AltPitch: Experiencing Art in a Different Space
You may have read the calls for entries for the AltPitch festival – but you may not be clear exactly what the festival involves or how you can watch this year’s entries online. So, what exactly is AltPitch?
The organisers describe the festival as being “dedicated to exploring the relationship between the digital world and humanity”. They also want to offer the audience new and different ways to experience art online, with the emphasis on involvement.
Ruby Colley
Eight artworks have now been shortlisted for the main programme and, throughout March, these are on their website for the audience to ‘Watch and Rate’. It costs just £3.00 to do this. The idea is to watch the shows and then award stars to each one. At the end of the month, the three entries with the most stars will receive commissions of £1,500 each.
The productions are extremely varied – some are complete productions like the moving monologue about Independent Living: Letter to Paul by Penny Pepper, performed by Liz Carr. Others are still in development, like Finding Magic, which introduces us to Beverley Bishop’s online one-woman show about the loss of her son: a show that includes storytelling, humour and magic.
Some of the more unusual pieces focus on virtual or interior spaces that require you to step out of everyday reality – preferably with headphones. For example, In Line Shadow Movement, Cliff Crawford experiments with a virtual interactive gallery space, projecting Celtic patterns – lines and shadows – onto invisible stone. Medeor by Syntropy States is a ‘breath pacer’ – computer generated images that expand and contract – combining “generative art and soothing multidimensional rhythms”.
EDIFICE Dance Theatre
Other productions explore our relationship with art and the natural world. Lucy Brennan Shiel’s Return to the Goddess explores our interconnectedness with the planet via computer-generated beach imagery (and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy). A highlight for me was Ruby Colley’s The Sea Wrote It – field recordings of nature that blend with her haunting folk music and unravel “the connections between and within nature, sound and audiences”.
Finally, there are two exquisitely sensual entries that centre around dance: BINARY by EDIFICE Dance Theatre (“Two bodies meet in a dystopian landscape and merge into one”) and FLOW by Lila Naruse, which explores fluidity – tea splashing into a cup, the dancer moving (with perfect fluidity) over the beach and through the sea.
• For the full impact of the AltPitch experience, check out the selected artworks on their website at altpitch.org. Register for Watch and Rate during March to help decide which applicants will receive the AltPitch commission.
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