallic ringing. As if the copper bowl used in the hamam is being played. The Guardian and The Celebrant take their places on small logs and begin to move. By now, maybe you are halfway to dreaming. But you recognise their movements - they are washing, scrubbing their bodies, flinging water onto themselves. Familiar and yet more lyrical. Incredibly frenzied.

The singers begin to cry. Softly, sobbing. Until they wail. The gentle sounds of the hamam build into a waterfall, a whirlpool. The sound moves around you, making you feel dizzy.

The lights fade. There is movement, sound, water and darkness.

And then again, silence.

The shaft of light returns.

You hear last drifts of Hildegard. 

End.

Workshop artists: Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian / Lore Lixenberg  / Tom Richards / Yfat Soul Zisso / Guardian Wennifer / Steph Singer

Bounce is the annual arts festival produced by University of Atypical that showcases outstanding new work by D/deaf and disabled writers, producers, actors, dancers, musicians, and directors. Nwando Ebizie starred as Lady Vendredi for a ritual gig performance.

Lady Vendredi is a mythopoetic super heroine and vodou priestess popstar from another dimension. You are invited to enter the space of Neon Dream – an imagined alternate reality of pulsating sensuality. A constellation of Afro-futuristic sound, light and movement.

Press >>

Disability Arts

Irish News

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Hildegard: Visions R&D participatory performance of Nwando Ebizie’s research into performative installation and ritual connected to the Neurophenomenology of Perception.

Workshop Artists: Stephanie Singer / Shelly James / Ignacio Jarquin / Lore Lixenberg / Tom Richards / Stephanie Kelly / Guardian Wenneifer.

The group performed the new composition Hildegard: Visions.

An invitation to let go, drifting into the background microwave radiation. A constellation of Afrofuturistic sound, light and movement rendered form. Drawing from sources as wide as Haitian Vodou, Bauhaus costume and 70s synth pioneers, Lady Vendredi created and recreated a new world in this mythic ritual gig.

Cult music icon Lady Vendredi is a mythopoetic super heroine and vodou priestess popstar from another dimension, and this year she performed at Latitude 2019!

She performed on the dedicated BBC Introducing stage at the festival in Henham Park, Suffolk, where festival-goers were able to catch some of the finest new music surrounded by beautiful woodlands.

The third annual award presentation to recognise talented female music creators innovating in music, sound and related technologies took place on Saturday 15th June at Kings Place London, where Nwando Ebizie performed as Lady Vendredi and received a prestigious Oram Award!

Presented by PRS Foundation and The New BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the Oram Awards recognise emerging artists in the fields of music, sound and related technologies in honour of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Daphne Oram, and other pioneering women in music and sound.

Named after Daphne Oram, one of the founding members of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the awards hope to build on her legacy. Daphne worked at the workshop with others including Delia Derbyshire, Glynis Jones, Jenyth Worsley, Maddalena Fagandini and Elizabeth Parker, creating music for the distant future, the distant past and inside the mind.  She played a vital role in establishing women at the forefront of innovation, in newly emerging audio technologies, in the UK and around the world. Fast forward to 2018 and whilst there are many women innovating in music and sound, their work and their voices often struggle to be heard and we’re missing the opportunity to celebrate role models for the next generation.

Enter the space of Neon Dream – an imagined alternate reality of pulsating sensuality. An invitation to let go, drifting into the background microwave radiation. Lady Vendredi performance featuring classical pianist Yung-Yee Chan.

“If you had to describe The Passion of Lady Vendredi stage show in one word, ‘chaos’ would be a good place to start. Channeling the spirits, rhythms and elements of Haitian vodou into her own electric cocktail of dance, beats and technicolour get-up, performance artist and musician Nwando Ebizie’s show takes audiences through a ritual like no other. Attacking gender, sexual and religious dogmas throughout, it’s a riotously immersive journey into the culture of the Afro-diaspora.”

-Huck Magazine

For 14 hours, over four floors, you are invited to revel in the apocalypse with hosts Live Art Bistro and a roster of talent from across the UK including Daniel Oliver, KP Culliver, Jim Burrows, Liddya, Adam Ekin, Adam Young, Sam Kennedy, Moa Johansson, Chillify the News, Edythe Woolley, Oozing Gloop, and Lady Vendredi.

Nwando Ebizie performed as Lady Vendredi at this fun live event.

A curated happening, Nwando Ebizie performed as Lady Vendredi for ‘Crystal Opening’ at Site Gallery, Sheffield.

‘Forget everything you know about what a performance ‘should’ look like, or sound like, or even feel like. Leave your preconceptions about music theatre at the door. Because you are about to enter Lady Vendredi’s futuristic, bizarre, psychedelic and sexy mystical world creatively directed by visionary Jonathan Grieve.’

-A Younger Theatre

London composers' collective Bastard Assignments GO DEEP in a new collaboration with choreographer-performer duo Thick & Tight.

Nwanod Ebizie performed as Lady Vendredi, performing tracks from her album 'Neon Dream', that passes a new threshold in exploration of Afrodiasporic ritual, from the purer rhythmic references of first EP ‘The Passion’ towards a bolder, more technoscientific intervention on those rhythms: namely, cross-rhythm as an Afrofuturist project.

Lady Vendredi: Neon Dream album release and 2018 tour. 

2nd June/ GLASGOW / (supporting Mykki Blanco) Take me Somewhere Sticky

9th June/ LONDON / Spirit of Change Festival, Barbican

15th June / LONDON / Bastard Assignments

‘If Nwando Ebizie appears to be unlike any other artist out here today, it’s because she’s not. The musician, producer, dancer, DJ and performance artist is more like a renaissance woman whose experimental presentations have dazzled audiences not only in theatres but have also captured the ears of tastemakers like Gilles Peterson.’ 

-Colorising

Watch Neon Dreams >>