This is the first part of a 3-part series of blogs, charting my journey through the Glitter Heart performance lab, lovingly  held by Liz Clarke and Company and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, in summer 2025. 

A Bit Of Context

My dear pal and long-time collaborator, Liz Clarke, has been reflecting on her creative practice, remembering her early work as a Live Artist and wondering what that work would look like if she were to make it now, “in this… aging, queer, maternal body…” 

Wanting to share her inquiry with other aging female and non-binary artists, Liz Clarke and her team of wonderbeings created Glitter Heart, a space for older female and non-binary body-based performance artists to explore how their creative practices are impacted by living in these aging bodies.

Our group consisted of six performers, two facilitator-producers, a photographer, a film maker and a pastoral care / evaluation person. We met at SPARKS community space in Bristol for 6 sessions throughout July and August 2025. 

Here's a tiny video about our process

You can also find that video on youtube here.

About This Blog

This blog focuses on our first two evening sessions; 1.) exploring our own performance practices, drawing on inspiration from the Live Art Archives and 2.) an investigation of our relationship with collaboration through discussion and play. 

I have written two more blogs capturing the two weekend sessions that followed, where we supported each other to create and perform snippets of new performance work:

• Glitter Heart #2: Who Is This Performer?

• Glitter Heart #3: I Fell In A Shame Hole.

Before we dive in, I want to acknowledge that there were five other incredible artists having equally profound parallel journeys. Our individual pathways wove together to create the Glitter Heart experience. I’m not going to write about their discoveries here, but I will include links to any public documentation that they produce at the end of these blogs. 

A Photographic Journey

The photos throughout these three blogs were taken by Vonalina Cake photography. Von is an incredibly sensitive, collaborative photographer who was embedded in the process. This meant she was able to capture all my raw vulnerability as well and my joyful stupidity. 

The photos tell their own story of the process - so if all the words seem a bit much to you, feel free to just take a journey through Von’s incredible pictures.

My Personal Context

This opportunity came at the perfect time for me, I’d just moved back to Bristol after 3 years of wandering in the wilderness and I was looking to reconnect with Bristol’s creative community, as this new version of myself. It felt exciting and a bit scary to play the roles of performer and participant, rather than my much more familiar roles of facilitator and organiser, but it felt like the next obvious step in my exploration of opening more to collaboration and learning to let go of more responsibility. 

I was really intrigued to know what kind of performance work I might make now, as a 46 year old who’s been through a thing or two!

The Glitter Heart lab was an extremely rich experience, full of insights which will continue to nourish and shape me, as a performer and as a facilitator and as a human for years to come. These blogs are an attempt to capture some of the golden nuggets while they were still alive in my body. I hope they are useful for you too.

Session 1: Exploring The Live Art Archives

The project began with us taking inspiration from Bristol University’s Live Art Archives. We rummaged around to find the legacies of older female and non-binary artists; amongst them we discovered Bobby Baker who painted with food, Marcia Farquar who performed a fashion show whilst telling the stories of her clothes, and Liz Aggis who asked her audiences bold, uncomfortable questions; “Do I please you?” 

I was delighted to get to know this treasure trove of eccentrics, dare devils, depth divers and truth tellers and I absolutely adored discovering how they document their work; from characterful hand-written performance scores or maps, to obscure objects preserved in zip lock bags, to more traditional scripts, sketches, photos and film. 

We were then asked to describe a great performance experience from our past - a time where things had felt aligned and the work had felt congruent with our sense of self. We were then asked to make a score, map or visual record of this performance…

My Work in Progress #3: Connection (2017)

In 2017, I decided to cure myself of stage fright by creating and performing three solo shows over three months at The Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol. Maybe not the most obvious of strategies, but it’s how I decided to tackle it, and it worked!

Each month I gathered a wide range of research on particular topics (February: Stage Fright, March: Vulnerability and April: Connection) and invited different facilitators, musicians and playmates to support me in developing three semi-improvised shows. 

