SPRING: RUNNER

Setting a pace, covering distance, breaking a sweat. In pursuit of knowledge, a place, or an idea. Step by step, one after the other. Hot on the heels of a feeling. You are invited to accompany her, this unfamiliar body making its way through the city. Is she seeking something, or is she escaping? Heavy calves, beating hearts, breath steaming from our nostrils. Working hard, and being good.

RUNNER is a performance about running and exhaustion. It explores the intertwined and contradictory joys, miseries, and potentials of both physical exhaustion and exhaustion as a sociopolitical condition. What kind of proximity, intimacy, and pleasure can be produced by hearing a body push itself? And why do we value people when they push themselves to their limits?

Ira Brand is an artist, writer, performer, and theatre-maker. She graduated from Dartington College of Arts in 2007 and completed the DAS Theatre Masters in Amsterdam in 2019. Ira creates live, interdisciplinary performances, from solo works to participatory pieces, in which she sets off from personal starting points to address broader social, political and formal issues.

Ira’s work has been widely presented internationally. Since 2022 she is Associate Maker at Frascati Producties in Amsterdam. She is also one of the co-directors of Forest Fringe, an award-winning artist-led collective, with whom she ran a festival venue at the Edinburgh Fringe for ten years, and has delivered projects, festivals, and residencies in London, Hong Kong, New York, Auckland, Dublin, Lisbon, Kanazawa, and Salvador da Bahia.

Ira’s performances have been presented at Malavoadora Porto; TNT Festival Terrassa; Kanagawa Arts Theatre Yokohama; Arnolfini Bristol; The Yard, Shoreditch Town Hall, The Wellcome Collection, and Ovalhouse London; Buzzcut Festival Glasgow; Monty Kultuurfaktorij Antwerp; CAMPO Ghent; The Basement Auckland; Altofest Naples; and the first Paris Globe Festival in 2024.

SPRING presented the production Ways to Submit of Ira during the Culturele Zonnacht 2024 in Utrecht.