Reactor Halls E02, curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv

About

Featuring mildly grating communist boxheads WE, horror hurdy-hog folk from Swine-thing and the ecstatic med-evil dance of the Dancing Plague of 1518. Challenging the individualism of the Western pop song, WE reveal the latent politics of the love song and transforms chart hits by annihilating their liberal subject and replacing it with a collective consciousness. Through the simple substitution of the plural for the singular, intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique the universal. http://www.kollectiv.co.uk/WE/ Swine-thing is a live performance, incorporating homemade instruments, video and spoken wood, used by Hogman Haye, Moleskin Jamie and Mr Piggy to re-interpret The Man Whom the Trees Loved by Algernon Blackwood. Robert Vaughan's and Nicholas McArthur's 'The Dancing Plague of 1518' references a mysterious outbreak of dancing-to-death that occurred in Strasbourg. Set to Gregorian plainchant and electronic trance music, the piece takes the audience out into the streets, finding parallels between religious ecstasy and club culture, and more broadly, capitalism and psychological distress'...Luke Jennings, The Guardian, 2011. http://www.nicholasmcarthur.com/THE-DANCING-PLAGUE-OF-1518