GIFT: Gateshead International Festival of Theatre
Friday 1 May and Sunday 3 May 2026
iara Solano Arana, Actos Reflejos. Photo: Adam Ireland
As part of this year’s GIFT, Vane is presenting three events in the gallery. Placing artistic experimentation and collaboration at its core, GIFT’s annual festival offers a supportive platform for artists to come together, to push the boundaries of their practice. International in scope and interconnected in approach, GIFT is a carefully curated conversation, providing a meeting point for meaningful exchange between artists and audiences based in North East England, and the wider world.
iara Solano Arana: Actos Reflejos (Reflex Actions)
Friday 1 May, 5.15pm, duration: 25 mins, age guidance: 18+
Object Permanence is a performance-based research project that investigates how we perceive the world when vision recedes and the body becomes our primary site of thought. Rooted in the unique capacity of the performing arts to activate imagination in real time, the work explores the shifting terrain between sensation and meaning, signal and feeling, body and thought.
The process begins with an artistic collaboration with Diego Solano, a deafblind musician living with Retinitis Pigmentosa. As his visual field has progressively narrowed, Diego has developed new perceptual strategies – including synesthesia – that radically reshape how we both navigate and interpret our surroundings. Together, we generate alternative psychophysical maps that challenge the dominance of sight and propose more inclusive ways of relating to the world and to one another.
Drawing from these shared practices, the research experiments with exchanging perceptual filters and creating tools that expand the sensory experience of audiences. Reflex Actions is the first public manifestation of this ongoing inquiry: a work in progress toward a performative lecture that invites us to imagine new forms of presence and relationality.
iara Solano Arana is a Spanish artist and researcher creating relational, transdisciplinary performance works centred on perception, the body, and audience experience. She develops immersive and one-to-one projects across theatre, dance, installation, and film, and currently combines artistic creation with mentoring, accessibility advocacy, and her role as Artistic Director of FIAR Festival. The development of the project has been supported by: S’ala Espazio per Artist* (Italy), and Residencias Bilbaoeszena, Fundación Vital and Teatro Calderón de Valladolid (Spain).
Tessa Parr, Inside I Am Thinking: inside the mind of Artist Johnny The Biblical Rapper
Tessa Parr: Inside I Am Thinking: inside the mind of Artist Johnny The Biblical Rapper
Sunday 3 May, 3-6pm, duration: 3 hours, drop in, drop out, age guidance: all ages, no booking required
For three hours, spoken word artist Johnny the Biblical Rapper opens his creative process. Witness his struggles, navigate his thoughts, and participate in a practice he modestly calls “not that deep”. Expect frustration, ink shortages, and fleeting brilliance – an immersive, chaotic, and ultimately humorous journey into poetry in the making.
Tessa Parr is an actor, interdisciplinary artist, and drag king whose work explores social class, queer culture, and humour. Since 2016, she has performed as spoken-word poet Johnny the Biblical Rapper. Credits include The Globe, GIFT, Transform, and The Pleasance. Her show I AM JOHNNY premieres at Edinburgh Fringe this summer.
Rosa Postlethwaite, Solos with Sourdough. Photo: Marley Starskey Butler
Sunday Scratch ‘n’ Social – Double Bill
Sunday 3 May, 7.30pm at Vane (Rosa) / 8.15pm at St Mary’s (Scott), duration: 90 mins, age guidance: all ages
Solos with Sourdough by Rosa Postlethwaite is about our lives with other-than-human species. It presents conversations between the performer and a portion of sourdough starter, with whom they lived for four years. Contradictory, hipster and heartfelt, the ‘solos’ represent the many ways that the performer is bound to their more-than-human community.
As part of the Sunday Scratch ‘n’ Social – Double Bill, audiences are invite to move to St Mary’s Heritage Centre after the event at Vane (a 5 minute walk) for Scott Turnbull presents How did we get here?, an allegorical tale that combines fact and fiction, whilst exploring the relationship between two best friends and their very different lives. Part parable, part fable – a late-night argument outside a kebab shop leads Scott on a fantastic and thought-provoking exploration of divisive, trans-Atlantic politics.
For more information go to www.giftfestival.co.uk
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