Venue: Hunt & Darton Cafe (Venue 172)
Dates/Times: Starts 10.00 9 Aug, ends 16.00 10 Aug (30 hours)
Bedside conversations: Aug 9 13.00, 17.00, 21.00, Aug 10 14.00 (all 45 mins)
Liz Crow/Hix Productions /Escalator East to Edinburgh present:
BEDDING OUT
Exhibited beyond a red rope barrier, a woman lies in her bed for 30 hours in Hunt & Darton Cafe
Bedding Out is a 30-hour durational piece that has emerged from the current welfare benefits overhaul that threatens many with poverty. A propagandist campaign that has seen disability hate crime leap by 50%.
At set times on both days audience members of the public are invited to gather round the bed to talk about the work, its backdrop and its politics.
‘Bedding Out is a performance in which I take my private self and make it public, something I have not done in over 30 years’ says artist Liz Crow. ‘In a gallery, over a period of two days, I will perform the other side of my fractured self, my bed-life. Since the public me is so carefully constructed, this will be a kind of un-performing of myself. I want to make a twilight existence visible. But more, I want to show that what many people see as contradiction, what they call fraud, is only the complexity of real life.’
Bedding Out has also been performed at SPILL festival and Salisbury Arts Centre where the piece was set over 48 hours. A live feed was viewed in over 50 countries, generating further interest and sparking debate around the current welfare system for people with disabilities.
Liz Crow is a writer-director working with film, performance audio and text. Interested in drama, life stories and experimental work, she is drawn to the potential of storytelling to trigger change. Through a four-year NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) fellowship, she explored ways to combine her creative practice and political activism.
Liz’s work has been shown at Tate Modern and the British Film Institute as well as on television and at festivals internationally. In 2009 Liz appeared on Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth with her controversial and celebrated work, Resistance. Bedding Out has been commissioned as part of Disability Arts Online’s Diverse Perspectives project which is commissioning eight disabled artists across the UK to make a new artwork. Working closely with host organisations, artists will produce work that sparks conversations and debate about the Creative Case for Diversity.
‘Dear Liz, Bravo! Your spirit shines’ Yoko Ono
Bedding Out has been selected for Escalator East To Edinburgh. Each year Escalator, East to Edinburgh helps artists and arts organisations to raise their profile and perform to new audiences as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Submitted by Simon Franklin
