Radio Ghost: Brent Cross

Persis Jadé Maravala has worked as artistic director of ZU-UK’s projects (London) since 2006. Her artistic work has won awards and nominations in the fields of interactive theatre, hybrid art and innovation. Her most acclaimed project, Hotel Medea, was the highest rated event by both public and press, becoming the standout hit of the Edinburgh Fringe 2011. She is the director and writer of Goodnight Sleep Tight, Binaural Dinner Date, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight), #RioFoneHack, East London Workers Party and Missing. She works at the intersection of games, performance and technology and believes post-immersive* approaches to dramaturgy can enable audiences to find new ways of engaging with one another meaningfully. Her work has focussed more recently on mediating relationships between strangers, particularly through the use of sound design and instruction-based performance. Her response to Covid-19 has been to create PlagueRound (an online interactive live game show) and Project Perfect Stranger, which has seen close to 250 strangers connected in intimate encounters across the world via their phones. Jadé is committed to reclaiming public spaces as sites for people to gather, as a way to reduce barriers to audience participation and to actively push for fairer and more equal opportunities for working class people.

Jorge’s work is based on the belief that extraordinary art and activism are not mutually exclusive and can be powerful allies for cultural and social change – where games and theatre are intrinsically connected. Over the past 20 years, his work as an artist-researcher has taken the form of multi award-winning performances, digital work, public installations and exhibitions in venues, conferences and festivals including London2012, Southbank Centre (Hayward Gallery), FACT Liverpool, LIFT Festival, The Lowry, amongst others. For the last decade, Jorge has led on research projects and artworks that have addressed the scalability of intimate performance whilst retaining the quality, depth and care of the live experience. More recently, his work has focused on mediating the space between strangers, often in public spaces. As co-author of The Post-Immersive Manifesto (2020), he believes we are responsible – as makers – to challenge privilege, articulating who our work is by, with and for.