Pink Fringe Presents PERFORMR at Brighton Fringe This Weekend

Pink Fringe presents PERFORMR at Brighton Fringe: today 3rd and Sunday 4th May 2014, 12 - 6pm and Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th May 2014, 12 - 6pm.

This May, Pink Fringe are excited to launch their sensational new art cruising app, Performr, developed with performance artist Brian Lobel. Apps like Grindr and Scruff have spilled into mainstream culture, with Tinder and countless others changing the way we meet up, pick up, and break up. Performr offers you the opportunity to hook up with an artist to digitally experience a specially made performance or, if you say all the right things, to experience it in the flesh...

LGBTQ people have always been at the forefront of innovative means of social networking, historically as a way of escaping detection by the straight world. Performr playfully engages with this illicit heritage.

All you have to do is download the app from the App Store (iPhone) or Google Play (Android) and sign up to make a profile. This will allow you to interact with the performers who will be online and ready during selected weekends in May.

Scottee, Stacy Makishi, Nomy Lamm, Steve Nice and Root Experience have all been commissioned to create amazing new works specifically for the app; these vary from a one-on- one performance to a Skype conversation with a performer in America. Welcome to the digital playground of Performr!

Scottee presents Guess Who? which uses Performr to find the nearest, willing 'player' to extract personal information from. Our online lives leave us exposed - our thoughts, holiday snaps and previous misdemeanours are available to anyone who knows how to use Google. But, are those behind the selfie really who they say they are? It's provocative and a bit frightening but it ends in an innocent board game.

Multidimensional artist and professional show-off Steve Nice has created Cilla Blackbeard's Bootleg Celebrity Blind Date which threatens to wreak romantic havoc on Brighton. Having failed to discover any actual famous people on her nautical adventures, Cilla has created some counterfeit celebrity treasures of her very own and now it's your chance to win a date with a superstar via the Performr app!

Root Experience want to explore the split fragments of personality that we create when presenting our identity to the online world. Audience members will interact with various characters through Virtual on the Performr app and enter into a dialogue of want and need that sparks an adventure to find that character in the real world. Does the online experience relate to the offline one?

From wherever she may be in her hometown of San Francisco, Nomy Lamm will be serenading audiences with a personalised song about whatever it is they need. It could be a cup of coffee, love, freedom from writer's block, a spanking or scent-free shampoo.

And last, but by no means least, is Stacy Makishi's Vespers which offers a transcendent one-to- one experience that will have you down on your knees and praying for mercy. It will open your heart, your mind and your legs. Stained glass never looked so good.

The show runs Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th May 2014, 12 - 6pm Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th May 2014, 12 - 6pm For more, follow @pinkfringeuk or @brightonfringe, or visit http://www.pinkfringe.org.uk/2013/09/performr/ or follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/pinkfringe.

Scottee is a 28-year-old performer, director, artist, broadcaster and writer from Kentish Town, North London. He is a regular contributor for BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends, Huffington Post and i-D magazine. He is currently an associate artist at Olivier award winning company Duckie and the iconic Roundhouse. He has wowed audiences at Barbican, Royal Opera House, Tate Britain, Roundhouse, ICA and Royal Festival Hall. Graced the pages and airwaves of Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Radio 4, Independent, W, Radio 1 and Sunday Times Style, included in i-D magazine's 100 portraits by Nick Knight, won the title of Time Out Performer of the Year and has grabbed the covers of both Time Out London & Independent on Sunday.

A new face in broadcasting Scottee has already interviewed some of the UK's biggest names including Jonathan Ross, Example, June Brown and two of the Spice Girls not to mention the fact he has thrown cake at Rihanna on the X Factor in a performance he devised for her Only Girl In the World performance and spat milkshake at Nick Grimshaw live on the BBC's coverage of Edinburgh Festival. As a director, Scottee has earned his formative stripes with the critically acclaimed Unhappy Birthday starring Amy Lame? and Do You Feel What I Feel - his debut music video for Rex The Dog. He is the creator of Hamburger Queen - a talent show for fat people and sell out variety show Camp. Scottee is currently touring his debut solo tour The Worst of Scottee which won Total Theatre Award in Edinburgh 2013.

Broken limbs, police questioning and the loss of 100s of pairs of high heels feature heavily in his determination to please his audiences as well as a brash, clumsy and naff approach to the arts leaving audiences elated, confused & often covered in confetti.

