Bert and Nasi at The Lowry

If you book to see both shows through the link above, you’ll only pay £10.00 per ticket. Just add tickets for both shows into your basket and the discount will automatically apply.

Award-winning performance artists Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, known as Bert and Nasi, bring an evocative and impossibly beautiful dance double bill to Salford next week.

Exploring life and temporality, endings and beginnings, the dance duo bring their signature choreography and stripped-back style to The Lowry with The End (Wednesday 26 April) and The Beginning (Thursday 27 April).

Tender, witty and dynamic performance that sits somewhere between live art and theatre.

Recipients of the Forced Entertainment Award in 2020, Bert and Nasi have been working together since 2015. Creating tender, witty and dynamic performance that sits somewhere between live art and theatre, their previous work has explored complex political and social questions, often interrogating their role, and the audience, as ‘active’ spectators in global conflicts.

Playful, though also heart-rending and poignant, The End (26 April) sees the duo imagine what a future without each other might look like.

The End sees the duo imagine what a future without each other might look like.

Through the use of clever projections alongside the duo’s mesmerising movement, we are reminded of two parallel narratives running at the same time: the end of the Earth and the end of a relationship. Compelling and sometimes silly, the dance is a reminder and a celebration of our own mortality, as well as the ongoing ecological crisis happening around us.

The Beginning offers a contrasting dance piece in which Bert and Nasi contemplate new beginnings.

The following night, The Beginning (27 April) offers a contrasting dance piece in which Bert and Nasi contemplate new beginnings. Exploring the nature of starting again – new shows and new relationships – in this piece, Bert and Nasi examine the joys, difficulties, exhilaration and exhaustion that arise from beginning again and again.

Perhaps what makes this performance so special is that it includes a chorus of fifteen non-professional participants, aged 60 and over, from the local community. As the duo dance, the chorus replicates simple dance movements alongside. This stunning physical ‘call and response’ style serves to highlight that new beginnings and adventures can be had at any age, and we can choose how – and when – we want to start over again. Life-affirming, hopeful and tender, The Beginning is a performative rumination of life, relationships and fresh starts.

Try something new this spring.

Of Bert and Nasi, Matthew Eames, Head of Theatres (Contemporary Commissioning) at The Lowry, told us, “Bert & Nasi are quite unlike anyone else and they make work that is quite unlike anything else. They take a subject – whether it is Brexit, or the left/right political divide or the end of the world and reduce it to the relationship between two slightly ridiculous humans moving around a stage. They are a pair of wallies – a pair of clowns without makeup. They make you laugh, they disarm you, they charm you, they move you. Yet it’s hard to fathom why. They are upscaling for this show and we felt that The Lowry could help them do that. They take their work to festivals and theatres across the world now and I’m delighted that we will share the world premiere of The Beginning with Lowry audiences. ”

Remember, if you book to see both Bert and Nasi shows this April, you’ll only pay £10.00 per ticket. Try something new this spring.