Space 50 (Biographies & Credits)
Niki McCretton (Creator, Performer)
Niki McCretton is an award-winning independent U.K. artist with a reputation for creating works that are contemporary and experimental -- yet highly accessible -- and tours internationally. She is Associate Artist at The Lighthouse (Centre for the Arts) in Poole, Dorset. Previously, she was Associate Artist for Somerset County -- based at The Merlin Theatre in Frome -- and is currently one of The Merlin's Affiliated Artists. As an independent performer/producer, she has worked as a performer and artistic director for 16 years. She trained in Physical Theatre at Fooltime and went on to specialise in Trapeze in Paris. In 1992, she was a founder of Shiftwork Physical Theatre Company in Scotland which achieved acclaim for its highly visual work, touring the U.K. and to southern Africa. She went on to study Contemporary Dance at Coventry University. She received a Year Of The Artist Award for The Bridgwater Dance Challenge collaboration with Bridgwater Arts Centre in Somerset.
Her first solo project, Worm-Hole, received Five-Star acclaim at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and toured to sell-out audiences in Canada and the United States in 2002, receiving the award for Best Physical Theatre Production at the Victoria Fringe Festival in British Columbia, Canada. Niki received scholarships to attend the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival in Seattle, Washington, USA in 2002 and 2003, awarded to her as an artist who is willing to take risks with her work. Following a Commissions Fund Award from South West Arts, Niki created her second solo production -- Heretic -- in collaboration with Guy Dartnell. Heretic toured the U.K. and went on to the Prague Fringe Festival, followed by a four-month tour of North America in 2003 and won Best Physical Production at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
In March 2003, Niki completed work on a commission for the Prague Fringe Festival creating Throw Me A Bone (her first children's show), touring across the U.K. and to Prague, Canada and the United States. Her second show for children, Muttnik: The First Dog In Space, has toured throughout the U.K. and abroad including the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her recent production of Relative was developed via a commission from the Nuffield Theatre in Lancaster, U.K. in collaboration with multimedia artiste Kathy Hinde and has also toured the U.K. and abroad.
Jamie Wood (Performer)
Jamie Wood studied Fine Art & Drama in Liverpool, U.K. After graduating, he studied Mime with Desmond Jones, Clown with Philippe Gaulier and Body Weather & Butoh with Min Tanaka & Masaki Iwana. In 2001, Jamie co-founded Petra's Pulse with Selina Papoutseli and they will present their new show, Donkey Shadow, in May 2007 at Camden People's Theatre, a venue for new-and-experimental works in London. Other recent performance work has been a tour of 21 Tales (co-starring with Niki McCretton) with The Fionnbarr Factory, Homemade and Escapology with Signal To Noise with whom Jamie will work on their next project (Longwave) for a tour of South West England in Autumn 2007.
Guy Dartnell (Director)
Guy Dartnell is an award-winning director and performance artist whose work spans the realms of theatre, music, dance, circus and film. He has set up and collaborated on a number of inter-disciplinary projects and has made four solo shows including Unsung, Bottle, Travels With My Virginity (which he is currently developing for film) and the Time Out Live Award-winning Would Say Something. He is a long-time Associate Artist with the U.K.'s Improbable Theatre -- his work with them including 70 Hill Lane which won a New York OBIE Outstanding Achievement Award. He is an internationally-acclaimed teacher, an Affiliated Artist at the Battersea Arts Centre in London and The Merlin Theatre in Frome, Somerset, and a member of the Choreographic Lab at the University of Northampton researching voice-movement work on video and exploring issues around documentation.
Andrew Smith (Text)
Writer and journalist Andrew Smith began at The Face, moving on to The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Observer. He has spent time on Icelandic trawlers, flying with The Red Arrows and recently wrote a three-part series for Radio 4 on the lives of submariners, spending a week under the Atlantic on a nuclear submarine. His first book entitled Moondust recounts his search for the nine remaining men who walked on the Moon. It stayed on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List for four months and was nominated for two 2006 British Book Awards.
Click Here to visit
Andrew's Profile Page at Bloomsbury Publishing.
Piers Bizony (Concept & Research)
Piers Bizony has written about space and cosmology for a wide variety of magazines in the U.K. and the United States including Focus, Omni, Wired and The Independent. His award-winning book on the making of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has become a standard reference work for the movie's many fans around the world. In 1997, The Rivers Of Mars -- his critically-acclaimed analysis of the life-on-Mars debate -- was nominated for the NASA/Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Writing. Starman, produced as a book and BBC film in partnership with TV Producer Jamie Doran, told the story of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin for the first time. Piers also worked on the successful £25 million Millennium Fund bid for the @Bristol multimedia complex and was creative consultant for the Cosmic Voyage planetarium at the Futuroscope educational park in Poitiers. His recent book, Space 50 (Harper Collins), is a pictorial journey of the human moments of space travel with images from NASA and Russian archives that have not been seen in print until now. He lives in Bradford-Upon-Avon, U.K.
