Video Transcript
My name is Mehrdad Seyf, I am artistic director of 30 Bird and we are delighted to be able to offer three commissions to artists who are interested or already working in an interdisciplinary and trans-cultural context.
30 Bird is an interdisciplinary performance company based at Cambridge Junction. We have been one of the companies who’ve received the Elevate Fund, which is enabling us to offer these three commissions.
So what do we mean by interdisciplinary work? To begin with, interdisciplinary is not just about disciplines within the arts, it also includes disciplines outside the arts; sciences, social sciences, mathematics, law, anthropology, anything at all that’s outside the arts. The whole process and outcome of interdisciplinary work is based on a dialogue between the artist and interdisciplinary practitioners. It’s about people stepping out of their comfort zones and discovering new forms of performance out of this dialogue. We are not interested in people for example working with anthropologist and ending up creating a play, that’s not interdisciplinary for us. It needs to be something new something different. We kind of pride ourselves at 30 Bird that all our projects are always very different from each other, they are new.
The other aspect of this call out is trans-cultural or inter-cultural practice. Diversity has always been very very important to 30 Bird but what do we mean by that? First of all people who have new contents or have contents from different backgrounds, which don’t necessarily fit into given disciplines tend to be marginalised or categorised into these binaries; black or white or developed world and third world, and this applies to other categories as well, where it’s gender, whether it’s disability. And we’d like to work with artists, who are prepared to step outside these binaries so to speak, and, in collaboration with practitioners from other disciplines, are prepared to challenge these established forms, established disciplines and come up with new forms, new ways of performance.
The commission offers a grant of £2K, plus a one week residency at The Cambridge Junction and the opportunity to share some of the artists’ findings at an interdisciplinary event called Junctures, curated by 30 Bird at the Cambridge Junction in March 2018.
We look forward to reading your ideas and your applications. Please get in touch if you have any further questions.
Thank you
