"Through pink dust clouds we—time—fly and are made. Collecting fragment after fragment, atom after atom. Drifting in soft spirals, gathering into gentle storms of dust and magnets. We fly and we are made. Assimilating pre-matter into our present bodies. Bodies of light matter. We—the mess—begin."

- Black Holes, 2018

Season Butler leads a workshop open to artists of any discipline interested in performative writing.

For their stage show, Seke Chimutengwende and Alexandrina Hemsley have been writing the text with support from artist Season Butler. As part of opening up their process, they invite you to a creative writing workshop led by Butler.

The workshop is a mixture of individual writing exercises and group discussion to explore re-telling origin stories and creating future mythologies. Together we uncover and situate lived experience within science fiction, looping the personal with the mythic.

Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and activist. Her writing, research and performance practice centre around intersectionality and narratives of otherness, isolation and the end of the world. Along with the core members of the I'm With You collective, she uses performance to interrogate how we gesture toward an unruly future in an age of failed predictions. Her first novel, Cygnet, is published by Little, Brown in November 2018.

Unfunky UFO: 2100AD

A retreat for artists of colour to explore how their work journeys in dialogue with futurity.

Developed from the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY programme, and supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

We guided participants through a 4-day artists’ retreat titled Unfunky UFO: 2100AD, combining both directed an`d independent research. This retreat centred around conversation, daily physical and writing practices, and the potential of new, imagined futures to construct alternative realities and bring personal narratives (bodily, symbolic or verbal) to the surface.

As well as the directed sessions, participants cooked together, spend time reading, and visited the surrounding Northumberland landscape. Together we were in dialogue with:

• Experiences of people of colour around (under)representation, exotification, isolation, safety…
• Physical and felt stories and experiences. This will be a space designed to cultivate and share these with one another, as comfort and as important artistic investigations.
• Transformative, time-travel narratives, including both movement and verbal expressions.

Right now, many artists of colour seem to be either burning out or at risk from it; rest, recuperation and self-care is an important part of our retreat.

Film by Uhuru Moor and Maya Chowdhry

Read more about the Live Art Development Agency DIY Progression here.