Allan Taylor is yet another one of the wonderful artist friends I made on Stacy Makishi’s workshop. It’s turning out to be quite some reunion, with Natalie Clarke AND Nick Field joining us on the 20th. Each has their distinct style of course but what I love about them all is their openness, generosity, intelligence, and humour.

With Allan, I participated in the Tempting Failure festival in Bristol last year and his solo piece there was tremendously beautiful, fragile, hopeful and resilient at the same time, and caught me off guard. I was so happy to have been there for it and am very excited to see what Allan makes for us!

Full details of the festival here and you can buy tickets here.

is an artist working across performance and photography. His work investigates the absurd, the self and the everyday, and how we can subvert everyday practices with the strange and unusual. Placing the audience at the centre of the experience, Allan experiments with gestures that invoke comedy, hysteria and the ridiculous to produce work that is simultaneously farcical, camp and hauntingly tragic.

Perpetually single and histrionic, Allan puts the ‘macabre’ into cabaret and explores the sociopathic potential of the drama queen in this short performance. Wavering between acting and over-acting, singing and wailing, and sanity and insanity, there will be music, tears, make up and madness as he recounts the disasters of his ever-failing love life and explains why every year he marks Anti-Valentine’s with lashings of vodka and disastrous karaoke standards.