Show Us Your Selfie
( - )
A post-data, participatory cabaret event (in development).
A Live Art and Social practice project.
- Location
- Berlin and Exeter
At some moments I was surprised at how moved I was by what was happening… I think when I leave here I’ll leave my phone switched off for a while.
Audience member
Show Us Your Selfie is a deliberately strange participatory show about the horror and the beauty of contemporary consumerism, and its fierce grip on our social realities. Drawing on and re-mixing youtube hits, memes and DIY internet culture of the last 10 years, it walks a a line between the entertaining addiction of watching our fears and failures being performed through the lives of others, and the repulsion of that participation.
There was real beauty in the room... and there was a certain kind of ugliness too.
Audience member
An intense and at times rather uncomfortable experience. A superb performer as the conduit.
Audience member
The work was supported in inception by Acker Stadt Palast in Berlin, where the seeds were sown to devise new work that shifts audiences between immersive, instruction based performance modes, and cabaret style engagement. Through an R& D period in Exeter, UK we wanted to contrast entertaining, high octane performance modes, with intimate and nuanced exchanges to explore how groups form, question, and rebel against coerced modes of participation in a social media enabled society. Our ambitions are to surf a rollercoaster of emotional engagement from high entertainment to political provocation, that will help us to understand more deeply the role digital technology plays in our collective social lives.
The performer’s solo was just beautiful and very tender… and a quite brilliant and startling moment
Audience member
I look forward to seeing where this might go. It was provocative!
Audience member
Show Us Your Selfie is a collaboration between devisor/director Paula Crutchlow from Blind Ditch and devisor/performer Berlin based artist Hans Kellett.
With the support of choreographer Jane Mason, composer Joerg Hochapfel and creative technologist Tim Dollimore from The Media Workshop. Exeter R&D producer Charlie Parker and production assistant Kerrie Seymour.
Funded by Arts Council England Lottery Fund.