Jamie Hale Joins MAYK’s Cohort of Resident Artists with Unlimited
We’re thrilled to announce that award-winning theatre maker Jamie Hale will be a resident with us for a week in autumn as part of a bespoke artist support offer made possible through a new collaboration with Unlimited. Jamie will spend time in the MAYKing Space here at St Anne’s House, developing their upcoming work Quality of Life is Not a Measurable Outcome, a show that asks what happens when your very life is no longer a cost-effective intervention? Drawing from Jamie's own experiences, Quality of Life is Not a Measurable Outcome celebrates disabled survival and joy, clawed out of a world where institutionalisation and death are a constant threat.
Jamie is Artistic Director of CRIPtic arts - their work focuses on crip/queer realities, and the urgency of living as a disabled person. Their first poetry pamphlet, Shield was read by Jack Thorne in the 2021 MacTaggart lecture, where he described them as an "extraordinary voice". Their solo film, NOT DYING, was described as "fantastic" by Hannah Gadsby. In 2021, they were awarded the Jerwood Fellowship, won Director/Theatremaker of the Year in the Evening Standard Future Awards, and were listed as one of the hundred most influential disabled people in Britain.
Jamie’s residency acts as part of Unlimited’s goal to support extraordinary work from disabled artists that will change and challenge the world. This is a new relationship for us and we are thrilled to be supporting Jamie in this way by offering our space as a base for research and development and brokering connections into the city. The MAYKing Space is dedicated to artists making and exploring live performance. It is an accessible resource for a broad community of people. A safe space to make, to develop and produce new work and a foundation from which to build new relationships with artists and makers from across the country and beyond.
“During my MAYK residency, I want to explore the bilingual aspects of ‘Quality of Life is Not a Measurable Outcome’, and how technology can mediate the translation and performance in BSL. Taking a small section of the show, I'll be working with a Deaf BSL signer and a movement specialist to design the BSL translation and movement to complement each other.
Through this process, we will film and record, working on how the footage of myself and the BSL signing performer can be edited and reconstituted to understand whether delivery with a single live performer and video footage would be feasible.
The residency will end with a sharing for disabled Bristol residents, especially those with lived experience of the social care system, where they will be shown a filmed version of the whole piece, and the live version of the section on which we've worked, as part of a discussion about how you bring challenging topics to audiences in a way that reflects and shares experiences without creating vicarious trauma. We want to celebrate what it is to resist, to be resilient, and to survive.” - Jamie Hale
Unlimited is an arts commissioning body that supports, funds and promotes new work by disabled artists for UK and international audiences. Funded by Arts Council England, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and British Council.