ARTISTIC PROGRAMME

We continued to expand the scope and ambition of our live programme, which included the world premiere of Alice by Jasmin Vardimon Company in August and an unforgettable residency by Pussy Riot in September. We were successful in our bid for Arts Council England NPO status, securing vital funding for the next three years.

2022 started with alumni children’s company Little Bulb and Hibernation, coming to us off the back of a Christmas residency in the Opera House Linbury Studio. Popular and successful, we are in discussion with them about a future Christmas show (in competition with the Opera House sadly).

February & March were mostly occupied with a run of music, poetry & comedy (“final show” from US punk legends Pere Ubu; film & music events with Tom Robinson and Freedom Rd; John Hegley; Jenny Eclair, Jimeoin, Ed Byrne, Ian Stirling), plus we hosted a fascinating conversation with Nobel Prize winning writer (and University of Kent Emeritus Professor) Abdulrazak Gurnah.

The first major theatrical event came late March with the Gulbenkian debut of our Associate Artists BAC Beatbox Academy with their international hit Frankenstein: How To Make A Monster. Although ticket sales were undeniably disappointing, everyone who saw the show loved it and the word of mouth was sensational. Beatbox Academy will be back Christmas 2023 with their new show, The Pied Piper.

April saw the successful return of some old friends of the programme with Motionhouse (Nobody) and The Brodsky Quartet. In May we featured appearances by two different Associate Artists in markedly different forms of presentation: Aoi & Esteban, our digital artists currently in residence in the Historic Dockyard in Medway, brought back their ground-breaking VR performance WHIST to Colyer-Fergusson: returning to the venue where the work started at the end of a world tour to many of the major arts festivals and digital events.

And later in the month we presented the sublime, ethereal Ghosts and Whispers, a collaboration between Associate Artist John Woolrich and legendary film makers the Brothers Quay; a solo piano recital performed by Clare Hammond accompanying an hour-long commissioned work by the influential animators.

A suitably sublime end to the 21/22 season in the venues.

The major feature of the summer was, naturally, bOing! Back at full strength for the first fully-fledged post-Covid festival, this was our biggest Boing yet. With an estimated 12,000 people on the campus over the August Bank Holiday weekend and featuring the world premiere of Jasmin Vardimon’s Alice, this was a triumph of a weekend and the high mark to reach for next year’s tenth anniversary.

Within what felt like days we were onto the launch of the 22/23 season We began the year with an exclusive UK presentation of Russian activists Pussy Riot and the latest iteration of their music/ theatre performance work RIOT DAYS An unqualified triumph, this searingly powerful, painfully topical work played to over 1000 people over several nights – over half of them first timers to the venue.

The music programme continued into the Autumn with a comprehensively diverse line-up of exceptional concerts: Penguin Café, John Woolrich, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Roger Eno, Joanna Macgregor, Maggie Nicols, Michael Gira and the Cowboy Junkies.

We hosted the culmination of the Estuary Sound Ark in an afternoon hosted by Matthew Herbert; presented the Gulbenkian debut of celebrated writer/ performer Shôn Dale-Jones and a sterling line-up of work for children and families (Joss Arnott’s The Tin Man; Peut-être’s The Dark; Motionhouse: Starchitects and Little Angel’s There’s a Rang Tan in my Bedroom). The calendar year ended with our Christmas show Under the Frozen Moon, from Half a String: ending the year with a children’s show created by an alumni company supported by the Gulbenkian. Full circle!

(A quick word on the cinema which continues to sit somewhere between “struggling” and “ticking over”: in common with the national picture, we still have not returned to pre-Covid levels but see peaks and troughs through the season – live cinema events (National Theatre etc) remain popular with our audience and we are experimenting with more “event”/ themed programming around film festivals and touring programmes – looking into more live concert film relays in the coming season).

Associate Artists: Aoi and Esteban

Aoi and Esteban are one of our iCCi Associate Artists. Based on our Medway Campus, they experiment with cutting edge VR and AR technology to create new work, and share this knowledge with an ever expanding network of artists and creatives.

Director, Aoi Nakamura explains:

“Since moving to the Central Boiler House in March 2022 we have engaged 76 creatives, artists, specialists, 437 participants, 6346 live audiences and our work has been seen by 157,867 people/audiences online, broadcast and in writing. We transformed Central Boiler House to a production ready house and launched A+E Lab (hub for digital and culture), we’ve grown company members and launched our virtual being Lilith. Aeon!

Our work 0AR and WHIST toured to five countries, our new productions’ R&D has taken place in the studio with dancers and composers, we are connecting to Medway local organisations, supporting 49 local, national and international artists to develop their own work through residency opportunities by sharing our studio and equipment, five local primary and secondary schools were engaged through workshop and creative open call writing, 437 participants were engaged through workshops both physical and online.

All this was only possible with this opportunity given by iCCi to be resident at Central Boiler House and we hope we can bring something truly unique to the local community!”