I went out to film the storm (2019) is a live performance of a text that scrolls through natural disasters, Sonic the hedgehog, Ted Bundy and melting ice. Thinking with the never ending screen 'scroll' as a way of viewing the world a poetic text spills images off the screen and into a hot world.
'Jenny has created a new genre, the writing is like new paint’
Tim Crouch
I Went Out to Film the Storm
Creative Team:
Writer/Performer/Concept: Jenny Swingler
Video Artist: Hazel Brill
Supported by Ede and Ravenscroft
Performed at Camden People's Theatre in 2019 and as part of the Digital Disruptions - Live Performance as Glitch event in 2021
Gills is a live performance. A response to the Nine Elms regeneration building project on the River Thames. A boy with gills seeks out the wet in a luxury elite living tower.
Shown as part of Live Drafts 2018 at The Yard Theatre and Corroding the Now: Poetry- Science -SF event.
Collaborations
Performing Wild Geographies. I was invited as a writer/responder to the Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex. Out of this residency came two pieces of writing, Hammer Rabbit and The A24 is a Hug,
This project was funded as part of Professor Jamie Lorimer's British Academy Fellowship at the University of Oxford.
David Overend discusses Hammer Rabbit Field Works: wild experiments for performance research in the Studies in Theatre and Performance Journal.
"The muddy, collapsed temporalities evoked by Swingler’s verse are revealed through a combination of environmental, palaeoecological, geographical, performative and literary entanglements"
You can read the article in full here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682761.2021.1895543
A Numbness in the Mouth (Dir. Kevin Gaffney, 2016)
In 2016 I performed in Kevin Gaffney's film A Numbness in the Mouth.
In an Ireland of the near-future; a self-sustaining, militarized island where climate change has benefited agricultural production. Shackleton’s Mill in Strawberry Beds, Dublin, provides the context for the film’s two protagonists to explore the role of women in the mill, alongside our relationship to food and its production in a series of staged scenes, monologues and analogies.
Film supported by the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, Arts Council of Ireland Film Project Award and Fingal County Council.
Clout Theatre
From 2011-2015 I was Co-Artistic Director of Clout Theatre. We made big messy physical shows. We trained at Ecole Jaques Lecoq and the LEM (Laboratory for Movement Studies)
Feast
A show about food. The evolution of humanity through the triptych of a daily routine: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.
'[Hieronymous] Bosch would applaud... brilliantly disturbing, not least because of the belly laughs that it serves up'
★★★★ The Herald
'An hour long riot of macabre buffoonery worth savouring'
★★★★ The List
‘An audacious, profound, ridiculous and oh-so-naughty provocation from one of the finest, most original physical theatre companies in the world.’ ★★★★★ Across The Arts
'Dionysian in an up to date way... a fabulous feast of visual imagery that we gobble up with delight'
TOTAL THEATRE
Creative Team:
Devised/Performed: Sacha Plaige, George Ramsay and Jenny Swingler
Director: Mine Cerci
Design: Naomi Kuyck-Cohen
Lighting: Erik Perera
Developed with support from Arts Council England, Battersea Arts Centre, Jackson's Lane, Theatre Madrasa and The Bike Shed Theatre.
The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity
Photos by The Other Richard
Join a support group as they meet to reflect upon their lives in the afterlife.
A plastic wasteland where domestic disputes last thousands of years, death doesn't work and milk-bottle-slurping children make the rules. A place of bloodbaths, shopping lists, premature burials and polite tea drinking.
Winner: Onestop arts audience award 2013
“I had goosebumps...beautifully tragic”
A Younger Theatre ★★★★
“The clowning genius of Clout is back!”
Edinburgh Guide ★★★★
“In Clout's hands, the screams may be deafening, but so too are the sighs of reassurance.”
The List ★★★★
“Vibrant, unnerving and enjoyable with as many laughs as there are winces”
Broadway Baby ★★★★
"The first time in a long time that I’ve spent an entire performance edgily wondering what might happen next,and it’s a real thrill.”
Total Theatre Magazine
Developed with the support of Battersea Arts Centre, ShowRoom, Owl Barn Residencies and Arts Council England
