Ysaline Rochat
Director & curator of Festival Les Urbaines
Since 2017, Ysaline Rochat co-directs with Samuel Antoine the festival Les Urbaines (Lausanne, Switzerland), a bold platform dedicated to emerging aesthetics. She was formerly the administrator and a member of the curatorial committee of the festival for several years. In her career, she has worked for different festivals, innovative dance/theatre companies and independent structures in the fields of performing arts and cinema in Switzerland. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Lausanne (English literature, History, Social sciences).
Festival Les Urbaines
Lausanne, Switzerland
Every December, Les Urbaines festival explores emerging aesthetics over the course of a single weekend. By encouraging the experimentation of alternatives to previously established forms, the festival provides an indispensable — and totally free — opportunity to discover around forty different local and international propositions that open the way for new artistic languages. Les Urbaines mixes visual, sound-based and performative forms throughout nearly a dozen different venues in Lausanne, Renens and Chavannes.
Next edition: December 2-3-4, 2022 (exhibition at the Espace Arlaud -> December 11)
Clayton Lee
Director & curator of Rhubarb Festival
Clayton Lee is a Toronto-based performance artist and curator. Previous performances include (◕‿◕✿) at The Performance Arcade in Wellington, New Zealand and Chapter’s EXPERIMENTICA in Cardiff, Wales; Duets for Beginners (SummerWorks); Chew, Chew, Swallow, Spit (Rhubarb Festival); and Informal Beginnings (Katzman Contemporary’s Duration & Dialogue II). His publication Brandy, the Virgin Slayer – Missed Connections appears as part of the BOOK MACHINE Project at Centre Pompidou in Paris, now part of its permanent Kandinsky Collection. Clayton has been the Rhubarb Festival Director at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre since 2019 and is also the Managing Producer of Selfconscious Productions, which presented the annual CanadaHub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 2017 to 2019.
The Rhubarb Festival
Toronto, Canada
Produced by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the world’s largest and oldest queer theatre, Rhubarb transforms Buddies into a hotbed of experimentation, with artists challenging our notions of what art-making and art-watching can be. The Rhubarb Festival is Canada’s longest-running festival of experimental performance and is the place to encounter the most adventurous ideas in performance and to catch familiar and unfamiliar artists venturing into uncharted territory. (Next edition: February 2023)
Karl Taylor
Director & curator BUZZCUT Festival
Karl Taylor is a producer and curator for Live Art and contemporary performance. He undertook the Artsadmin Producing Traineeship in 2014, and has subsequently worked with arts organisations around the world, including Liberty Festival of Disability Arts & Mons European Capital of Culture. He joined BUZZCUT in 2015 and has led the organisation as Administrative Director since 2017. Outside of BUZZCUT he has worked as an independent producer for artists such as Lucy McCormick, Tania El Khoury & Scottee and works as Associate producer for Take Me Somewhere, an international performance festival & year-round sector support organisation developing radical performance in Scotland.
BUZZCUT Festival
Glasgow, Scotland
Since 2012, //BUZZCUT// has run a Live Art & experimental performance festival across the bars, theatres, galleries, shops and community centres across Glasgow. Founded with no funding, the festival champions grassroots community support, to create a welcoming, friendly space for artists making raw and challenging work to take genuine risks with their practises, exchange ideas and make connections with their peers in a supportive environment. In addition to the Festival, BUZZCUT delivers a programme of year-round support, through bespoke artist development opportunities and their extremely popular monthly performance platform Double Thrills.