Farnham Maltings and Orient Productions are delighted to announce that four creative partnership grants have been awarded to enable Egyptian and British performing artists and companies to develop new performance works together and imaginatively test new ways of collaborating without meeting in person as part of the New Conversations programme supported British Council and Arts Council England.

The selected partnerships will also have the opportunity to have their work presented as part of Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) and Arab Arts Focus in October 2022.

The New Conversations programme encourages artists and arts organisations based in different parts of the world to develop new creative ideas, and exchange knowledge and practice. Originally launched in 2018 as a two-year pilot to increase collaborations between Canadian and British artists with an emphasis on new partnerships, physical exchange and artist mobility, the initiative is now being adapted for UK artists to exchange with peers in other countries and encourages remote collaborations in response to the ongoing climate crisis and challenges to arts mobility.

The selected New Conversations, UK-Egypt creative partnerships are:

Abdalla Daif (Egypt/ Netherlands) and Lucy Ellinson (UK)

Beyond locality: the Thatcher Effect will review and discuss the effects of Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal policies at the social level and aim to highlight the global connectedness of these interventions in a human and relatable way through the experiences of a family based in North Wales and a family in northern Egypt.

Milk Presents (UK), Nagham Salah Othman (Egypt/ Sudan) and Sami Yassin (Egypt)

A live dance-film audio experience will be developed to create a space for play, communion, and encounter, online and on the streets of Cairo and London. In reaction to hardening borders, It is certain that we too shall see / Wa yubqa wajho rabboka / wehna kaman hanshoof will use the Sufi tradition of dance as a means to transcend the physical and a starting point for surmounting distance and difference, through creativity encountering humanity - and perhaps divinity.

Kristin Bacheva (UK) and Ahmad Auiby (Egypt)

Drawing inspiration from the experience of isolation during COVID-19, Poetic cybernetics will explore the idea of blending physical and virtual bodies, and how technology has facilitated this blending by expanding our perception of reality. Using Artificial Intelligence, the artists will translate physical movement into a digital visual performance.

Joel Cahen (UK) and Shaymaa Shoukry (Egypt)

The Depths will be an exploration of water as a space for movement, performance and listening – working with themes that contrast womb-like environments and intimate experiences with public spaces, the fragility of our marine environment and ecosystem, and the use of water as a shared resource, building block of life and carrier of our collective consciousness. A dance film shot underwater in the Red Sea and at a Cairo pool with a sound composition will form the basis for an underwater live performance.

Follow this link to find a full press release: Supporting international artistic exchange with sustainability in mind: New Conversations, UK-Egypt creative partnerships announced.