Liz Carr

Liz Carr is a wheelchair using actor, broadcaster and comedian.  She currently plays forensic  examiner, Clarissa Mullery in the BBC drama Silent Witness.  She is a stand-up comedian, often as part of Abnormally Funny People and enjoys performing cabaret and 'criptease'.  Liz co-hosted the irreverent BBC Ouch! podcast for 7 years and in contrast, in 2012 she authored the documentary 'When Assisted Death is Legal' for the BBC World Service.  She is a disability rights campaigner and as a member of Not Dead Yet she speaks out against assisted suicide.  She is currently working on 'Assisted Suicide - The Musical' which will premiere as part of the Unlimited Festival at London's Southbank Centre in 2016

Rather Dead than Disabled
What is it with the current flurry of people wanting to top themselves rather than have a walking stick, a dodgy bowel or need a bed bath?  Is the PR of disability so bad that people really would rather be dead than disabled?  Is it actually that rubbish?  With cuts in all areas of our lives, the mainstream media scrounger rhetoric and the few rights we have being eroded away at an astounding rate, is it in fact any surprise  no one wants to be us? And if that’s the case, why aren’t people generally doing more to make life, rather than death, better for us?  And how do you cope when you’re the person that no one wants to be?

Sir Colin Blakemore

Colin is one of Britain’s leading neuroscientists, member of twelve academies of science and winner of awards in Britain (including the Edinburgh Medal), the United States, France, Switzerland, Ireland and the Czech Republic. He is best known for his part in the discovery of neural plasticity – the ability of the brain to modify itself in response to stimulation, experience and injury.
 
After studying in Cambridge and Berkeley, California, he worked in Cambridge and then Oxford, and has been a visiting professor at some of the world’s greatest universities and research institutes, including MIT, New York University, Bell Telephone Labs and the Salk Institute. He directed the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, was the Chief Executive of the UK Medical Research Council, and is now Professor of Neuroscience & Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study in London.
 
Colin’s fascination with the arts has influenced his scientific quest to understand how we perceive the world. He has been a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, and he now directs a network of scientists and philosophers, working with artists, chefs, designers and dancers to rethink our fundamental understanding of the senses.
 
Colin has a parallel life as a broadcaster and writer. He writes for the national press and has written, presented or contributed to hundreds of TV and radio shows, including presenting a 13-part series on brain and mind for the BBC.  He was an adviser for, and appeared in, the full-length documentary Tim’s Vermeer, which was nominated for a Bafta in 2014.

Colourful Music and Tasty People

Sir Colin Blakemore will challenge the audience to think about whether we can trust our senses, looking closely at some of the Fringe’s most exciting acts that question the relationship between what we see, hear or touch and the reality of the physical world around them. From the famous Rubin face/vase illusion to prosopragnosia and synaesthesia, Colourful Music and Tasty People will ask audiences to look at the worlds of both science and art with a fresh perspective. 

Bryony Kimmings & Tim Grayburn

Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn in conversation with Brian Lobel at TSOTF Open Meeting, Summerhall Old Lab, 10/8/15

Bryony Kimmings is a performance artist inspired by the taboos & anomalies of western culture, her autobiographical themes promote the airing of her own dirty laundry to oil conversations on difficult subjects. Her work follows social experiments embarked upon with genuine intrigue & wholehearted gusto. Kimmings award winning work exists cross-platform, as music, documentaries, websites, PR campaigns and viral movements, but always ends in a theatre work.

Tim Grayburn is Kimmings' fiancé formally an account director in a top advertising firm, Tim is currently a mental health activist and artist working in collaboration with Bryony on their joint project "Fake it 'til you Make it"

“Bold, brave and very brilliant” Independent

www.bryonykimmings.com

Simon McBurney

Actor, writer, director, and co-founder of Complicite, Simon McBurney has created and acted in more than 30 productions for the company.

In 2012 he was the first British Artist Associé of the Avignon Festival, and his adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita was the festival's centrepiece.

