Double Bill: Katy Baird & Catherine Hoffmann
When: Thursday 30 May 2019
Time: Catherine Hoffmann: 7-7:30pm & Katy Baird:
8-9pm
Where: The White Rock Theatre, Hastings
Link: Full Knotty 2019 Programme
A week before the official Knotty festival of performance opened, we invited an audience to join us for this special warm-up event presenting two unique and radical performances that explored what it means to find your place in the world when you just don’t fit in.
Catherine Hoffmann: What ever happened to the Glory days?
Songs and texts, created from interviews with people from all over the UK about their break ups are spluttered, danced and spoken in this honest and tender performance looking at what happens when we exit a relationship. Delving into the economy, being down and out in Britain, love, separation, hopes and fears this performance is an attempt to heal our wounds in fragmented times – a way to make peace with each other and to find a way through.
Workshy by Katy Baird
This remarkable debut performance work from artist and activist Katy Baird takes a brutally truthful look at her career of more than twenty years working within the service industry.
From getting you high to supersizing your whopper meal, Katy feels she has done everything she can to make the public happy and she isn’t sure if she has much left to give.
With unflinching humour and a provocative performative style Workshy is a powerful and honest portrayal of the relationship between work, class and aspiration.
“messy, anarchic and very funny’ – The Stage
‘Baird is a brilliant, clever and funny performer’. – Exeunt
‘A really great piece of theatrical social commentary’ – Vice
This double bill was part of the Knotty festival of performance that took place from 6-9 June 2019.
More about the artists
Catherine Hoffmann mixes performance and music, pushing into absurdity using autobiographical material, song, choreography and objects.
‘Cyst-er Act’ – a kind of messy live art musical in relation to womb mishaps, fertility, ageing and childlessness toured this Spring and will be at Summerhall for the Edinburgh Fringe festival.
She has also toured ‘Free Lunch with the StenchWench’ – A personal account of shame, poverty and class amongst other staged and participatory projects in the UK and abroad.
Katy Baird is an artist who often finds herself in uncomfortable situations of her own making!
Katy has performed at Live Art festivals and venues as well as squat parties, clubs and raves. Her recent solo studio-based performance Workshy a show about work and the things we do for money, has toured internationally to over 30 cities. Her performance project ReDress, exploring identity and consumption is currently ongoing.
She has received commissions from the Wellcome Trust, The Yard Theatre, Camden People’s Theatre and Duckie, amongst others. Since 2016 she has been artist in residence at queer club night Knickerbocker.
Images by Alice Denny
