EVENTS: Sick! festival

Welcome to the first ever SICK! Festival this spring

SICK!, the latest international arts festival to come to Brighton, looks at new ways of talking about and dealing with the experience of sickness of all kinds: physical, mental, ethical and spiritual. It uses different art-forms to delve into how our bodies and minds can act against us and against society’s expectation of what is normal.

Highlights from the two-week programme include the UK premiere of Dutch performance ‘Eleonora’ in which Jochem Stavenuiter’s mother suffered a stroke and, as a consequence, lost her memory. This insightful performance is about forgetting who you are, and the hope that one day Eleonora will be cured after weekly visits to an Alzheimer’s clinic.

In performance and dance piece ‘Parkin’son’, a father and son confront each other on stage, telling the story of their relationship through their two very different bodies: a 62-year-old therapist with no dance experience and a 31-year-old choreographer.

In ‘Mental’, artist activist the vacuum cleaner presents an autobiographical performance told through psychiatric records, police intelligence files and corporate injunctions collected through the Data Protection Act, which declare his mental-being.

Other events in SICK! Festival include advanced film screenings of Amour, Our Children and Asmma, and the debate ‘Who Says I’m Sick?’ which looks at the way that illness can be seen as a social, rather than physical or medical, condition.

The festival is aimed at anyone who has ever been sick, cared for someone who is sick or struggled to find the right words to talk about these difficult issues… surely that is all of us!

The Basement, Jubilee Square, Duke of Yorks & The Old Market, Friday 1– Friday 15 March 2013. For a full programme of events & ticket prices see www.thebasement.uk.com