For my third show, I was facilitated by Franki Anderson, my beloved Fool teacher and mentor. She led me through a three-day process where I got to audition and recruit a cast of inner parts to support me in my stage improvisation. My cast included my Inner Critic, my Inner Academic (aka Patrica), my Inner Child, Grief, Compassion, my Chaos-Monger, and Healthy Grounded. 

Each part had their own spot on the stage and through our process, Franki supported me and my parts to find a constellation that would best support me on stage (and consequently in life - who knew?). We brought Healthy Grounded to the centre of the stage and made sure there was distance between my Inner Child and my Inner Critic. Compassion acted as a human shield, standing between the two of them.

Patrica, my Inner Academic, had a powerpoint presentation which included research on connection and data from a survey she’d put out to my community. During the performance, I was supported by two live musicians: singer / songwriter Jess Langton (who created two songs from the survey data) and responsive live loops from musician / Fool Simon Panrucker.

The Wardrobe Theatre is a sweet 100-seater studio that was the home of my company of fools, Beyond The Ridiculous, for many years. On the 2nd April 2017, the teal velvet seats were full of my friends, students and peers and three very special guests: my therapist, my supervisor and Franki Anderson herself. Building on what I’d discovered in the first two shows and with all the amazing structure and support in place - for one hour and 45 minutes at The Wardrobe Theatre, I flew!

Performance Score for WIP #3: Connection 

Ingredients 

• 1 cup of structure

• 1 cup of freedom

• 3 gallons of support

• A hefty dollop of familiarity

• 1 powerpoint presentation

• 2 songs (with harmonies)

• 1 black sparkly jumpsuit

• 2 red boots

• 1 beloved mentor

• 1 generous / maverick supervisor

• 1 kind and clear therapist

• 2 sensitive and talented musicians

• 1 simple theme

• 200 kind eyes

Session 2: Collaboration

Back to the Glitter Heart lab, summer 2025… 

In the second session, we were invited to reflect on our relationship with collaboration. One of the facilitators annotated our discussion onto post-it notes. Patrica has sorted them into the following categories.

What is collaboration?

• Equal power, time, resource, commitment

• Capacity to commit equally

• Equity

• Complimentary strengths and fairness

• Shared values / values align

• Journey taken together

What’s holding us?

• The container

• Common goal

• Timeframe and location

• Clarity of expectations

• Societal roles

• Consensual

• Safe space to bounce ideas / be together

• Being held in order to participate fully

• Continuous check ins (access)

• Tending to the collaboration within the process

• Give time for everyone's ideas to be explored

Useful qualities to bring to collaboration

• Modelling what we want to see around us

• Practice aligned with values

• Being comfortable in the ambiguity

• Communicating genuinely and honestly

• Direct, clear communication

• Trust

• Being curious

• Open to challenge

• Being accountable

• Joyful

What collaboration means to me

My early collaborations left me with a large variety of wounds which led to me becoming a Lone Wolf practitioner for a long time. This in turn led to burnout after burnout and so for the last few years, I have been exploring many different flavours of collaboration, in the hope of eventually curating a more sustainable life, free of burn-out…

Performance Experiment

After the discussion, we split into two groups and were invited to create a short performance about collaboration. We were offered prompts and a table full of creative materials to play with. 

My interest was still with the post-it note brainstorm on the wall and I wanted to embody the concepts we’d discussed, to see if that would help me understand more about healthy collaboration. So this is what I proposed, and a clown and a dancer chose to join me. 

We immediately dived into an extended improvisation, in response to the post-it notes. Here’s some of my notes from after the improvisation.

Collaborative Clown Improvisation

Start with something
Start with a word
Start with a movement
Start with not wanting to start
Just start

Find pleasure
Find a game
Find a pattern
Make a rule,
Then break it
Or don’t

Go deeper
Be curious
First draft
No censor
No edits
Free flow

Play with the stuck
Play with the ick
Play with the doubt, the fear and the yuck
Play with the limitations
Play with the voices
Who don’t
want you
to play

Dissolve blocks
With play
With curiosity
With patience
With kindness
With love

How do you join?
How do you leave?
Don’t wait to be invited
Don’t wait to be told
Take space
Be brave
Jump in

Connecting Across Difference

During the improvisation, the other clown and I fell into familiar patterns of boisterous, noisy play; we have been playing together for many, many years and have a huge shared vocabulary of physical / clown play. 

