Saturday 4 September, 1 to 10pm

Wysing Arts Centre are delighted to invite A---Z (Anne Duffau) to curate the twelfth edition of Wysing Polyphonic, our annual festival of music and sound.

With CAMPerVAN, FAUZIA (Live), Ignota: MJ Harding & Nisha Ramayya, Juliet Jacques, Marissa Malik & Yeshe Bahamon-Beesley, object blue, Space Afrika, YaYa Bones & more

Download the Festival map and set times as a PDF by clicking here.

Wysing Polyphonic is SOLD OUT

Please click the image above to view photos from Wysing Polyphonic: Under Ether.

Titled Under Ether, after the element thought to connect us to other realms, Wysing Polyphonic will step into the threshold of magic, the esoteric and speculative futures. For this year’s edition, the festival will be comprised of three rituals staged across the summer on Wysing’s site and on our online platform.

The climax of the festival will be an intimate day of open-air performances, music and readings at Wysing on 4 September. Using a new outdoor stage and sites across Wysing’s woods, CAMPerVAN, FAUZIA (Live), Ignota: MJ Harding & Nisha Ramayya, Juliet Jacques, Marissa Malik & Yeshe Bahamon-Beesley, object blue, Space Afrika, YA YA Bones,  & more will join us over ten hours to explore forms of optimism, resistance, alternative realities and to speculate together on new possible futures.

Two further rituals will frame the onsite event: Ain Bailey will host a closed-door workshop in July for a group of long-term collaborators. This prelude to the main festival programme will connect Under Ether with Wysing’s summer exhibition, Version, in a ritual of sharing and healing together.

The third and final ritual will take place on WysingBroadcasts.Art in mid-September. A collaboration with New Art City will rework recordings from the 4 September event into an accessible and immersive online experience.

Tickets for the 4 September day-long event are available now.  

Book tickets on Eventbrite here.

Tickets are available in three tiers:  

Pay-what-you-can 
Suggested Donation (£8) 
Contribute more (£20)

We are providing the option of coaches from London and Cambridge (pay-what-you-can - £15.50 - £25) to Wysing. 

Please note: Wysing is a not-for-profit organisation. 

As a registered charity, we are committed to supporting artists and ticket sales help to support our charity mission. We ask you to pay what you can afford and leave it to your discretion. Please keep in mind that there are people who will genuinely need the cheaper tickets and we will have a limited number of those to offer.

Wysing Polyphonic does not have specific activity organised for children but they are welcome to attend as long as accompanied by an adult ticket holder who is responsible for them at all times when on Wysing's site.

Access Information

Free companion tickets are available for anybody who needs them.

Accessible parking and toilets are available.

The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users. For a map of the festival site showing surface textures, please click here.

Wheelchair accessible transport - We have a limited capacity to offer wheelchair accessibility for London and Cambridge transport. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the Eventbrite ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. We can provide a free Companion Ticket for transport if required. Please let us know by Saturday 31 July so we can make arrangements with the coach company.

If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, our Head of Operations, ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.

Covid Safety

To help keep audiences, artists and staff safe, this year’s onsite festival event will consist of open-air performances. The capacity will be capped at 25% of previous onsite editions of Wysing Polyphonic and we ask audiences to social distance while onsite. Transport to the festival arranged by Wysing will be at 50% capacity.

We advise you to dress for spending the day outdoors and to consider bringing an emergency poncho, umbrella, rug or picnic blanket.

Toilets will be available in Wysing’s buildings and sanitiser points are available around the site.

In the event of Wysing Polyphonic being cancelled due to Covid-19, tickets will be fully refunded.

Media partners

TANK Magazine, The Wire, AQNB, Noods Radio

Biographies

CAMPerVAN

The CAMPerVAN is a transportable queer performance, and community event space that can be deployed anywhere in the world to bring LGBTQIA+ performance art, film screening, panel discussion & workshop into the public realm. The collective is made up of collective is made up of film director and inventor Samuel Douek, artist Zoe Marden, curator and performer Fiontán Moran and artist and producer Youcef Hadjazi.

FAUZIA

FAUZIA first broke through as a DJ. Inspired by the interwoven legacies of fast music from either side of the Atlantic, her monthly NTS show sees her blend together the best of footwork, jungle and everything in between — with the likes of Mall Grab, Kode9, DJ Taye, Om Unit and Ikonika stopping in for guest spots. The start of 2020 saw FAUZIA start to showcase her own original music for the first time, first with a celebrated production mix for DISCWOMAN, and then with a contribution to the flagship 10th edition in HAUS of ALTR’s various artists series — picking up glowing press from Resident Advisor, Mixmag, DJ Mag, Crack and more in the process.

Ignota

Founded in the last days of 2017 by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, Ignota is an invitation to awaken, and at the same time, dream. Deriving their name from Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota, they seek to develop a language that makes possible the reimagining and reenchantment of the world around us.

Juliet Jacques

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker, whose books include Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015), and Variations (Influx Press, 2021). Her fiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including Granta, Frieze, London Review of Books, The Guardian, New York Times, Sight & Sound, Wire and others.

Marissa Malik 

Marissa Malik (she/they) is a London based astrologer, bruja, tarot reader, and sound artist renowned for her intuitive skills in the occult. She works across mediums to explore community care, ancestral connection, and the concept of mother tongue. Malik’s work has appeared on platforms such as Cosmopolitan, Dazed Beauty, Vogue, and BBC Asian Network.

M. J. Harding 

M. J. Harding is a music producer from London.

Nisha Ramayya

Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and is currently based in London. Her collection States of the Body Produced by Love (2019) is published by Ignota Books. Recent poems and essays can be found in The Contemporary Journal, Spam Zine, and audiograft festival of experimental music and sound art.

object blue

Born in Tokyo, raised in Beijing and now resident in London, object blue is one of the most exciting new voices in experimental club music, her limber live sets blending techno and sound design in a way that’s both cerebral and body-moving. Since storming onto the scene with her TT released debut EP Do you plan to end a siege? and follow up REX on Let’s Go Swimming, object blue has been in all the right places.

Space Afrika

Manchester UK’s Space Afrika make music of what they term “overlapping moments” – oblique mosaics of dialogue, rhythm, texture, and shadow, half-heard through a bus window on a rainy night. 

YaYa Bones

YaYa Bones is the musical alter ego of Ayesha Tan Jones.  

They protest music for witches, non-binary love songs and apocalyptic lullabies for the gestation phase of the nu-awakening. Taking influences from the unheard sounds of the weeds pushing through concrete and the crackling of embers in the hearth, they create a symbiosis of operatic siren calls and  technological earth beats, mantras of poetics and epitaphs to the cuthulucene. 

Yeshe Bahamon-Beesley

Yeshe Bahamon-Beesley is a Manchester based music producer and DJ who has created and performed music under the moniker “DJ Florentino” for nearly a decade. Garnering attention for his genre-bending releases on the canonical label Mixpak, The entrancing melodic quality to his work has captivated audiences from around the world, allowing him to do multiple extensive world tours. He has left his mark at venues such as MoMA in New York, OIL in Shenzhen, and Razzmatazz in Barcelona.

A—-Z (Anne Duffau)

Anne Duffau is a cultural producer, researcher, and founder of A—Z, an exploratory/nomadic curatorial platform. A---Z aims at opening up to audiences by sharing discursive practices in order to challenge preconceived ideas on race, gender identities and the so-called history in terms of power relationship. Anne is currently the interim curator at Wysing for the Polyphonic Festival 2020/2021 Editions, & a Tutor in Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art’s Contemporary Art Practice Programme. She has performed live music under Alpha through several projects and collaborations.