Join us for Ashley’s Fit UP, a collaborative musical and visual performance
[ID: of a group of people sat on a stage facing an audience. They are all performing. The person on the far left is crossing their arms. The next person is wearing a cycling helmet and looking down. The next two performers are smiling with their hands behind their backs. The next person is holding their instrument and wearing a colourful hat and jacket, they match with the person next to them who isn’t wearing a hat but is wearing a similar style jacket. The last performer on the far right is facing the performers, not the audience. They are wearing a beige jacket and touching their hat. We see the back of the heads of seven audience members.]
Doors: 7pm (performance begins promptly at 8pm)
Please note that this is a seated event; latecomers will be asked to wait for gaps between performances to be admitted.
Tickets: £7 - £15
This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings).
One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!
The collaborative collective behind Ashley’s Fit Up invite you to join them for the 179th night of the year as they bring together a collection of live performances…
We have the pleasure of hosting: the newly formed Clown Troupe; the wonderful Shadow Show, presented by musician and artist Theo Laird; the surreal puppet world of Beanpigs; Rosalind Strange’s Encounters With Objects; as well as performing our own ever-evolving collaborative musical and visual show, Ashley’s Fit Up. These are performances woven from collaboration and pieced together to form a patchwork night celebrating communal making. We climb aboard the RAFT and pitch our assembled sail against the wind.
Ashley’s Fit Up was originally created to fundraise money for the Save Cressingham Gardens campaign to prevent the demolition of multiple buildings in the Cressingham Gardens council housing estate in Southeast London. The project includes handmade puppets, animations and a collaged musical score created as a way to repurpose and reconnect disparate ideas through shared sonic memory and performance. Formed as part of a fluid group or vessel poised to connect people through varied making processes and to vivify non-linear creative ideas, utilising a multidisciplinary assortment of contributors. Like in an archaeological dig, the group relies upon fragments of evidence in the form of open-ended musical language, folk stories and inter-historical social rituals to patchwork their ideas together and weave them into a collective performance, that is in its nature intent on replacing industrial creative restrictions with play and inclusivity.
“…The ground was filled with clay and boulders and the bodies of a woman and child were discovered, buried with considerable ceremony. The woman and child were placed on a bed of willow catkins. Water lilies, red campion and holly flowers were then scattered over their bodies. Among the ash were many hundreds of offerings including hair pins, spindle whorls, glass, ivory and bone beads, fragments of pottery, pieces of corn-grinding quern-stones, and most surprising of all, the remains of a lyre. The child, Ashley, stood up among the offerings. Although they were plenty, there was something missing. He looked down and noticed the first finger of his left hand was missing. He pieced together what was left of the lyre and began to sing ‘I want my finger! My finger’s gone!’…”
Clown Troupe are emerging from a very small car straight into the The Horse Hospital.
Rosalind Strange presents Encounters With Objects
Beanpigs is a collective of queer puppeteers and performers, who believe in the life of all things. Everything has the potential to change: people, bodies, and society…
“Part of our understanding of transformation comes from our own experiences as queer and trans people. By demonstrating the power of objects we like to empower the audience to dream beyond what they thought was possible, and to break the boundaries of real/not real and broaden the imagination. We like to use expanding the imagination as a revolutionary tool, to practice dreaming of other worlds, and realise that they are possible. These ideas are conveyed in abstract and surreal puppet shows, we like to see our performances as more of a ritual of facilitating the lives of our puppets, and ultimately they choose how the story ends.”
Theo Laird’s performance Shadow play uses disparate symbolic cues with long standing roots in ancient folk traditions to originate a new, hybrid mythology. Intended to summon a sense of the uncanny by intimately entangling the real with the replicated, the familiar with the "unheimlich", Shadow Play seeks to unearth a story that exists already in the subconscious of the viewer. By engaging with the space, the viewer is an active participant in the development of this story, becoming the interface between the symbolic constituents of the space. Also used as a space to host improvised musical performances, Shadow Play is inspired by the spontaneity of aural traditions within folk culture.