The New Libertines. Year Zero on tour in 2011

Katelan Foisy, who epitomises New Libertinism, in action with eight cuts gallery and Year Zero for last year’s show Lilith Burning

Last year the world let us put on some shows. This year they’ve even invited us to some festivals. But don’t worry, we’ve not crossed over to the festival mainstream – we’re talking fringes and sone of the fabbest shows in town.

“We need writing that serves up the whole of life, in the smallest microcosms maybe, single truths told in single voices, but told in the full – the ugly and the beautiful; the hopeful and the despairing; the angry and the aspiring; that wrings art, words, life itself until they offer up every last secret, every hidden pain, every unexpected and delightful pleasure; that gives life in the full. Free from judgement. Free from taboo. Free from pretence.” (Dan Holloway, The New Libertines)

eight cuts gallery is delighted to announce its 2011 New Libertines tour. The New Libertine movement, if it can be labelled a movement, stands for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirity, and stands against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence – of everything it means to be human.

4 April 2011, Albion Beatnik Bookstore, Oxford, 6pm FREE (Not the Oxford Literary Festival)

4 June 2011, Stoke Newington Literary Festival, 4-6pm at Baby Bathhouse, entry £4

13 June 2011, Albion Beatnik Bookstore, Oxford, 6pm as part of Oxfinge, entry £4

more dates tba incl The Literature Lounge at Covent Garden Poetry Cafe

Who’s involved

lucy ayrton
slam poet extraordinaire and hammer and tongue regular

penny goring

commander-in-chief of the new libertine movement, author of the forthcoming collection of shorts and poems zoom zoom

anna hobson

star of oxwords’ no reading alone and the life force of oxford creative writers

dan holloway

literary death match winner, author of the man who painted agnieszka’s shoes, contributor to transgressive anthologies. your mc for the night, and for your sins

federay holmes

marc nash

experimenter, word-twister, raconteur, friday flasher, typographer, author of A, B & E

renee sigel

wonderful poet and part of the ground-breaking art and poetry shawback redemptions collaboration

joan barbara simon

author of mut@tus and long time walk on water, playwright and performer extraordinanaire 

helen smith

author of alison wonderland; “at the very least a minor phenomenon” (the times)

anne witchard

Anne Witchard teaches at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown and co-editor of Gothic London: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. She is currently working on a book called Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution which aims to redress the sidelined story of China’s place in literary modernism.

Susanna Starling performs at last year’s Lilith Burning

with music from the one and only experimental electronic artist Rabid Gravy and double bass phenomenon Susanna Starling, host of the legendary Queen of Clubs Cabaret

~ by yearzerowriters on March 31, 2011.