Digital Programme: Rachel Mars – FORGE

Safety
For safety reasons, please arrive wearing a long sleeve top, long trousers covering your ankles with no exposed skin and closed covered shoes. Please note that if you aren't wearing the appropriate clothing you will be refused entry. A protective welding helmet and apron will be provided to wear at all times during your visit.  According to Jewish custom you'll be invited to wash your hands before leaving the space.

Audience care
The age guidance is 16+

The themes of this installation link to genocide and the Holocaust, without direct imagery, and there will be flashing lights, loud noises and unexplained noise within the space. There is a quiet space available outside the installation, please speak to a member of our front of house team if you would like to take a break there.

Accessibility
The route around the installation is fully wheelchair accessible.

Rachel Mars
Creator and Performer
​​Rachel Mars is a writer and performer based in the UK. She works at the cross-over of performance art and theatre, interrogating the possibilities of live assembly; female, Jewish and Queer identities and their intersections; and the ways cultural and political constucts affect everyday human behaviours. Her recent performance work includes: YOUR SEXTS ARE SHIT: OLDER BETTER LETTERS, an archive of sex and desire; OUR CARNAL HEARTS, a choral dissection of envy; ROLLER, with Mars.tarrab, a fight show about female aggression and Roller Derby, and STORY #1/#3, an ongoing collaboration with Greg Wohead on radical narrative. She has won a Total Theatre Award and the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. For screen, she was a participant on the inaugural UK and Ireland Writers Lab, and a finalist on 4Stories 2002. She has performed all over the UK and internationally, including recently at Under The Radar in NYC, UMS Michigan, Barbican London, Brisbane International Festival, Brighton International Festival, Fusebox Festival Austin and On The Boards in Seattle.
rachelmars.org

Wendy Hubbard
Dramaturg and Co-director
Wendy Hubbard makes new theatre and performance. Previous work with Rachel Mars includes: OUR CARNAL HEARTS, as dramaturg and co-director, and YOUR SEXTS ARE SHIT: OLDER BETTER LETTERS, as dramaturg. She has been involved in FORGE since the inception of the project. Other recent projects include co-writing and co-directing Kingdom Come with Gemma Brockis for the RSC’s Mischief Festival of new and experimental work at The Other Place. She has worked with artists including Melanie Wilson (as outside-eye on Autobiographer and Landscape II, and dramaturg on Opera for the Unknown Woman) and Jamie Wood (as co-director, dramaturg and co-writer on Beating McEnroe, O No! and I am a Tree). Projects she has worked on have won a number of awards including the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award in 2004, a Total Theatre Award for Innovation, and a Scotsman Fringe First. Wendy Hubbard is also an academic researcher and teacher, with an AHRC funded PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. She lives in Frome, Somerset with her family, and is developing a multi-form project about psychic solitude, and the relationship between performance and compulsion, under the title RECOVERY/ DISCONNECT.
wendyhubbard.net

Dinah Mullen
Sound Designer
Dinah Mullen trained in Sound and Image Design at Rose Bruford, and is a performance sound artist and designer for live and digital performance, specialising in dance, interactive storytelling and devising. Dinah’s practice is currently focused on the relationships between humans and the natural world and humans and technology. Selected work in sound design for theatre and dance includes: Attempts on Her Life, Icarus and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Tobacco Factory; Cracked Nuts on Northern UK tour, with The Glitterbomb Dancers/Joseph Mercier; Habibti Driver at Bolton Octagon; Remedy for Memory at the Assembly Roxy and Dancebase; Squirrel at The Unicorn Theatre and The Egg; The Bolds at The Unicorn; Bobby and Amy on UK tour; YOUR SEXTS ARE SHIT: OLDER BETTER LETTERS on tour in the UK and US, with Rachel Mars; The Daughter In Law, Richard III and The Plague at the Arcola; ROLLER at the Barbican Pit, with Mars.tarrab; and Stella at Theatre Royal Brighton, Holland Festival - Brakke Grond and Hoxton Hall. Dinah Mullen is a recipient of the Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice Award (2021-22), and the WECA Creative Business Grant Bristol Council (2021) and was nominated for Best Sound Design at the Off West End Awards 2018.
dinahmullen.com

Naomi Kuyck-Cohen
Designer
Naomi Kuyck-Cohen is a creative collaborator and designer for performance and space, and regularly co-designs with Joshua Gadsby. Recent design work includes I, Joan at Shakespeare’s Globe; The Chairs, co-designed with Cécile Trémolières at the Almeida; in a word at the Young Vic; The Greatest Play in the History of the World at the Royal Exchange, Traverse Theatre and Trafalgar Studios; BODIES with Ray Young for Unlimited; Nightclubbing with Ray Young at The Lowry, CPT and on tour; OUT with Ray Young at The Yard and on tour; Amsterdam with ATC at the Orange Tree and Theatre Royal Plymouth; and The Tyler Sisters at Hampstead Theatre. Co-designs with Joshua Gadsby include: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with Kandinsky at the Royal Exchange; Trap Street with Kandinsky at the New Diorama and Schaubühne Berlin; Dinomania with Kandinsky at the New Diorama; Trainers, or the brutal unpleasant atmosphere of this most disagreeable season at the Gate; The Extinction Trilogy for Hester Stefan Chillingworth; The Winston Machine with Kandinsky at the New Diorama and on tour; We Should Definitely Have More Dancing at Oldham Coliseum; NDT Broadgate; and New Diorama’s cafe and public spaces.

