“ a celebrated performer, writer and artist”
Paid Fantasist
A show about regeneration; political, personal and urban, in collaboration with Rebecca Biscuit. In 1978, at the height of his Doctor Who fame, Tom Baker wrote about a day in his life for The Times; a full-pelt 16 hours across debauched, legendary Soho on the cusp of change. In Paid Fantasist, Biscuit & Field unpick that to ask what it means when Baker’s fabulous, dangerous enclave is scrubbed generically clean by late-stage capitalism. The duo fuck with perception, time and myths of Soho and self to explore the fallout of neoliberalism as a fresh hope in 1978, and a crumbling ruin now.
“The central metaphor of regeneration, that London has seen as many changes as the BBC’s beloved Doctor Who since Neo-Liberalism dominated British political ideology post Thatcher, is smart. It provides these artists with a mass of theatrical potential... It’s clear that Biscuit & Field have a glorious future together”
Unicorn Party
Unicorns, have you noticed they’re everywhere right now? As is the far right. Right?
This hilarious, rollicking, razor-sharp show asks what the simultaneous rise of these phenomenons tells us. Hunting the omnipresent one-horned icon across civilisations to explore how ideologies spread and our imaginations become capitalised, Nick Field envisions a dystopian Unicorn Fascist State Britain. When the unicorns take control, there’s only one thing to do – throw a party. That’s an order!
Unicorn Party is a very contemporary response to the crazy times we live in. Unexpected, thoughtful and at times gloriously bonkers, Unicorn Party is a riff of satirical comedy, power ballads, myth-making, and copious glitter, to take a sneaky gawp at what happens when escapism becomes inescapable.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Fascinating’, The Scotsman
“Part dystopian satire, part self-disclosing performance lecture, Unicorn Party is an unapologetically raw solo piece from multidisciplinary artist Nick Field”
Work Play
Work Play explores the games we play at work, and why we play them. It makes the tiniest office incidents into the biggest things in the world, it makes desks into epic battlegrounds and stationary cupboards into coveted treasure chambers. It asks why we so willingly become embroiled in minuscule intrigues blown up to medieval court proportions in the workplace, when all we really need to do is get paid. Work Play pitches the personal implications of this against a political context in which the increasing loss of workplace stability and rights crank up the imperative.
Multimedia and interactive, this show leads the audience through surreal encounters with workplace politics, plays with ideas of scale both physical and conceptual, and draws them into games that mirror, subvert and parody those we’ve all played at work. Work Play features searing, soaring storytelling, sharp-eyed comedy, live music and participatory games that sit somewhere on a sliding scale between Guess Who? and Gladiator.
“Field is deliciously funny and makes us laugh hard. They aren’t simple laughs of recognition, they’re raucous chuckles that make it hard to breathe…Ridiculously relatable and so much fun”
Be My Friend
Be My Friend is a one to one performance that explores the negotiations and complications of friendship in a world of fractured selves. Nick would like to be friends. Would you?
Choose something at the festival to see together, and Nick’s outfit for the occasion, and find out.
There will be a shared experience, an exchange of stories, and a moment that makes or breaks. Be My Friend is a bargaining between strangers towards becoming something more, where the rules are made up as we go.
Created to run alongside festival programmes, Performances have included touring with Forest Fringe at Latitude and during Edinburgh Festivals, and performances at Stockholm Festival and Norfolk County Show.
“A gift and a welcome exchange”
Adventure/
Misadventure
Adventure/Misadventure is existential travelogue as performance, comedy and theatre. It is lyrical beauty meets melancholic fury meets sharp humour meets absurd surrealism.
Adventure/Misadventure captures the textures and joys of constantly being a stranger, an outsider in unfamiliar cultures, and the sensations of becoming immersed in them. It contrasts this with tragi-comic stories of failed relationships and the absurdities of terrible jobs; the negotiation of ideas of home.
The performance is weaved with poetic delivery evoking places and people, comedic timing, and a searing honesty. Theres a roller-dance routine to a megamix of songs about freedom, theres ritualistic movement scores contrasting experiences of a tea ceremony in Kyoto with childhood sunday lunches. A Dolly Parton classic is reimagined as a dark electro smasher. Theres a section about an unfortunate brush with academia that ends with a tussle at a symposium involving an evil toy frog wrenched from a clowns penis- true story, well maybe not the bit where the frog starts talking.
“Nothing in this show is linear or ordinary, but all of it is exquisite...Field is as adept a philosopher as he is an imaginist and traveller, and this show, as crazed as it is, is a thoughtful, well observed, and ethereal marvel”
The Cosmos,
The Cosmetics
The first full length solo show by Nick Field
The Cosmos, The Cosmetics is a powerful, resonant and intimate story of the search to find a place to belong through the underground sub-cultures of the UK.
Weaved with tales of an eccentric rural youth, poetic meditations on the nature of skin, scars and memory, and shot through with delicious humour.
The show toured with dates including Oxford Playhouse, Ovalhouse and Brighton Fringe Festival, and was then programmed by the invitation only Stockholm Fringe Festival.
“Nick is a passionate, and flexible performer, with a tale to tell and admirable vulnerability”
Other projects
I Show You a Mirror - stories & spontaneous moves as Nick tries to remember how to vogue. An exploration of subculture, bodies and language to reflect the predatory relationship between subcultures and the mainstream, and ask questions about language, ownership and cultural expression. Performed at Forest Fringe during Edinburgh Festival, 2016.
Love Map - Neuroscience is pitched against sexuality in this searching, funny & poetic journey into uncharted neurological territory to ask if we can ever only really be defined by our brain chemistry. Performed at Latitude Festival and Southbank Centre Literature Festival.