Join FABRIC as we celebrate experimental performance pioneers Bodies in Flight  and the publication of their first book: Flesh and Text, celebrating over 30 years of making performance.

FABRIC will also hold a pre-announcement of Nottdance 2025, and begin to share our 10-year strategy, due to be fully launched in the Autumn.

Bodies in Flight return to FABRIC to mark the launch of their hybrid text retrospective covering more than 30 years of transgressive productions.  Their performances, where flesh utters and words move, challenge and re-energise the conventional relationship between audiences and performers, and audiences and place. They insist on the buzz of ideas, on philosophy and poetry, using words and images, movement and stillness, voices and bodies, in order to move audiences emotionally and intellectually.  

About the evening

This fascinating event will include discussions and archival footage, covering milestones in formal innovation and the future potential of new technologies in devising process.

Paul Russ (Artistic Director of FABRIC), will share the organisation’s 10 year strategy, which will be fully launched in the autumn, and offer an insight into plans for Nottdance 2025, which is taking place in the city during October.  

Simon Jones (Director of Bodies in Flight) will be in conversation with Vida Midgelow (Professor of Dance and Choreographic Practices, University of Arts London). 

Responding to images and video from their extensive archive, Simon will reflect on Bodies in Flight’s practice, its beginnings in the early nineties UK experimental performance scene, where physical and dance theatre encountered performance and live art. Its development through collaborations with sonic and visual media artists, duetting between bodies and technologies, texts and spaces, mixing flesh and text; and their recent work with different communities, some of place, others of skill-sets. 

See “Key Information” tab for event timetable.   

About the book 

Organised in a highly visual design, Flesh and Text is both a history and a workbook with selections of scripts and archival material from 30 years of making devised theatre and performance in the UK and internationally. It includes texts by collaborators, arts professionals and scholars exploring the company’s collaborative working method, contextualizing it in the wider performance ecology and culture.

Intended as an inspiration to emerging artists, the volume covers key questions for any maker of contemporary performance: the relationship of choreography and spoken word, the use of new technologies and multi-media, the role of original music and soundscapes, the differences between work presented in a theatre or gallery or sited in non-theatrical places, the persistence of theatre as an art-form in an increasingly digital culture.  

Published by Intellect Books (Bristol) April 2025.  

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