Performances

Alexander Norton (Annita Sleep) (she / her) will participate in and run a football show where she plays all the parts of The Breakdown, from the footballers, managers, pundits, crowd and theme songs. It aims to be an absurd and informative review of a famous match between two teams that changed her life forever. It is an absurd recreation of an impossible task to convince the audience that the match is not only interesting, but culturally important for a trans girl growing up in the United Kingdom. Wish her luck!

Ben Glas’s performance Cognitive Dissonance is a participatory composition in which all volunteer participants are given a word that they are to repeat in any way they choose, entirely at their own discretion. Each person receives a different word, thereby unfolding a nonlinear narrative or semantic landscape that is created and dissolved together as a group. The aim of the piece is to explore a sonic space for semantic saturation—a psychological phenomenon in which a constantly repeated word temporarily loses its meaning. A surreal effect emerges, and listeners are encouraged to walk through the space and establish linguistic connections with other speakers, thereby discovering seemingly magical possibilities.

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Alexander Norton (she / her) is a transgender interdisciplinary artist and film maker working in absurdism. She doesn’t understand why things exist the way they do. Through comedy, performance, drag, sculpture, photography, character creation, film making, poetry, music / sound work and illustration she takes on each subject of existing through the relevant medium to the action. She mocks institutions and importance through absurdism and jarring performances rooted in comedic intention. She has performed in such spaces as: Volksbuhne, Hamburger Bahnhof and Gropius Bau. She studied Documentary Photography BA (hons) in the prestigious Newport University, graduating in 2012. She also has a PGCE to teach photography at college level. She has founded and ran (along side various teams) Künstler, Künstlerin, a performance / art platform for artists to make work without fear of failure. The project has been running for 9 years and continues to develop. She hopes to leave an impact, however small or large, however important or unimportant. Annita Sleep is Germany’s first accidental Margaret Thatcher impersonator. She is often placed in moments of nostalgia and memory, but plays with the absurdism of existence and expected behaviours. She has just discovered her own attractive nature and is deeply confused by it. See her in many places she finds herself in.

Ben Glas (he/him) is an experience-oriented composer based in Berlin. Through ephemeral compositions, Glas explores preconceived notions of the difference between passive and active listening in his work. In search of open musical forms and pragmatic listening perspectives, Glas’s compositions focus on the realms of subjective perception and cognition, employing acoustics, psychoacoustics, and space as tools of sound composition. His works have been exhibited and performed worldwide, including at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), the Radiophrenia Festival in Glasgow, the Soundwave Biennial (SF), and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA). He holds a B.F.A. from PNCA and an M.A. from UdK. He contributed to sound recording and editing for Folks Press as part of the Dada variety show The Late Now. His performance piece UNTITLED (°45.536693 °-122.665898 13.08.2017 22:40)—a multichannel composition featuring seven performers—was presented at PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland. Glas also had a solo exhibition titled A Social Harmony at Ohrenhoch! Der Geräuschladen in Berlin, and his works were featured in the 2018 group exhibition Post Human: The 5th International Exhibition on New Media at CICA.