All posts by Megan

Myra Stuart

Co-Conspirators

Myra Stuart is a designer, spatial artist and puppeteer.

A key part of the Festival 23 veering group, she is responsible for coordinating and designing the decor on site and curating visual art for our DeStablise area.

Alongside working as a set designer and prop maker for the likes of the Southbank Centre and Brighton and London based arts organisation Theme she is one half of the Future Zen Variety Show, where she explores the very fabric of reality, channelling characters such as Alan Watts, William Burroughs and Diane Di Prima as complex and sometimes muppet like sages for the seekers.

Terry Logan

Live music, Performers

Terry Logan is a singer/songwriter and guitarist from Hebden Bridge. With life-affirming lyrics, and soulful sound, her songs remind us of the importance of happiness and kindness.  

Terry has supported legends such as Donn Letts (BBC Radio 6 Music) and American R&B singer Geno Washington and The Ram Jam Band. She was also asked to join Lee Scratch Perry on stage at The Trades Club as part of his 80th Birthday Tour. Following a number of successful years gigging with a band, Terry launched her solo career at the Hebden Bridge Folk Roots Festival in May 2016, supporting Chris Helme. The video of one of her original songs live on BBC Radio Leeds quickly clocked up thousands of views.

At Festival 23 Terry, along with the sensational Chris Manley on guitar, will showcase songs from her debut album due for release Spring 2017.

“Singing and making music is Terry’s Dharma.” Tony Rigg, The Laboratory Project entrepreneur and former Ministry of Sound Operations Director

“A star on the rise.” Hebden Bridge Times

Vinay Gupta

Performers, Talks and Playshops

Vinay Gupta (or ‘The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save it’ according to  Vice) is a technologist and policy analyst with a particular interest in how specific technologies can create or close off avenues for decision makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defence, security, resilience and disaster management arenas.  Vinay is currently engaged as a strategic architect for Consensus Systems, a New York based technology hub focussed on the ethereum blockchain and its applications.

Circus of the Mind

Games, Miscellany and Nonsense, Performers, Theatre

Bob Prophette, the world’s foremost (and only) Metaphysical Bookmaker will be bringing his Circus of the Mind to delight the crowds at Festival 23. Circus of the Mind is a three ringed circus of feasts for your intellect and imagination featuring games and performances associated with Metaphysical Betting (anything unprovable but “true,” Bob is the bookmaker for you); the Court of Moral Ambiguity (let Bob challenge your rationalisations of morally ambiguous acts and find out just how morally ambiguous you really are); and the Confessional for Modern (Cognitive) Sins (confess you sins of memory, decision making and bias to Bob and receive the absolution you deserve). So look out for Bob the Bookie, Bob the Judge and Bob the Priest and discover something new about yourself and others. You may even get a chance to punish Bob for his sins. Now where is that whip?

Mark Armstrong

DJs, Performers

Mark stumbled into Djing aged 23 spending the mid/late 90s flying the flag for techno, house and electronica, playing alongside alongside such luminaries as Aphex Twin, Jeff Mills, Andrew Weatherall. Autechre, Surgeon, Carl Craig, Dave Clarke, Marshall Jefferson etc.

As well as being resident DJ for seminal Sheffield night Remedy and a founder of Sheffield’s Curfew Sound system (holders of many Yorkshire/Derbsyhire free parties) he also played at various places including Sankeys Soap, Turnmills, Sheffield’s Republic/Bed and Arches, NY Sushi, Scuba and Headcharge* (*in a backroom capacity!).

Much as how prior to DJing Mark played in bands, these last 21 years have also been peppered with musical projects playing with (ex-Cabaret Voltaire, Hula) Nort’s band Yonni and more recently Meat for a Dark Day with Mark Hudson of Fat Truckers.

