About this Event
Reckless Sleepers was formed in 1988, taking its name from a painting by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. The company or Project was formed out of a multiplicity of ideas and concerns, mishaps, accidents and opportunities.
There was, I remember, an energy, a reaction to proper theatre in big places, too big for our small little words to get into. I was, I remember, getting angry at watching and listening to a style of presentation that attempted a realism in an unrealistic way, that tried to convince unconvincingly, that presented big names as a big attraction. It still seems the same, it still gives me a drive to try and attempt something else, something other than this bigness.
The positives that grew out of this negativity soon outweighed the negatives, and so without a plan of action, or idea of what it was that Reckless Sleepers was supposed to really be doing, projects started to be made.
A small unwritten set of breakable rules started to take shape. Ideas became central, projects were installed rather than presented, mistakes were embraced, ideas were given a chance, ideas were pushed so that they became uncomfortable to do, uncomfortable to listen to, uncomfortable to watch.
The projects aren't written in a traditional sense of the word. They are constructed layers and pasted sets of fragments that have been worked out in front of a computer screen, in a black box, on a train journey home, in the middle of the night. They contain a set of rules, a social order, a structure, a chaos in a very ordered way and after some time and some experiments and lots of failures, a project begins to take a shape and form, an identity of its own.
I still don't know what it is that Reckless Sleepers make, I still can't quite place my finger on it so it stays still.
Mole Wetherell (Artistic Director)
Bunker Talks invite artists and researchers to talk about who they are and what they do. Curated by the Performance Research Group at Manchester School of Art, Bunker Talks explore geopolitical, ecological or economic concerns. The talks create space for critical encounters, presentations, provocation and dialogue.
Originally conceived in the pandemic to explore how artists, writers, curators and researchers continued to make and share their work, live Bunker Talks now take place at The Salutation every month. Since 2020, over 100 talks have been hosted by members of the Art & Performance Research Hub. All talks are recorded, edited, captioned and archived to create an online catalogue, capturing how artists think about the world today.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Salutation Pub (upstairs), 12 Higher Chatham Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00