Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts

Video documentation of THE CALL CENTRE with Artist in Residence Samra Mayanja and Riot + the Ether co-presented with Newington Green Meeting House.

Curated and hosted by Samra Mayanja, THE CALL CENTRE has become a monthly must-see in London’s Live Art calendar. Initiated in and usually taking place in her studio, Samra has created a framework not only about, but in service to, that difficult task that we engage with every day, which is to speak. To say ourselves and to speak ourselves, and to make the decision with every word and every breath not to hide.

For each CALL CENTRE, Samra invites cross-disciplinary artists and writers to share live work with and alongside her. This framework comes from her impulse to contextualise her own work through the artists whose work she loves.

In this special edition of THE CALL CENTRE  Samra stepped out of her 21 seater studio and joined the long-line of dissenting voices that have spoken out in the chapel at Newington Green Meeting House.

Riot + the Ether presented ‘the impossible big’ on Saturday 07 February, 2026.

Video documentation of a one-off event hosted at LADA. Artist Tim Etchells invited performer Rosana Cade and musician Angharad Davies to join him in an encounter working with text loop fragments and violin improvisation. Drawing on Etchells’ practice in which language distorts and transforms through repetition and in dialogue with sound elements, More details are slowly falling in was a collaborative experiment in which three unique artists bring their considerable individual experience and perspectives to play, inventing and exploring sonic material together.

The starting point for the performance was a set of text fragments taken from Etchells’ notebook – overheard comments, puzzling images and questions – which take their place in layers of voice and violin in compositions where texture, energy and musicality are as important as semantics.

The event was hosted at The Garrett Centre on Saturday 21 February, 2026

Unfixed Archives is amonthly radio show podcast on RTM radio, taking listeners on an audio journey that investigates how archivists and artists work with performance, why they do what they do, and what happens to performance once it’s ‘finished’.

Audio recording of the Unfixed Archives: Holders of Liveness – Podcast Launch on Friday 27 June 2025.

This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.

Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended.

This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualizes Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound, and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

The trilogy of novels by Samuel Beckett is his best known work outside the theatre, dating from the same period as Waiting for Godot, and as such is central to the main body of his work. This new edition has been corrected from the errors that appeared in some previous editions. Many people believe it to be the most important volume of prose in the English language after Joyce’s Ulysses, although written originally in French, a language that the author adopted to escape from the richness of Irish speech rhythms.

Most critics today consider the trilogy to be Beckett’s major achievement, more controlled than the brilliant early work, more easily readable than the complex How It Is and the later plays and texts. Malloy has two parts, the parallel narratives of the old Molloy, passing time by telling himself stories and remembering his past journeys, and of the waspish Moran, a private detective sent to find him, whose deterioration during his quest bears a strange similarity to Molloy’s. Malone Dies appears to be a continuation of Molloy’s narrative, only this time the speaker knows that the end is almost at hand. The additional poignancy of the stories he tells himself is largely related to the sense of time running our, and the prose seems heightened from the earlier book. In the third novel The Unnamable, the narrator, again under a different name or names, is aware of the approaching silence and tries to keep it at bay with thoughts, reveries, stories and inventions. The prose undergoes a complete change as we find ourselves listening to the sounds of panic, written in a punctuation of the human breath that the narrator has ever greater difficulty in drawing into his lungs, while the mind races giddily ever faster. The end is terrifying, bu t finishes, strangely, on a note of hope. Molloy has been translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author, the rest of the trilogy by Mr Beckett himself.

Against Interpretation is a selection from Susan Sontag’s early writings about the arts and contemporary culture. The book quickly became a modern classic and has had enormous influence here and abroad. As well as the title essay, ‘On Style”, and the famous ‘Notes on Camp’, the book includes discussions from such figures as Sartre, Simone Weil, Georg Lukács, Lévi-Strauss, Artaud, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Bresson and Godard.

In this pocket publication Flanders Arts Institute examines new ways of working internationally in the arts. Joris Janssens collects insights and light bulb moments from the research & development trajectory (Re)framing the International.

Still, this house is better than me. It’s going to be torn down and each piece scattered, but it will become something else. The wood will become desks, tables… Now it’s time to empty this house. – Snow in March

If you want to find yourself, there is only one way. Kill anyone who reminds you of you even if just a little. Someone who reminds you of your past, present, and future, all of them are your enemies! They will confuse you, ruin you, take away your freedom, estrange you from this world, and in the end, bury you alive. – The Master Has Come

The baby is my scar. A symbol of my hopeless future. But I don’t consider my scar or my bleak future a bad thing. I don’t regret anything. Though I chose a different path, at least I chose it. It was my choice. I don’t care how things turn out. Even if the end of that destructive path is death, I’ll accept it. Because I chose it. – Red Bus

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys dance company, founded in 1984 by Lea Anderson, Teresa Montano, and Gaynor Coward. Inspired by the DIY culture of post-punk UK, they wanted to create something that resonated with their friends, blending dance with the energy of fashion, music, and club culture of the 1980s.

They named themselves The Cholmondeleys, like a band. Emerging from this vibrant time, their performances featured collaborations with British artists, including choreographer Lea Anderson, costume designers Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, composers Drostan Madden & Steve Blake, and lighting designer Simon Corder. Together with their sister company, The Featherstonehaughs (founded in 1988), they produced over 87 works, both live and on film, performing in the UK and internationally. This rich creative legacy is captured in an archive of images by photographers such as Chris Nash, Pau Ros, and Matilda Temperley, now presented together for the first time in this celebration of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs.

The reinforcements mounted by our profane masters have transformed the theatre into a boulevard or, closer to home, into a good-old thoroughfare. In other words, the theatre is a space that hasn’t changed at all. We have to reinforce its mountainous profanities yet again, a little less old-fashioned perhaps, but similarly escorted by those necessary moralists-in-mind and a concomitant mania for marvels. So, here we are.

My dramas- in which I seem to lean on the ludicrous which must be kept so, in order to be accountable, the inspiration of such a work being precisely its utter and insulting reality-must not be born of ‘today’ but of the spells and numerologies of the old masters, the drowsy and doddery in their chic flannel slippers and their well-practised blandishment.