MfaDD’s double B side single having a side each produced by Sheffield production legends Ross Orton (MIA, Arctice Monkeys, Drenge) and Dean Honer (I Monster, Eccentronic Research Council), boasts the dubious honour of being the first release on Sheffield Phonographic that Steve Lamaq DIDN’T play.

More recently he’s been collaborating with BAFTA nominated film-maker Annie Scott on films for writer Stephen Scott’s short stories and playing an eclectic ‘audio obstacle’ course show on Sheffield Live radio spanning Krautrock to afrobeat, garage rock to electronica, as well, of course as the slightly-rarer- than-they- used-to- be DJ sets.

DJ Moonmonkey

DJs, Performers

Hailing from the impenetrable jungles of Snowdonia, Tom Collister aka DJ Moonmonkey has been sending party creatures swinging from the branches at festivals, parties and clubs across the UK and Europe for over fifteen years. Moonmonkey brings the party every time, dishing out his inimitably cheeky homebrew of Funk, Soul, Beats, Jungle, Rock n Roll, Hip-Hop and Reggae.  Glastonbury, Shambala, intimate Parisian bars, the Barcelona Anti Sonar and numerous forests and hills across the UK – they’ve all had a taste of the monkey magic! Has record box, will travel.

JAZZ RIOT

Live music, Performers

A folk/punk spoken word duo with roots in the Edwardian music hall tradition, JaZZ RiOT are like nothing else around at the moment – it’s basically a rhyming gobshite and a jazzing riffer, using comedy as a Trojan Horse to fire on Babylon. or something.

“Venomous, thoughtful and very funny” – The Crack.
“Like Viz comic brought to life!” – Kriss Jewitt
“Had the entire room on the verge of unconscious bladder-release..” – Louder Than War.
“Every face I could see was either shocked or laughing!” -Jowheretogo
“The sensibility of John Cooper Clarke, the look of Iggy Pop and the passion of the Sex Pistols” – Gigglebeats.

Megan Alan D

Co-Conspirators

Megan Alan D (pseudonym) is a busybody who has at one stage or another had a hand in puppetry, poetry, opera, musical comedy, DJing, theatre, experimental soundscape, illegal parties and mixed media spectacles, creating performance art of some kind in venues including Royal Albert Hall, 02 Arena, Brighton Dome, Secret Garden Party and Supernormal Festival.

Currently exploring interactive nonsense, (heading up that department for the festival) Megan brings Happy Hardcore Aerobics, Human Dog Crufts and Spirit Animal Fashion Show to Festival 23.

Megan is partner in the Future Zen Variety Puppetry firm with Myra Stuart (the firm that brought you Puppet Alan Watts and Puppet Tim Leary) and also performs in experimental magi-pop band ‘Bloom.’

Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson and the tidalwave of ideas, friends and realisations that followed rescued her from a period of surgically imposed muteness, changing her life, and opening her up to the cosmic void of pure everything we all happen to be. Megan is also a Music Technology Lecturer and emoticon witch. Hail Eris.

Lee Ravitz

Cosmic Trigger Cabaret

Lee Ravitz is an actor with a longstanding interest in the work of Robert Anton Wilson, Kennedy conspiracy theories, comparative mythology and Fortean High Strangeness (but of course). He loves genre based, avant garde and comedic work, particularly for screen, and has had the pleasure of appearing as Bond villain wannabe Clem in PULP (a Brit comedy set on the comic book convention circuit), as a cynical fisherman alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in BURLESQUE FAIRYTALES and was ripped to shreds by particularly vicious rabbits in 80s comic horror homage, CUTE LITTLE BUGGERS. On stage, he has a habit of embodying cultish literary characters, and is proud to add Simon Moon and George Dorn to his past depictions of Rincewind (TERRY PRATCHETT’S ERIC) and Flay (TITUS GROAN). A talented writer, he has penned radio plays performed by e.g. Timothy West and Prunella Scales, and also lectured to the Society for Psychical Research on historical poltergeist hauntings, as these things go.