As we got louder, the dancer (who I had never played with before) found herself on the outside of our play, looking in. She stayed with her process, switching from embodied play to writing and photography, but I was aware of her absence in the embodied play and felt torn between wanting her to feel safe and welcome and enjoying the rambunctious quality of the clown play. I was also hyper aware of the impact we were having on the other group, who were at the time sitting and writing in silence as part of their devising process.

I tried to weave these concerns into my play, but found myself popping in and out of playfulness. Not quite fully being able to give myself to the play, I found myself in self-conscious, clunky, frustrating no-mans-land.

This exercise left me with some big questions about collaboration. How do people with diverse needs tap into their power in the collaborative melting pot? How is it possible for people to express themselves fully and for everyone to feel empowered to assert their boundaries and take care of themselves without feeling shame? How can everyone’s voices be heard? 

The dictionary definition of collaboration is “working together towards a common goal…shared effort and joint contribution...” But does the effort and contribution need to be equal for collaboration to be effective? Thinking back to our pre-play group discussion, we’d explored the difference between equal and equitable. Here’s the dictionary definitions of both:

Equal: “of the same measure, quantity, amount, or number as another”

Equitable: “having or exhibiting equity : dealing fairly with all concerned… often, specifically : fair in a way that accounts for and attempts to offset disparities in the way people of different races, genders, etc. are treated.”

My heart longs for equity in all forms of collaboration and community. I yearn for a world where people are able to show up as they are and feel a sense of safety and belonging on their own terms. So what stops this from happening?

Having facilitated collaborative spaces for a long, long time, I have noticed that many of us have inbuilt assumptions about what’s OK and what’s not OK in collaboration. We each carry an invisible rule book. This can lead to us developing resentment towards others for not pulling their weight or not towing the (often undisclosed) party line. 

Our invisible rule books can also lead to us falling into shame holes, when we find ourselves not being able to show up in ways that are (often secretly or internally) expected of us.

For me - the gold is in bringing all of this into consciousness, so we can learn about ourselves and our secret rulebooks. Becoming aware of our assumptions and perceived expectations of others, frees us from our limited / limiting behavioural patterns and gives us more choice in how we operate in the world.

After our improvisation, we had a little bit of time to unpick what had happened. We realised that we had dived right into the play, without any discussion or agreement as to how we would work together; a peculiar choice, given that we’d just had an in-depth discussion about the importance of the container! 

Without an agreed container, made of clearly expressed goals, expectations, roles and boundaries, it was neigh-on impossible to access true freedom in our play. 

As a neuro-spicey performer, I think I need more clarity and containment than a lot of people, in order to access freedom and flow in my play. I have a hypervigilant part who is always reading the reactions of others and I have an extremely loud inner critic who stops me playing if he’s worried that I’m pissing people off (that’s the worst thing that could ever happen, according to my inner critic).  

Thinking back to my 2017 Work In Progress #3: Connection, the freedom I found on stage was largely due to having crafted a very sturdy container for myself. People had bought tickets to see me play. I had been very clear with the blurb about what might happen and the audience had contracted in. I had lots of friends, colleagues and supporters in the audience and support on stage in the form of two musicians, various parts / characters situated in particular spots on the stage and a powerpoint presentation on connection to anchor into, when needed. I had time and space and I felt confident in my form.

So what kind of container do I need now? What might help me feel safe enough to play? And what might my play look like now?

Tune into the next edition to find out how these questions continued to move through me! 

Glitter Heart #2: Who Is This Performer?

Glitter Heart #3: I Fell In A Shame Hole

Find out more about Liz Clarke and company

Find out more about Vonalina Cake Photography

If you want to look back at my work in progress (2017) fill your boots!