Ray Young

Young and their collaborators transform a swimming pool into a unique immersive environment for BODIES.

Art form: Live art
Age guidance: 16+
Duration: 90 minutes
Sensitive content: Audience participation, audience recuired to walk or move around during the performance, audience recuired to undertake directed movement, Covid safety measures, audience required to declare swimming ability in advance
Space requirements: Swimming pool minimum 25 metres in length to accommodate minimum 24 participants per performance (12 each side with approx 2m per participant)

Show Description

An interactive performance that explores the essential character of water, its universal presence, and the importance of collective action in achieving climate justice. Guided by Young, we are invited to gather in the pool for a sensory experience – to float, discover, and move in synchronisation. Here, the dynamics of individual and collective energies play out as powerful forces of creation and renewal as well as destruction and devastation. With our very existence threatened by climate emergency, BODIES holds space for us to navigate the entangled and complex relationship we have with the planet, and therefore the urgent responsibilities we have to each other.

Artist Information

Ray Young is an award-winning artist and writer based between Nottingham and London whose transdisciplinary practice exists on the boundaries of live art, text, movement, activism, and neurodiversity. Through celebrated works such as BODIES and THIRST TRAP, Ray holds space  at the intersection of multiple realities, championing and centring alternativenarratives and forms.

Ray is also a recipient of the Jerwood Live Work Fund and the Eclipse Award, has been nominated for multiple Total Theatre awards, and named the British Council’s Artist to Watch.

Artist website: Ray Young

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