Founded by Inua Ellams in 2005, The Midnight Run is a walking, dusk to dawn, arts and culture-inspired urban journey that gathers complete strangers to play, walk, explore, create art and reclaim streets and hidden spaces whilst the city sleeps.
To celebrate 10 years of growing success this event sees The Bush Theatre join forces with the Almeida Theatre, The Albany, and the Roundhouse for four synchronised Midnight Run events across the city.
WHEN AND WHERE?
Our Midnight Run will begin at the Bush Theatre at 6pm, Saturday July 18 and will finish at 6am, Sunday, July 19 in Central London. Participants are advised to dress for the weather, bring a pen, a first class stamp, cash for food, an Oyster card and above all a healthy sense of adventure.
Cause we can’t see stars for fumes
we turn to smashed glass, believing
shards shine like constellations do
This 3min film is a taster of what to expect.
50% of funds raised will support Liter of Light, a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring eco-friendly solar bottle-bulbs to communities living in darkness.
James brings to life characters, rituals and events that look at the place of ritual and play in contemporary societies. He is influenced by ethnographic and anthropological studies producing participatory performances and games, which generate documentation and objects portraying evolutionary steps.
His practice has developed from an on-going interest into the social, cultural and gestural qualities that define a group or individual as being inside or outside of the whole. Through stress testing fictional societies, James works seek to question social and cultural constructs.
Living under bracken shelters in Sherwood Forest for 8 days in 2014, James worked with a group of 8 artists and a baby to trace the origin of a fictional isolated woodland people. Recently, he has used dereliction as the backdrop and catalyst for a series of non-verbal midnight pervasive performances that seek to imagine a brighter future.
His 2014 solo show ‘Wasteland Rituals’ at Legion-TV gallery marked the culmination of a 3-month research period during which 5 artists lived between the gallery and small woodlands in Hackney. Resulting in an object and ritual based conversation between fictional communities and forest-based interlopers.
In 2013, Artsadmin chose James as one of their bursary award winners. His subsequent artist research and participation in the Nordic Larp scene led him across Europe and to develop new performances involving Lapers. Subsequently James‘ brought UK Dancers and Danish Larpers together for a performance about at Siobhan Davies which and has since been a key figure in establishing the Nordic Larp scene in London.
Born in Birmingham (UK), Adam James has been performing, running Larps and exhibiting nationally and internationally since 2007 at programmes such as The Artist and the City (Stoke on Trent), Knutpunkt (Sweden), LUPA (London), V22 Summer Club (London) and at spaces such as the Jerwood Space (London), ICA (London), Tate Britain (London), W139 (Amsterdam), Legion-TV (London), Siobhan Davies Dance (London), Vitrine Gallery (London). He has collaborated with choreographers Hamish MacPherson, Andrew Graham, artist’s boyleANDshaw, Frank Millward and has recently been awarded the Artsadmin Bursary, 4 successive Arts Council England grants and is currently on a one year residency at Tate Learning.
Grace is a photographer and filmmaker based in London. She works with a diverse range of clients on commissions and facilitates workshops in photography and video. She is passionate about using still and moving imagery to communicate ideas that inspire individual and social transformation and she’s committed to empowering women and men by capturing their stories, beauty and developing their creative skills. Grace has a particular interest in helping people who have issues around body image, using photography as a means to show people a more positive perspective . Grace is also widely known for her Self-Marriage, which made global headlines last autumn.
Imogen Butler-Cole trained at RADA and LISPA and has worked in theatre and television in the UK, France, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and Bangladesh.
For her theatre company THEWHATWORKS she has directed devised multilingual productions of A Story and A Song; Dreamtime; PiNiK; Fora das Correntes and Much Ado About Nothing.
Imogen has trained actors, students and teachers in Shakespeare and physical theatre in theatres and schools across the world and has worked as a guest lecturer at the Universities of Oxford, Westminster, Loughborough, Kalina (Mumbai), Jadavpur (Kolkata), Jahangirnagar (Dhaka) and Dammam (Saudi Arabia).
Inua is an award winning poet and a playwright. Born in Nigeria in 1984, he began the Midnight Run in 2005 after a bus failed to arrive on time. Choosing to walk the bus route, he discovered the tranquility of a city at night and wished to share the experience with other urban dwellers.
Keith Jarrett writes poetry and short fiction. In 2010, he simultaneously held the title of London and UK Poetry Slam Champion. He has since run workshops and co-ordinated school poetry festivals in the UK and beyond. In 2013, his five-star reviewed poetry show Identity Mix-Up debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. In 2014, he completed the pioneering Spoken Word Educators programme, teaching in a secondary school while studying for an MA at Goldsmiths University; he also won the Rio International Poetry Slam championship at the FLUPP favela literary festival. Keith’s fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines, including Attitude and Tell Tales IV. His influences range from Caribbean trickster figures to Latin American surrealist authors. He is writing his first novel and a new pamphlet of his poems, I Speak Home, was published in May. Keith is also a Lambda’s Writers’ Retreat Fellow 2015.
Niamh Mckernan is a movement teacher and director. She teaches actors and opera singers as well as creating original performance works with artists from other fields.
She is a founding member of the company Biography and teaches internationally. Her teaching is influenced by the work of Jacques Lecoq, Laban, Trish Arnold, Feldenkrais and Yoga and has included working for the Royal Ballet Denmark, Trinity College Dublin and The Royal Academy of Music.
Tiu de Haan is a facilitator, celebrant, writer and singer.
Tiu reminds people of all ages how to see the magical in the mundane, empowering them to see the world with shining eyes. She is passionately devoted to the creation of experiential adventures that connect us to each other and to our own creativity, playfulness and sense of possibility.
She brings this magic to her work both as a creative workshop facilitator and also as a non-denominational celebrant, helping people to create meaningful and original weddings, funerals and other bespoke ceremonies.
Tiu founded a successful not-for-profit reconnecting parents and children through play, and also co-produced an immersive theatre production in the USA that was covered by the New York Times. She is also a professional singer-songwriter and is currently writing her first book, a creative guide for 21st century rituals.
