The Platform is a new space for young, emerging artists to share their work with Hay Festival audiences. Spanning a diverse range of art forms, The Platform aims to elevate and develop outstanding creative artists at the start of their careers. BBC Radio broadcaster Fee Mak hosts this session, where you can discover and support some of the best young talent working in the UK today.
Performances will be approx 20 minutes.
Alexis Maxwell - The Space Between Us
The Space Between Us is a live spoken word performance with animated visuals, exploring what it means to be human through a speculative, sci-fi lens. Blending poetry and digital storytelling, it centres on non-human figures -Androids, Machines and Aliens- as metaphors for marginalised identities; weaving together personal reflections and cultural narratives to touch on the ways we navigate belonging, otherness and the shifting borders of identity.
Alexis Maxwell is an interdisciplinary storyteller, self-taught animator and long-time fan of all things spoken word. They adopt a socially involved approach to exploring their lived experiences; using a blend of sound, projection and poetry to merge the digital and physical realms. Loudly and proudly working class, they navigate the art sector with a tongue in cheek use of its overblown terminology and a healthy dose of imposter syndrome; not shying away from crudely drawn imagery, purposely distorted audio and cheap alternatives to the modern technology that is so necessary to contemporary art.
Eden Peppercorn - NED (Extracts from Vegemite Sandwich)
“A blistered film reel. A man made of steel. Twenty-seven paintings, enamel on hardboard. The foamed sweat on the neck of a stolen horse. Ned is a black box against a finely painted orange-blue sky.”
Australian-born, British-raised theatremaker Eden Peppercorn leads us through a vivid, visceral dream of a homeland with the ghost of Antipodean antihero Ned Kelly as our companion. NED is a series of extracts from their current work-in-progress Vegemite Sandwich, through which they try to navigate the landscape of their dual nationality and the colonial shadows that hang over modern stories of im/emigration down under.
Eden Peppercorn is a writer, theatremaker and visual artist born on the Central Coast of Australia, Darkinjung Country, raised in the West Midlands and currently based in Nottingham. They are a graduate of the University of Bristol and The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and their love of literature, visual art and performance permeates all elements of their artistic practice. They create interdisciplinary performance work rooted in notions of queerness, a love of mess and asking questions to which there aren’t always easy (or any) answers.
