The Acts

About

The Acts is a meta-theatrical piece which brings together individual works from four of the UK’s most exciting disabled theatre makers & companies.

Join us inside the walls of a bustling theatre, where four acts are hard at work on their latest productions: a solo show about love, joy, and cancer; a comedy about the ways neurodivergent people are expected to sell their stories for the stage; a live art and sound performance that explores posthuman ideology; and a multisensory meditation on isolation and moon landings. 

In a rapidly changing artisic landscape the Acts explores the work disabled people are allowed to make and the conditions we’re expected to make it. Perhaps we need an artistic revolution.

The Acts comes to The Pit Theatre at the Barbican for 2 nights, Friday 8th & Saturday 9th November.

The Acts has been made possible with the support of Arts Council England and The Barbican Centre.

Act 1

Peyvand Sadeghian & Matthew Robinson use immersive projections & material from the NASA archives of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, to navigate awe, despair, wellness, and isolation in Over The Moon.

Act 2
Stephen Bailey and ASYLUM Arts present the darkly comedic Autistic as Fuck, exploring the complexities and contradictions of neurodivergence, masking, and the ways we’re told we need to tell our stories for them to be seen by non-disabled audiences. Performed by Evlyne Oyedokun, Kat Dulfer, and Theo Angel.

Act 3 

A.C. Smith brings To Rose On Her 18th Birthday, a love letter written by a mother to her daughter as she reaches for joy after twice developing cancer, aware her daughter may have inherited the same genetic risk.

Act 4

Rachel Gadsden & Freddie Meyers bring PostHuman, a dynamic “live” art and sound performance that navigates the audience through a journey of PostHuman ideology. Through considerations of institutional discriminations and the need to reiterate ethics and justice, PostHuman addresses how chronic illness and disability not only presents challenges, but also empowers and authorises agency of the body.

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