Kathy Hinde (Film-Maker)
Kathy is a graduate of Bath Spa University College (1994-97), specialising in Art & Music. Kathy shows artwork publicly in a variety of contexts: video, sound and site-specific installations; multimedia performances, theatre-and-dance productions, exhibitions, and privately-and-publicly-commissioned work. She regularly collaborates with pianist Joanna MacGregor and sound designer Matthew Fairclough. She has performed in Ireland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Macedonia, Serbia, Colombia and numerous U.K. venues including Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. In October 2002, Kathy collaborated with Jin Xing’s Contemporary Dance Theatre for a tour of China. She created visuals for Paco Pena’s Flamenco Dance Company for their Musa Gitana show which toured Holland (2001), Germany (2002) and Hong Kong & Macau (2003). Kathy regularly collaborates with artists working in different disciplines including dirty:theatre and Company Q. She is also a member of Bath, U.K.-based arts company Eshoda Arts who create interdisciplinary work that combines contemporary dance, visual art, text and sound. Kathy has created two public sculptures for sites in Birmingham, U.K. and gives lectures, seminars and workshops at a variety of venues. Kathy is based in Bristol, U.K.
Click Here to visit Kathy's Official Website.
Paul Riordan (Original Score)
Paul started his musical career playing bass guitar with the now-cult-1960s psychedelic band, Mandrake Paddle Steamer. After Mandrake, Paul worked as a session musician for Pye Records and EG Management touring as a support act with major bands/artistes such as King Crimson, Roxy Music and Randy Newman. In the early 1980s, he worked for Pink Floyd’s studio -- then started his own studio, becoming involved in composing/recording music for television, and music production. In the year 2000, Paul teamed up with performance artist Ivan Rados and created a system of non-repeating loops with a sound system that would continuously play four pre-recorded CDs, never playing the same loop twice. Due to an overwhelming request for copies, Paul set about producing a complete album: Rados The Transparent Man was a success in the ambient-dance genre and within the dance/trance remix world. "My Soul Is At The End Of The Universe" was included on many dance compilations. Paul has also composed theme tunes for many satellite-TV channels. He has more recently been commissioned to create the music for the New Look Viasat TV3 broadcast in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany. Paul's Big Mind Music Studio is located near Reading, England.
Click Here to visit Paul's Official Website.
Click Here to hear Tracks from the Original Score.
Susan Sloan (Animator)
Susan Sloan is a visual artist, lecturer and researcher at the National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University, in Bournemouth, Dorset, U.K. Her practice ranges across a wide variety of media including sculpture, installation, video, 3D animation, photography and theatre design. She has exhibited work and presentations at the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (2003) in San Diego, California, USA; the International Symposium on Computer-Generated Animations & Visual Effects (2003) in London, U.K.; the International Symposium for Non-Photorealistic Rendering Conference at the Annecy Animation Festival (2002) in France; The Atrium Gallery at Bournemouth University; The Russel-Cotes Art Gallery in Bournemouth and the European Council for Educational Research in Slovenia. She was recently invited to exhibit her work at the Kunstihoone Gallery in Tallinn, Estonia as part of the Invisible Fields Scottish Video Art Exhibition funded by the British Council. The exhibition has also toured Yokohama Art Museum in Japan; An Tuireann on the Isle of Skye; the Street Level Gallery at the Glasgow International Festival in Scotland; the Angus Digital Media Centre in Brechin and the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Krakow, Poland (2006). She has been Artist-in-Residence for District of Columbia Schools in Washington, D.C.; the Scottish Trade Union Council and Coates Threads in Glasgow; and the Royal Scottish Academy.
Adam Vanner (Animator)
Adam Vanner is currently a full-time lecturer in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University. He has contributed to a wide range of successful projects from music promos for Coldcut (Music for Mo Musicians Remix 1996) and Higher Intelligence Agency (Mushroom Jellyfish 1996) to internationally-renowned simulator rides (Mission To Mars, NASA Hall of Fame, Florida, 1997). He was also an animator on two award-winning shorts by director Nico Clark, a sting for MTV Europe (MTV/Greenpeace 2002) and Summertime (2003). Adam’s most recent works have been collaborations with artist Susan Sloan on two pieces, Mel As Me (2005) and Three Way Conversation (2002). His recent work has concentrated on computer programming real-time 3d graphics, in particular AVO Viewer -- the program used to display and create Mel As Me. In development of this software, Adam has pioneered new approaches to real-time rendering of 3d graphics.
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Niki (clad in a cosmonaut's spacesuit) salutes while engaging in research for Space 50 at Star City, the cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow in Russia, in March 2006.
Webpage Last Updated 15 May 2007
