Experimentica 26 – frank r jagoe: Collective Breath (on love and strife)

frank r jagoe is running a writing workshop at Chapter on Thursday 22 October, starting at 6.00pm. The session is called Collective Breath (on love and strife) and it's all about embodied engagements with performance — the kind of thing that asks you to think about how a performance feels in the body, not just how it looks from a seat. It's a workshop, so you'll be writing during it, not just listening.

The evening is part of Experimentica 26, a programme that opens with a welcome dinner hosted by Chapter and LAUK and runs alongside a special edition of tactileBOSCH's The Thursday Show, which brings together artists to experiment across performance, sound, movement and installation. If you're into that cross-disciplinary side of things, this is one of several sessions happening around the same time.

The wider context of the season reaches back into Welsh theatre history. It reunites the artists behind the 1988-89 soundtrack of Gododdin, made by the company Brith Gof and the industrial music group Test Dept, who turned a derelict Cardiff factory into a battlefield of water, sand and wreckage. Gododdin remains one of the most important theatre events ever staged in Wales, and its soundtrack has been remastered and expanded with new material on CD. Test Dept, formed in the early 1980s, is regarded as one of the pioneering forces of industrial music; Brith Gof, founded in 1981, became internationally renowned for ambitious site-specific work in disused factories, ice rinks, railway stations and forests.

So while the workshop itself is a focused session on writing and performance, it sits within a season that's looking back at that industrial, site-specific tradition. It runs on Thursday 22 October at 6.00pm at Chapter, and it's Pay What You Can.