Norwegian performing artists at the first PUSH-lab

The 14 performing artists who will meet and work together in the first PUSH lab in Edinburgh in the new year have now been selected. We look forward to sending Katja Brita Lindeberg and dancer Mari Bø to Scotland!

PUSH is a two-year art development project supported by Creative Europe, led by Imaginate (Scotland), Krokus Festival (Belgium), The Ark (Ireland), Aabendans (Denmark) and Scenekunstbruket. Following an open call earlier this fall, we are delighted to announce the 14 performing artists who will participate in the first lab in the new year. They will explore gender and identity in performing arts for children and young people.

The performing artists who will participate:

Rob Evans Scotland
Shona Reppe Scotland
Emma Park Scotland
Mamoru Iriguchi Scotland
Yentl de Werdt Belgium
Soetkin Demey Belgium
Maryam K. Hedayat Belgium
Ilse Ghekiere Belgium
Shane O'Reilly Ireland
Anna Newell Ireland
Micaela Kühn Denmark
Erik Pold Denmark
Katja Brita Lindeberg Norway
Mari Bø Norway

You can find out more about the project at a special seminar at Showbox on Wednesday, November 30.

About the PUSH Lab (Gender and sexual identity)

This Lab will bring together fourteen artists from five different countries in Europe to explore gender and sexual identity in theater and dance for children. Artists will work together over 8 days from Monday 30th of January to Monday 6th of February 2017.

Gender Lab - how can we use performance to explore gender and sexuality with children? And should we? How can we as artists use our current skills and push ourselves and the sector to create bold and radical work for children? How can we match our personal politic with the work we create and the ways we engage with young people?

Through performance experiments, discussions, skill-sharing, cross-cultural pollination, and engaging with children, we will explore how ideas around gender and sexual identity manifest themselves not only in our individual practices, but also in the wider field of Theatre for Young Audiences and in society at large.

We will ask the difficult questions concerning taboos, stereotypes and archetypes within work for children, and question where the boundaries lie between what is safe, subversive or wholly inappropriate. Where are the tensions between these considerations? Who makes the rules? And is or isn't it the job of the artist to push and question these ideas?

In terms of gender and sexuality, the LAB seeks to address the gap between the leaps forward in legal equality and the way children and society in general engages with these important topics. For example, in Scotland we are apparently Europe's fairest nation in terms of legal protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. But these equality laws are not always reflected in the lived experiences of these people, nor are they reflected in visibility or representation in performance for children, which still sometimes clings to heteronormative narratives.