Created and performed by Liz Crow
A 48-hour around-the-clock live performance
Part of the People Like You exhibition
Salisbury Arts Centre & via social media
10 – 12 April 2013, starting 2.00pm
Reflections from the Bed – recorded at SPILL Festival of Performance Nov 2012
Bedside Conversations:
The work, its backdrop, and its politics
Free entry. Duration 40 minutes. With BSL interpretation and live captioning.
Watch online here.
Wed 10 Apr – 2.00pm and 6.00pm
Online and Salisbury Arts Centre
Thu 11 Apr – 12.00pm (Twitter) and 3.15pm
Online and Salisbury Arts Centre
Fri 12 Apr – 10.15am
Online and Salisbury Arts Centre
To attend Bedside Conversations in person, members of the public can sign up at the Salisbury Arts Centre website or phone 01722 321744
BEDDING OUT emerges from the current welfare benefits overhaul, which threatens many with poverty and a propagandist campaign that has seen disability hate crime leap by 50%.
“I wear a public self that is energetic, dynamic and happening,” explains artist-activist Liz Crow. “I am also ill and spend much of life in bed. The private self is neither beautiful nor grownup, it does not win friends or accolades and I conceal it carefully.”
“But for me, along with thousands more, this new system of benefits demands a reversal: my public self implies I don’t need support and must be denied, whilst my private self must be paraded as justification for the state’s support. For months, I have lain low for fear of being penalised, but the performer is beginning to re-emerge. Instead of letting fear determine who I am, I’d rather stare it in the face.” BEDDING OUT is a performance in which I take my private self and make it public, something I have not done in over 30 years. On this stage, for a period of 48 hours, I am performing the other side of my fractured self, my bed-life. Since the public me is so carefully constructed, this will be a kind of un-performing of my self.
“I want to show that what many people see as contradiction – what they call ‘fraud’ – is only the complexity of real life. This is not a work of tragedy, but of in/visibility and complication; a chance to perform my self without façade.
You can participate in BEDDING OUT:
Follow @RGPLizCrow and use the #beddingout hashtag to take part in the conversation.
Join our Twitter-based Bedside Conversation on Thu 11 Apr at noon.
By text:
Anyone not on Twitter can text us: 07784 899514 and we can upload what they say to Twitter. Typing ‘MySecret’ before the message ensures that their message will be tweeted anonymously.
Via the web:
Bedding Out will be live streamed throughout the 48 hours here. Bedside Conversations will be live streamed with audio, BSL interpretation and live subtitles.
In the run up to the event, Dawn Willis will be blogging about Bedding Out, its backdrop and its politics. Bedding Out Blog can be found here.
