Short works with Ben Kulvichit

I’ve made a number of short works with Ben Kulvichit. These are often in the region of 10-15 minutes long and made for scratch nights or smaller sharings, which is why they don’t each get a page to themselves. But they’re good and interesting and fun, which is why they get a page all together.

In general they are oftern concerned with multiplication of identity, celebrity and parasociality, and simultenaeity. They are often quite silly but not always.

So far:

1. Boys: a short work made for Josh Coate’s Angels, a night of art paying tribute to Charli XCX, at HOME Manchester. No prizes for guessing which song we took as a starting point.

The central conceit of Boys was that we were two boys of the woollen jumper wearing, milk carton drinking, yu-gi-oh collecting, runny nose having variety, and we were trying to embody the concept of a boy but imagining only having the music video to Charli XCX’s Boys as a reference. We weight lifted banaguards, fed each other birds custard, danced and played the recorder. It was about as silly as it sounds, and all the better for it.

2. Only Lovers Will Survive: made for another Josh Coates fan night. This time it was Saviour, a tribute to St Vincent at Camden People’s Theatre. We borrowed heavily from Hang On Me, a little from The Strangers, and also yoinked some material from Chris Nolan’s Interstellar. The piece was a set of intercut perspectives set to music, a slow-mo vehicle crash in which multiple people fall in love instantaneously in a moment of cosmic bliss. Featuring edited text from an implementation of the GPT-2 AI. Listen HERE.

3. Midnight Mass: made for Chapter 9 of Something Other. A looping phone conversation for one voice in which intimacy and identity looses its footing in an unstable environment. A bit more po faced than the previous two, perhaps but with some related themes. Listen HERE.

4. Coming soon… you better be excited about this one it’s gonna slap