Maggie Nicols and Dan Johnson + support from Robert Evans and Anushiye Yarnell

Celebrating their debut release, Contact (TBC Editions), Chapter welcomes back Maggie Nicols and Dan Johnson. Two improvisers of different generations, who share a fearless approach to collaboration based in radical forms of communality and the practice and politics of deep listening.

Maggie’s voice, piano and tap dance meet Dan’s gong drones and percussive rhythms with profound results.

With a special performance from Robert Evans and Anushiye Yarnell featuring voice and crwth.

£6 early bird tickets are available until 6 June. Use code EARLYBIRD6 at the checkout.

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About the artists

Maggie Nicols is a legendary Scottish vocalist, dancer, and performer. Since the 1960s she has been a key figure in the free improv scene, including as part of John Steven’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble which she joined in 1968, Keith Tippett's fifty piece band Centipede (along with Julie Tippetts, Zoot Money, Phil Minton, Robert Wyatt, Dudu Pukwana and Alan Skidmore), and as a founder of the Feminist Improvising Group with Lindsay Cooper and influential trio Les Diaboliques with Irene Schweizer and Joelle Leandre, along with countless other groups and collaborations around the world. A committed feminist, much of her work has sought to amplify women in improvised music, dancing and other creative arts, not least through running workshops such as those at Oval House Theatre in the 1970s, and Contradictions, a women's workshop performance group that began in 1980.

Dan Johnson is a percussionist working in improvised sound and expanded composition. Undermining conventional notions of drumming, his experimental work is manifested across a wide range of projects; from eight-hour solo improvisations responding to instructions provided by the audience, to invite-only performances in rail tunnels, lifts and public toilets, to non-hierarchical group improvisation project Ecstatic Drum Beats. Running through this multifaceted output are consistent concerns with balancing chance and control, exposing performer-audience relationships, and the demands of discipline and physical endurance. Deeply rooted in Bristol’s DIY scene, where among his innumerable collaborations he was a mainstay of Dali de Saint Paul’s sprawling power-improv vehicle EP/64, Dan has brought the same spirit of openness to live and recorded work with artists like Moor Mother, Ximena Alarcon, Valentina Magaletti, Rattle, Yama Warashi, GNOD and Surgeon.

Robert Evans’ research and experiments in medieval, bardic music and poetry have made him a world authority on the music of the crwth. He is responsible for the revival of this bowed-lyre as a viable historical instrument, which he plays in Pythagorean tuning. A renowned fiddler, instrument-maker, expert in medieval Welsh string music, his interpretations and compositions, based on medieval Welsh sources, have been performed across Europe and the Americas. Robert has mentored many of today’s generation of traditional musicians and crwth-players. He is regarded as one of our finest critical thinkers on the role of tradition in contemporary culture.

Anushiye Yarnell is a performance artist and maker whose work is drawn from personal experience, past and future  mythologies. Her works examine the intersection of dream and fantasy realms within ordinary life and cultural diversity, experientially unravelling the function of Love within our lives.