We are very pleased to announce the Horizon Residency Artists for 2023.

Gareth Chambers, Jo Hellier and Yas Clarke, Rachael Clerke, Rhiannon Armstrong, Takeshi Matsumoto and Victoria Dela Amedume, will be supported to develop a piece with the potential for international touring. They will each be hosted by one of the Horizon Consortium Partners (Battersea Arts Centre, FABRIC, Fierce, GIFT, MAYK and Transform) at a venue in the partner’s location. Horizon Residency Artists will also attend the Horizon Showcase week at the Edinburgh Festivals, where they will be part of the cohort of Horizon artists, introducing their work to key industry professionals and international presenters.

Horizon Residency Artists 2023

POPPERFACE aka Gareth Chambers, transgresses traditional choreographic making methodologies to create performances based heavily in working class experience, queer masculinity and libertarianism. In 2021 he was the Associate director for Welsh National Opera and a Jerwood Fellow. His work has been presented in Tel Aviv, Berlin, Melbourne and Vienna. He is currently mentored by Opera director Sir David McVicar.

Gareth will be developing his piece, The Revenge of POPPERFACE, inviting audiences to bear witness to the real-time crafting of masculine mythologies, through dance, mixed martial arts and boxing practices.

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Jo Hellier and Yas Clarke

Jo Hellier is an interdisciplinary artist and performer working across live art, dance, experimental music, video and installation. Their practice incorporates improvisation, somatic movement practices and witchcraft to amplify awareness in body and imagination.
Her performance work has been commissioned by Jerwood, Artsadmin, In Between Time, SPILL, Bristol Biennial, Buzzcut, Battersea Arts Centre and Bristol Ferment.

Yas Clarke is a sound artist and composer working across live-art, theatre, and music contexts. His work is always experimental, collaborative and improvisational, and favours weird, minimal and abstract aesthetics. His collaborative performance work has toured internationally and received critical acclaim and recognition including multiple selections for British Council Showcase and Made in Scotland at Edinburgh fringe.

They will be developing a multidisciplinary performance work, The Morgul Way. The work will combine choreography, vocal composition and extended vocal technique, and video projection, to conjure an abstract world which disorients audiences and gives distance to reflect on their themes: queer ecology, ecosexuality and sensorial exploration of landscape.

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Rachael Clerke is an artist and organiser living in Bristol. They make generous artworks that sit somewhere on the edge of live art and community infrastructure; playful experiments about what real life might look like if we were less concerned with what real life ‘should’ look like. Rachael is co-founder of quarterly LGBTQIA+ postal newsletter Modern Queers, and a proud member of Interval artist collective. They are a winner of the 2021 Situations Award.

Rachael Clerke’s work Balancing Acts is an absurd, desperate, multitasking, celebratory and damning physical performance about precarity. It is also a published score, an audio description and a workshop plan. The work will be created with participants currently experiencing housing, employment or financial insecurity.

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Rhiannon Armstrong is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist making works with empathy, interaction, and dialogue at their core, often for unfiltered audiences. Conversation and collaboration are central to her practice: between makers of different disciplines, public contributors, and audiences. Rhiannon is an Another Route International Fellow (2022-23), and recipient of the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance (2019).

Rhiannon is using the Horizon residency to work further on recent sensory work, with a project currently called The White Noise Factory.

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Takeshi Matsumoto is a dance artist and a dance movement psychotherapist, working in the sector of Performance for Young Audiences (PYA) and contemporary dance. He has worked as a Vital Spark Associate Artist, been commissioned by Little Big Dance, and created a short film “We Belong”, as a way to embody the marginalised voices of stateless refugee children in Thailand, which was screened in the UK, USA, Canada and Thailand.

He will be developing his work Club Ninja, which will contribute to the exploration and development of participatory practice within dance performance, with and for children and their families, with themes of East Asian cultural heritage.

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Vicki Dela Amedume founded Upswing with her passion to create the extraordinary, sharing circus artistry with diverse audiences and creating/directing projects – in theatres, outdoor touring, in found spaces, and large-scale spectacles. Outside Upswing, she’s worked on productions for National Theatre of Scotland, The RSC, The Royal Exchange, Kenny Wax Productions and the New Vic among others. She is Creative Director of Lewisham – Borough of Culture and Associate Director – New Vic Theatre.

Vicki will be developing her work COMMON GROUND. Framed as a good night out, COMMON GROUND will be a playful exploration of power, competition, and the limits of shared experience.