Optimizer! Programme

Introducing Optimizer!  the curated mini-series inside Metabolizer. My interest in radical inclusion is expressed in its public-ness and free-ness: anyone can dance in the pod, and there is no financial barrier to enter any of the work. I am also interested in distributing authorship, leading me to invite other artists to share the installation space, in a kind of convivial curation. Each artist’s work touches on a theme – mycelium networks, tracing through-lines of resources, labour, and waste water – which is in resonance with Metabolizer. Evenings include drinks, dialogue and dancing. Interweaving Optimizer! With Metabolizer acknowledges the co-authorship and networked enabling that is always part of making and performing whether or not it is formally recognized. 

This performance ritual is concerned with cultivating modes of engagement with climate and climate change through embodied and relational practice. Working with mycelial logics as both material and method, it invites ecological awareness to be felt, negotiated, and lived in the body. The performance blurs boundaries between human and more-than-human agencies, nurturing queer relations, collective desires, and ancestral ways of knowing as modes of futurity. Drawing from Indigenous practices mainly from the Brazilian Krenak and Yanomami peoples, the work understands mycelium not only as a metaphor but as an ancestral and ongoing force that organises life through interdependence. Through a durational, participatory ritual, the work invites audiences to sit, interact, and negotiate through scores and material entanglements, allowing myceliated futures to be fabulated collectively.

Manuela Albrecht is an interdisciplinary movement artist, facilitator, performer, PhD researcher and mother with a creative practice situated at the intersection of embodiment, micro-politics and arts-activism. Her work spans theatre, dance, and embodied practices, exploring solo and group multimedia performances that intertwine movement, text, audio, and video in dynamic dialogues with the space. She is a PhD candidate at Kingston University where her practice-based research investigates how a coming together of dance and fungi—specifically the mycelium network—can foster embodied understandings of our interconnection to nature, unravelling new modes of responding to climate change.

A loosely linear, process-led performance series by Kyra Norman.  How do we experience the flow of movement, time, ideas and resources, when we watch a dance performance?  This work welcomes you into the uncertain, serendipitous process of dance-making in real time, and invites broader dialogue around the ‘how’ of making art work, in this complex present moment.  Previous iterations (CAST, Helston 2018; Auction House, Redruth 2025) brought together artists from around Cornwall to share time and space, proposing improvisation as perhaps the only currently viable economy.  For Optimiser! Kyra will share a solo performance and informal chat, followed by an Up, Across and Along-themed micro-disco dance party.

Kyra Norman is an artist, dancer and choreographer with 20+ years’ experience.  Her work mostly takes place in galleries, public spaces and outdoors: on land, in water and through weather.  She works with embodiment, improvisation and experimental choreography to explore ideas and practices of movement, connection, presence and listening, through live performance, screen media, writing, public workshops and social knees-ups.  Kyra lives in West Cornwall, UK. https://www.kyranorman.co.uk

BOOK HERE (tickets free but space is limited)

This evening will share BRED’s recent commission from the Science Museum’s MAILHOC research project exploring issues around industrial patronage and the arts and sciences. The short film will be followed by a performance of the Manager-festo, a powerpoint presentation performance about performing productively, day after day after day after day, A polished veneer of corporate lingo slowly cracks to reveal a doughier, more precarious side to work/life balance.

BOOK HERE (tickets free but space is limited)

Through video assemblage and performance practices, artist-researcher Heni Hale shares her encounters with a set of unedited video records of a ‘simulation’ experiment, conducted in 1977 with a merchant navy shipping company Jebsens. The experiment programme, devised with Tavistock Institute of Human Relations action researchers, simulated a ships environment and proposed hypothetical problems to be solved by the group, aiming to develop new decentralised, democratised work systems, to improve conditions, and work relations in the contained environment of industrial sea life. Mobilising a visceral and felt- sense responsivity, Heni tussles with affective impacts of witnessing and touching these suspended fragments of a world seemingly halted in time and heavily defined by a gendered class system. At the same time, she explores the thorny ethics of re-use and mis-use (a term coined by Jaimie Baron, 2021) of archival images, and lack of consent from original participants.

Image credit – stills from Borgnes Seminar. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source:
Wellcome Collection. SA/TIH/B/2/52/13/1 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations


Heni Hale is a movement and performance artist whose practice navigates the space between bodies, histories, and technologies. Through her collective Dog Kennel Hill
Project and current post graduate research at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, she explores how movement can activate archives and reimagine past encounters with automation and industrial systems. Drawing on the
Tavistock Institute’s 20th-century studies, her work embodies and re-enacts historical moments to explore how technological change continues to shape contemporary working lives. She has also served as co-director of Independent Dance in London,
and leads its MA/MFA Creative Practice partnership with Trinity Laban.

BOOK HERE (tickets free but space is limited)

Upstream is an essay-performance that interweaves domestic plumbing failures, bodily illness, protest and wastewater infrastructure to explore containment, leakage and control. Through humour and discomfort, the performance examines how waste, illness and toxicity are managed, hidden or displaced, and how responsibility is deferred “up (or down) stream.” Foregrounding embodied knowledge and sensory experience, 

Upstream questions where care, agency and accountability reside within systems designed to make waste disappear. The performance (15 mins) will be followed by an opportunity for conversation about wastewater and Bryony’s research. 

Bryony Gillard is an artist and PhD Candidate at University of Plymouth. Her current research uses artists’ moving image to explore wastewater as an aesthetic, metaphor, material and method. Framed by a multi-disciplinary approach to theory and practice, her work asks what wastewater can teach us about bodies, responsibility and care. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at East Quay, (Somerset, 2026), a commission with Focal Point Gallery (Southend, 2025) and an essay and performance for Mirror Lamp Journal (Dublin, 2025). Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including ESTUARY (Kent), Jerwood Arts (London), Playbill (Amsterdam), Ocean Archive at TBA21 (Venice), Tate St.Ives (Cornwall).

BOOK HERE (tickets free but space is limited)