Steve Nice is a multidimensional artist and professional show off based in London. He has exhibited and performed across the UK and internationally in theatres, museums, art galleries, catwalk shows, homosexual drinking establishments and nightclub toilets. His work typically combines camp humour with a more sinister sensibility - informed by the darker side of pop culture.

Steve's high energy performance work can perhaps be best summarised as "showing off"; combining elements of hosting/compering, interactive live art, cabaret and dance. Steve purposefully seeks out forms in which audiences not only consume the work, but are also able to actively participate and create as well.

Recent work includes performing as part of fitness arts troupe Bodies International (Art Basel Miami Beach 2013) and with infamous alt-drag super-group The LipSinkers (monthly residency at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London).

Steve is a long term user of Grindr and has been on countless first dates.

Root Experience is an interactive theatre company that devises performances and workshops in Brighton and beyond. Their performances are always based on a structure that invites debate, direction and inclusion from the audience. By breaking down conventional actor/spectator relationships, they aim to enable audiences and performers to feel fully present to each moment of the work.

They are currently developing The Rise and Fall of Geo Goynes - an interactive theatre piece which smashes together digital and immersive theatre with urban gaming. The Rise and Fall of Geo Goynes was created during a residency at Blast Theory, and performed at The Old Market, Hove as part of Brighton Digital Festival, and York Theatre Royal in 2013.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician and voice teacher based in San Francisco. She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, a project that centres queers and people of colour with disabilities creating work about sexuality and social justice. She writes an advice column for Make/Shift magazine, and facilitates creative expression through writing workshops at the County Jail, as a vocal instructor with Bay Area Girls Rock Camp, and as a private vocal and creative coach. The scope of her musical and performative vision ranges from very big to very small - she has released solo albums with full touring stage productions, co-written musicals and rock operas including the grandiose post-apocalyptic rock opera The Transfused, and is in a lullabye band called ((double hug)) that has played campfires, basements and libraries around rural Washington State. She is currently working on an experimental novel titled 515 Clues, and a performance based on the book titled 515 Clues: A Kabbalistic Collabaret which will premiere at the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco in June 2014.

Stacy Makishi is a transplant from Hawaii who found paradise in Dalston, London in 1993. After graduating from the University of Hawaii she worked as a stand-up comic at the Comedy Store. But when her punchlines punched back, Stacy found herself happiest when making what New Yorkers called Performance. When she eventually washed up on English shores, Stacy began to work in diverse disciplines; her present work is the result of cross-fertilisation between theatre, comedy, film and visual art. Perhaps it is hard to pigeon-hole because the work has grown out of so many genres and media. It is as complex as it is accessible; humorous as it challenging; visual as it is literate. Over the past decade, Stacy Makishi has been awarded an ICA Attached Artist Award, Millennium Fellowship Award, a Live Art Development Agency One to One Bursary, an Artsadmin Bursary and the Franklin Furnace Award. She is an Associate Artist with Artsadmin, Chelsea Theatre and New Unity.

Her work ranges across solo performances for stage, large-scale outdoor participatory projects and intimate one-to-ones. Also a workshop leader and mentor of international renown, Stacy opens her making processes to the public through workshops and talks and is a guest lecturer at Queen Mary University, Chichester University, Brunel University and Harvard.

Pink Fringe produce theatre, cabaret, comedy, dance, immersive art and entertainment, presenting an exciting and ambitious programme of live performance throughout the year.

Pink Fringe are committed to the ongoing development of artists making queer work and we run commissioning projects and development schemes to support this.

They have presented successful seasons of work within Brighton Fringe in 2011, 2012 & 2013. Each year Pink Fringe's programme for Brighton Fringe is curated on an open-access basis.

Their aim is to challenge perceptions around diverse work, specifically art created by and about queer & LGBT people, placing it multiple contexts, some familiar, some new and unusual, with the aim of attracting new audiences.

Pink Fringe make queer and LGBT culture all year round! Brighton Fringe

Brighton Fringe (3 May - 1 June) is the largest arts festival in England and one of the largest fringe festivals in the world. It sets out to stimulate, educate and entertain a wide audience by providing a showcase for diverse art forms. Everyone can take part whilst enjoying a friendly and supportive environment. And all this in an iconic city with unique cultural heritage. See www.brightonfringe.org for details.

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