This website is a correspondence that revolves around a discussion between Performance artists Sharon Smith and Katie Duck.

The Artist Team

Katie Duck and Sharon Smith

Katie Duck (currently in her 70s) and Sharon Smith (in her 50s), are two experienced artists who have worked and played together for over twenty years. They explore performative explorations , combining improvisation, sound, punk aesthetics, and feminist expression to disrupt conventional ideas of identity and age, with a dynamic and theatrical style that challenges norms. .They attempt to get off, shake off, and escape” the rigid constructs that define and police them. They are female. They are women behaving inappropriately especially for their age and stature. They have shared a friendship that has grown into family feelings.

Katie Duck

Katie Duck is a renowned multidisciplinary artist, performer, teacher and pioneer with a career spanning several decades. Originally from the United States, she has lived in Italy, England and is now based Netherlands. Duck is celebrated for her innovative multidisciplinary approach to performance art, blending dance, theater, music, and text in her work.

Duck uses a microscopic view of improvisation as both a creative tool and a performance strategy. Her work often blurs the line between composition and spontaneity, challenging traditional notions of performance by incorporating elements of sound, voice, movement, and visual design into her practice. Her performances are often characterised by their spontaneity and interaction with the audience, as well as their exploration of themes such as vulnerability, identity, and the human experience.

A key figure in experimental performance, Katie Duck’s contributions have significantly influenced contemporary processes towards real time performances. She has collaborated with musicians, dancers, and visual artists throughout her career, with performances that are often described as dynamic, raw, and deeply engaging.

Sharon Smith

Sharon Smith’s work often explores the intersections of liveness, politics, the body, and identity, frequently incorporating elements of humour, improvisation, and experimental performance.

She is known for breaking the fourth wall, engaging with audiences directly, and questioning traditional theatre structures.

She is a member of the acclaimed Berlin based performance collective Gob Squad, who have, over 30 years produced numerous internationally touring pieces that blur the lines between reality and fiction, performance and life.

She holds a practice-based PhD in performance (Nottingham Trent University), where her research focused on themes such as liveness, feminist performance, and collaborative practice.

Sharon Smith presently runs a pub in Devon

The Work

(We would like to play our two piecs in a double bill weekend)

“SKY” is a one hour real-time performance created and performed by Katie Duck (Amsterdam) and Sharon Smith (Devon), in collaboration with cellist Ben Roberts (Devon).

Photos Roman Zotter

‘SKY” is performed with text, movement, live music and a film that fills the room with silent, slow moving images of skies. With a laptop in the space, Katie and Sharon develop their text challenging AI with questions: “What is nothing”? ”Do you have emotions”? “What happens when we die”? They explore ancient stories of skies in tandem and in company with our current cosmic confusion. Their correspondence results in a tender playful dialogue, gently funny, absurd, and not afraid of the dark.

Duration: 60 minutes

Abandon Human (ship wreck) is a one hour structured play about woman on a cruise ship who get caught in a storm. They celebrate their survival with text, story telling, songs and movement accompanied by a pre-recorded sound score full of chaos and songs—particularly songs written by women, for men

Their text expresses their survival and their experiences of having a child, the most vivid, unbearable emotion… Irretrievable loss. You cannot put them back in, once they have torn them from your belly via vagina or scalpel, they set in motion a certain grief… a slow, life-long, death-looming loss. They leave you and leave you and leave you. And that is your job. To help them do just that. The love is so strong that you can deal with their shit, their piss, their selfishness and their hatred… of you.

Duration: 50 minutes