Cade & MacAskill
Cade & MacAskill are actually four people, who work together to create, and present, singular, complicated worlds on stage.
Consisting of Glasgow’s Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill, plus Tim Spooner from Newlyn and Yas Clarke of Bristol, Cade & MacAskill are four artists working as one to present staged worlds which open up ideas of queerness and human and non-human experience.
As their name suggests, the collective was initially a collaboration between artists Cade and MacAskill. Whilst working on 2022’s The Making of Pinocchio, a semi-autobiographical theatre show which draws on their experience of gender transition, the pair invited set and costume designer Spooner and sound designer Clarke to collaborate. Energised by the possibilities their different specialisms as artists brought to this collaboration, and by the fluidity with which they worked together, they have continued to work as a foursome.
Their artistic inspirations include the UK/German collective Gob Squad who explore the possibilities of live video within live performance. They also draw interest from the work of philosophers, particularly Jakob Johann von Uexküll, Donna Haraway, and Thomas Nagel, who have all written about consciousness and animals. ‘We enjoy playing with intricate esoteric ideas and finding ways to embody them, put our own spin on them, and translate them for a live audience’.
Cade and MacAskill's previous project The Making of Pinocchio blended live performance and video to create a moving multi-media work about trans relationships, queer possibilities and what it means to be ‘real’. Since its debut performance in 2022, it has been performed at numerous venues around the world.
‘The Southbank Centre has always been part of all our lives. Over the years we’ve all seen work there that has changed our understanding of how ambitious and experimental we could or might want to be as artists.’
Cade & MacAskill’s Southbank Centre Studio will see them continuing to develop an as yet untitled stage project which is broadly about themes of time and sensation and considers how time might be experienced by others – both human and animal. They’ll be using their time in our Purcell Room to expand on the possibilities of presenting both live and mediated action using video, work which they initially began to explore during residencies with New Dioramas Theatre.
They hope to use their time at the Southbank Centre to get a firmer perspective on what form their show will eventually take. ‘The opportunity to develop this work with the support of the Southbank Centre is hugely important to us. At this early stage of the project, being able to work in a big space with access to its technical resources means we can create and imagine with ambition, what this work might eventually become’.
‘We really appreciate the Southbank Centre as a space where a range of creatives and audiences are invited in to share the work, and we hope to be influenced by the particular configuration of people that move through the space during our residency.