All The Ways We Could Grow

There have been a multitude of expressions and experiences of genders across the world throughout history. Yet in recent years, the topic has been repositioned as new, bringing with it wider visibility alongside aggressive pushback. 

Free Word’s upcoming Season, All The Ways We Could Grow, will celebrate the variety of human experience, and ask how challenging confined notions of genders might open up possibilities for us all.

 

Preliminary highlights from the Season:

 

Artists Travis Alabanza and Denny Kaulbach will transform Free Word into a mirror-balled bedroom refuge in their All The Ways We Could Grow installation: think sleepover-meets-exhibition, evoking the playfulness we often lose after adolescence. Blending performance, lecture and participation, Travis Alabanza will also give a talk on the fight for freedom for those on the margins, linking explorations within the season to trans liberation. The Black Flamingo Cabaret, developed in partnership with Spread the Word, promises a spectacular display of wordplay and gender-defying drag featuring black and queer performers, hosted by critically acclaimed writer and performance poet Dean Atta, with Keith Jarrett and Lasana Shabazz. The Apocalypse Reading Room will be an on-site library from writer and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge, who will also lead in-conversation events exploring alternatively gendered and ungendered worlds. Emma Dennis-Edwards’ acclaimed Fringe First winning play Funeral Flowers, presented by Harts Theatre Company and Power Play, wings its way into Free Word for two nights only. Juz Amma: The Qur’an in Public will be a sound installation and event curated by  The Inclusive Mosque Initiative to mark International Women’s Day 2019, in which female and non-binary Muslims recite the final chapters of the Qur’an in Arabic and English. And following last Season’s Soof In Private commission, visual artist Soofiya returns to Free Word with a unique interactive workshop in their signature inimitable style. (A) Wake for Gender takes the form of an imaginary funeral for ‘Gender’. Plus, look out for a brand new Free Word Commission and direct action workshop from artist and activist Liv Wynter.

 

We’re proud to programme collaboratively with our artists and partners.

Full season to be announced in January 2019. Stay tuned.

 

To view the press release, click here.