Factory Floor currently has 8 members throughout the UK:
Abi Lake
Caroline Wilson
Clare Duffy
Emily Underwood
Kerstin Bueschges
Lena Simic Lorena Rivero
Louie Jenkins
Biographies:
Abi Lake is an interdisciplinary artist & maker, working with performance, textiles, writing, visual & installation art. She completed her MA by Creative Practice at Liverpool Hope University (2010), and her BA Performance Studies and Drama at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (2003). She is co-founder of Scarlet Letter Performance Company and of the Factory Floor network.
Previous performances include: ‘Elvis is my Mum’ (2009, 2010, 2011), The Look of Love (2009), HOME: tŷ halen (2008), PaperScissorStone/I Luv U (2007), trace… (2007), Periodic Breathing (2005), 192 & blushing (2004) and The Paper Dress (2003- on-going).
Both The Paper Dress & ‘Elvis is my Mum’ have recently been exhibited at Manchester’s Gallery of Costume.
Abi’s current work combines traditional dressmaking skills with contemporary performance practice to create remarkable sculptural garments & installations. Her work seeks to experiment with notions of gender representation through fabric and form, and references her interest in womens history & the performativity of ‘dress’.
Caroline Wilson, is amongst other things a chartered accountant, and financial analyst. Caroline completed her BA in English Literature and Theatre Studies at Leeds University in 2004, where she wrote and directed Thinking Outside of the Box, a comic exploration of lesbian identity. She has also written and performed stand-up comedy. She has performed her latest piece, But I Just Want to Fall in Love and Work with Elephants at The Show Room (Chichester), Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff), Chorlton Arts Festival (Manchester) The Bluecoat (Liverpool), and the Homotopia festival (Liverpool).
Caroline is currently operating under the moniker of The Well Conneted Lesbian. This is a social experiment in interconnectedness and also a is a growing database of interviews, articles and musings about queer female culture.
Clare Duffy lives in Edinburgh. She is a playwright and also currently hoping to finish a practice as research doctorate at Glasgow University in January next year. Clare continues to write and make theatre with Unlimited Theatre, (www.unlimited.co.uk) which she co founded in 1997. Clare is also currently working with Stellar Quines, (Edinburgh), Imago Theatre (Montreal), Magnetic North (Edinburgh), The Other Way Works (Birmingham), and Theatre Writing Partnerships (East Midlands).
Emily Underwood-Lee is a performer based in South Wales. She creates solo autobiographical performances and works collaboratively as part of Burst. Emily is principally concerned with the construction of gender and how the female body can be presented and represented in performance. Her recent show, Patience, focuses on the post-operative body and draws on her own experience of motherhood and breast cancer. Emily is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Glamorgan exploring female performance, autobiography and the body. Emily is also a lecturer and researcher at the University of Glamorgan.
Recent performances include: Patience (2009/10), Ode to Morten Harket (2007), What is Burst Theatre (2005), Do I Come Here Often (2004), Restless Space (2003), 2270 Seconds (2002), BPM (2001/2). http://emilyunderwoodlee.wordpress.com/
Kerstin Bueschges, Senior Lecturer in Drama & Performing Arts at Anglia Ruskin University is an active practitioner, academic and pedagogue. She completed her practice-as-research PhD ‘On hair, fishtails and voices – resisting femininity in contemporary performance practice’ in 2007. Current research focuses on notions of temporality in live/performance art, self-referential performance and theatre practices, gender studies and choric theatre. Her work has been published in Platform and Feminist Review. Her latest performance Date, Mate, Fake, Bake (Showroom, Chichester Sept 2009; Bluecoat, Liverpool Nov 2009; Chapter, Cardiff March 2010) is an exploration of internet dating via one-on-one encounters in an intimate space. Other recent performance work includes: Mapping Maternity (2008/09) and Bloody Rosa – Part 1(of a continuing series), (2008). She is a founding member of Factory Floor, and a member of the international, interdisciplinary network and research project MaMSIE (mapping maternal subjectivity, identity and ethics).
Lena Simic, performance artist, born in Dubrovnik, Croatia, living in Liverpool, UK. Trained in theatre directing/acting at Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia and London Academy of Performing Arts. Completed practice as research PhD ‘(Dis)Identifying Female Archetypes in Live Art’ at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University in 2007. Lecturer in Contemporary Performance at Liverpool Hope University.
Recent solo performances include Masha Serghyeevna (the Bluecoat 2009), Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic (MAP Live, Carlisle, 2008), Joan Trial (Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, 2005) Medea/Mothers’ Clothes (Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, 2004) and Magdalena Makeup (Art Workshop Lazareti, Dubrovnik 2004). She is currently co-organizing The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, an art activist initiative run from a spare bedroom of her council house. Lena toured her performances nationally and internationally; her and the Institute’s work has been presented at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, Leeds Met Studio Theatre, V&A Museum, Artsadmin in London, Arnolfini in Bristol, Odin Teatret in Denmark, Teatro Guiñol in Santa Clara, Cuba amongst others.
Lorena Rivero de Beer is a performance artist, writer and producer born in Madrid, Spain. She trained as an art historian and theorist at the Art History Departments of The Autonoma University in Spain and the University of Essex in England. In 2009 she completed a PhD at the Department of Sociology of the University of Essex exploring the relationship between cultural politics, representation, aesthetics and subjectivity by looking at the work of the Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Her performance practice helps her to find a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice and explores mainly issues around the subjectivity of history, belonging and power.
Recently she co-founded Tuebrook Transnational, a company that collaborates with local residents of North Liverpool to create collectively site-specific outdoor performances/interventions that look at the psycho-geography of the area while promoting transnational solidarity.
She joined FF in June 2010.
Louie Jenkins is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester in the Performing Arts Department and the co-ordinator of the new Drama degree. Her specialism’s are in Performance Writing, Solo Performance, Devising and Applied and Interventionist Theatre. She has completed the first year of a practice-based PhD at Brunel University, where her research focus is on bio politics, death and performance. Her Master’s degree is in Writing for Performance. She has worked as a professional actress, writer and director in England and USA, and is a founding member of Factory Floor, a network for female solo performers.
Factory Floor 