OurHaus Festival: Rethinking the Total Work of Art

For four days students from different programmes across Central Saint Martins will work in the Platform Theatre together with Co-Artistic Directors of Waste Paper Opera Company: Klara Kofen and James Oldham. After critically engaging with Bauhaus theory and performance, they will create a new work for our times. Scavenging historic texts and performance archives for what is relevant, tearing up what is not, experimenting with different forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and proposing new ideas.

James Oldham is a composer, performer, curator and researcher focusing on comic timing in music, with a focus on crossing borders of music genre and performance context. Through his work as Co-Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera Company, a London-based experimental music theatre and performance collective, James has developed an approach to interdisciplinary collaboration that questions what theatre is/is not/can be. James studied at the Birmingham Conservatoire (with Junior Fellowship) and is undertaking a PhD at the University of Southampton and Bath Spa University, supported by AHRC.

Klara Kofen writes, makes films, directs, designs and builds costumes and sets out of discarded materials. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera. Her work is influenced by her research into eighteenth century pornography, the French Revolution, futurism, things that crawl inside and outside of the human body, and the impact new technologies have on notions of agency and responsibility. Klara studied at Glasgow University, Oxford University and Guildhall. She was born into a Greek/Polish family in Germany.