Joshua Gadsby
Lighting Designer
Joshua Gadby is a lighting designer and creative collaborator working across theatre, dance and live art. He regularly co-designs set, costume, and lighting with designer Naomi Kuyck-Cohen. Lighting designs include: Who Killed My Father at the Tron and on UK tour; The Beauty Queen of Leenane at Theatre by the Lake; Alice in Wonderland at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester; Gulliver's Travels (lighting co-design) at The Unicorn Theatre; Robin Hood: Legend of the Forgotten Forest at Bristol Old Vic; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Leicester Curve and on tour with ETT; in a word at the Young Vic; A Kettle of Fish at The Yard; The Tyler Sisters and Alligators at Hampstead Theatre; Still Ill at the New Diorama with Kandinksy; As We Like It, Dragging Words and In Good Company at The Place; and RISE: Macro vs. Micro for Old Vic New Voices. Co-designs include: The Winston Machine at the New Diorama; There Is A Light That Never Goes Out: Scenes from the Luddite Rebellion at the Royal Exchange Manchester; Trainers at The Gate; Dinomania at the New Diorama, and Trap Street at the New Diorama and Schaubühne, Berlin, both for Kandinsky theatre.

Helen Mugridge
Production Manager
Helen Mugridge is an experienced production manager. Her previous credits include: Ancient Futures for Unlimited and Upswing; Wuthering Heights for Inspector Sands and China Plate; A Dead Body in Taos for Rachel Bagshaw with Fuel on UK tour; Oh Mother for Rash Dash on UK tour; Cupid’s Revenge for the New Art Club on UK tour; FORGE for Rachel Mars at the Transform Festival; Chasing Hares and Best of Enemies at the Young Vic; RED and Likely Story at Wales Millennium Centre; Gaping Hole with Rachel Mars and Greg Wohead at Ovalhouse, London; Little Wimmin for Figs in Wigs on UK tour including the Southbank Centre; Class for Scottee in Edinburgh, Canada and on UK tour; Atomic 50, an interactive installation for Waltham Forest Borough of Culture; Les Voyages for Company XY at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival; Idol for Jamal Gerald at Transform Festival and Theatre in the Mill Bradford; I’m a Phoenix, Bitch for Bryony Kimmings at the Grand Hall, BAC and international dates; Fat Blokes for Scottee at Edinburgh and on UK tour; The Shape of the Pain for Rachel Bagshaw and Chris Thorpe with China Plate at Edinburgh, in Germany and at BAC; and Golem for 1927 in the West End, at The Space/BBC and on UK and international tour.

James Ball
Sound Engineer
James Ball is a multidisciplinary engineer and technologist with a specialism in live sound and sound installation. He has extensive experience working both with outdoor performance and more traditional live music and theatre. Recently he has created a number of digital, interactive works for museums and online. Work and projects include Saint Etienne (front of house sound), Fahrenheit 451, 1000 Feet Deep, Periplum (front of house sound), Ring Out, Points of Departure, Ray Lee (design and production management, Found Sound Coventry, Found Sound Cycling and Kieran Lucas (coding and design).

Claire Summerfield at Tandem Works
Executive Producer
Tandem Works: is award winning Independent Producer Claire Summerfield. We support companies/artists developing and presenting performance-based work; from one person shows to site specific multi-disciplinary productions to and international tours. Each partnership responds to the needs of the artist/company and may include artistic and organisational strategy development, project design, partnership development and mentoring. Our current portfolio includes: Anatomical, New Art Club, Rachel Mars, Second Hand Dance and Takeshi Matsumoto, and past relationships include Mars.tarrab, Tom Dale Company, 30 Bird and Michael Pinchbeck. In 2017 Claire Summerfield secured Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation status for Tom Dale Company and in 2023/24 for Second Hand Dance for whom she has acted as Executive Producer since 2015.
tandemworks.uk

Pilar Santelices
Associate Producer
Pilar Santelices is an independent Creative Producer based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, where she works with performative projects across the world. After studying drama in Santiago, Chile, she moved to London to do an MA in Social Education and Community Development at Goldsmiths, and later completed an MBA in Arts & Cultural Management in Paris. Pilar Santelices has worked in the fields of education, social and cultural development for different organisations and in different countries. As well as performing, she has directed and produced many creative projects such as contemporary operas, a web series, artistic workshops, residencies and international tours. In the last six years, her work has had a particular focus on the area of performing arts for young audiences and recently she has been exploring the field of creative technology and VR.