In  2009, Shun-kin, created with the Japanese company of the Setagaya Theatre, Tokyo, earned him the Yomiuri Theatre Award Grand Prize for Best Director.

In 2008 he was awarded the Berlin Academy of Arts Konrad Wolf Prize for outstanding multi-disciplinary artists.

Other recent directing work includes A Dog’s Heart, an original opera, A Disappearing Number, winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play, Measure for Measure, A Minute Too Late, The Elephant Vanishes, Pet Shop Boys Meet Eisenstein (Trafalgar Square) and Strange Poetry (with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in the Walt Disney Concert Hall). Other directing credits include All My Sons (with John Lithgow, Diane Wiest, Patrick Wilson and Katie Holmes on Broadway) and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (with Al Pacino in New York).

As an actor Simon appears in many feature films, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Jane Eyre, The Duchess and The Last King of Scotland. Film and television appearances include The Theory of Everything, Magic in the Moonlight and BBC TV’s Rev. 

Brigitte Aphrodite

Brigitte Aphrodite is a punk poet, musician, theatre maker and feminist showgirl. With her band she has played Leeds and Reading Festivals, Bestival, Latitude, Kendal Calling and supported Kate Nash and Josie Long on their UK tours.

Brigitte’s debut studio album is due for release in the new year to coincide with her self-penned musical My Beautiful Black Dog which debuted at the Bush Theatre in London last year.

Brigitte is a proud mentor for the youth charity, Arts Emergency. She has facilitated workshops for Ideastap, the National Youth Theatre, the Eggtooth Project and has invented the sport Frunning (a combination of running and dancing!).

Laura Dannequin

Laura Dannequin is a French-born Bristol based choreographer / maker / performer working predominantly in & with movement. She makes installation and performance work and is interested in making work that is present, live and raw and explores bodily being in the world: the dancing body, the social body, the diseased and medicated body. Following an injury which resulted in years of chronic pain, she created the performance solo Hardy Animal. Before that she worked as a performer with a wide range of companies including Daghdha(2006-2010), Saburo Teshigawara's Karas, Fabulous Beast and Deborah Hay (SPCP). She works in close collaboration with Dan Canham and is associate director at Still House (Ours was the Fen Country, of Riders and Running Horses) and enjoys working as a creative and choreographic advisor with a growing number of artists.

www.lauradannequin.co.uk

Emma Frankland

None of Us is Yet a Robot create performance work based on transgender identities and the politics of transition. The work has been shown at Buzzcut Festival, Glasgow; Dialogue and Sprint Festivals, London and at Forest Fringe, Edinburgh. The project is led by Emma Frankland, an award winning theatre maker and performer. Emma has created a diverse collection of work and was featured in the British Council Showcase at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival with an anarchic adaptation of Don Quijote. She has collaborated with many companies including Chris Goode & Company, Wildworks and Coney. She is a two-time Fringe First award winner and Total Theatre Award nominee.  Throughout her work, there is a shared theatrical language that focuses on honesty, action & a playful DIY aesthetic.

Ria Hartley

Ria Hartley is an interdisciplinary artist & researcher based in Bristol, UK. Her work has taken forms as devised theatre, site-specific and durational performance, live art, installation, video, photography, one-to-one performance and socio-political art. Her practice pays close attention to memory, identity, human relationships, and shared narratives and is concerned with recycling, returning and repair. She has taught as an associate lecturer in BA Theatre at Falmouth University (2010 - 2013) and was a visiting artist lecturer for BA Theatre: Performance at Plymouth University (2012).  She has delivered various training in devised theatre, media and performance and site-specific performance. Her current project The Genetic Body is an auto-ethnographic exploration of her diasporic identity through DNA testing. Upcoming performances include: Matilda and Me (Word of Warning, hAb Arts, June 2015) SPIT KIT  (Fierce Festival, Oct 2015)  Untouchable (Re:Play: Poetry International, Southbank Centre, July 2015, Flying Solo Festival May 2016).