Living Pictures is a pop-up avant-garde puppet theatre show that combines soundscape and performance to breathe new life into local stories, legends and histories. Staging a playful, slightly absurd DIY performance near Noble’s Amusements on the waterfront, the project revisits Portobello’s history of travelling shows, pop-up theatres and sideshows.
Through a socially-engaged research process of radical listening, that has involved hearing people’s memories of the area, Living Pictures manifests a return to the idea of a ‘people’s theatre’ – centring performances made entirely for the pleasure of the community. Cowley’s core enquiry is about democratising space and joy: revisiting the ‘pleasure grounds’ of the past. In a world where much of our interaction now happens online and physical gathering spaces are being defunded or erased, the work asks: whose voices are being heard, and whose stories risk being forgotten?
About
Fibi Cowley is an artist and puppeteer based in Glasgow. Inspired by hyper-imagination and counter-cultural mischief, Fibi draws on the legacy of puppetry as an outsider art form to disrupt and reimagine the ways in which we relate to the world around us.