Earlier this year Instant Win! invited performance artists from across Greater Manchester to pitch a new performance idea in no more than 60 seconds. A panel of judges selected the best idea, using imagination and originality as their only criteria.

With two competitions, one in-house at greenroom and the other in Sale Waterside Arts Centre, this year saw two winners receiving a £500 commission to realise their idea, a package of support, plus a slot in the greenroom programme.

Come along and see the winning ideas presented, as Hello Friends Theatre explore the everyday performances we all create in Dressing the Part: A Durational Performance, and Tam Hinton recites beautiful poetry whilst boxing a professionally trained mystery fighter in HARD BARDS.

For more information about previous Instant Win! winners, click here.

Dressing The Part: Hello Friends Theatre

A Durational Performance from 5pm until 9pm (watch all four hours or just half an hour)

Self-presentation. Personal tastes. You chose to put that on. You chose to. Fads, trends, standardised uniforms. Ooo – nice. What has she come as?

Dressing The Part employs two performers and 50 pieces of original photography in an exploration of performance in everyday life through what we wear. Dressing The Part is a dress up and dress down performance piece in which everyone we are, were, and ever could be, are laid bare in front of an event-controlling audience.

As well as being a freelance artist, Ellie Harrison founded Hello Friends Theatre in 2006. The company is ever striving to create a perfect replica of the subtly theatrical, seductive world the media presents… but in a live medium where there are no edits or flattering angles. Everything is in shot. We want to find the common ground between the audience and the performer. What makes us both laugh? What makes us both unnervingly uncomfortable? What we see on the TV; in the pub; on the bus? The company makes work that responds to the opinions and interests of our audiences, and acknowledges our differences as freely as we acknowledge our common ground. Hello Friends Theatre are currently touring How To Be Well Dressed and Famous to studio spaces across the country.

Ollie Smith is an independent artist who makes performance work which interrogates the frictions of reality and fantasy, especially the hazy place which human thought seems to inhabit somewhere in-between the two. He is currently making work with artist Phoebe Walsh and is also working as the Coordination Manager of experimental company Reckless Sleepers.

For more information about Hello Friends Theatre’s current projects and tour dates, go to myspace.com/hellofriendstheatre or contact via e-mail hellofriends.caniplay@hotmail.com

Please note that this performance contains partial female nudity and full male nudity.

HARD BARDS: Tam Hinton

begins at 9.30 pm

Many people have wanted to PUNCH TAM HINTON during his ‘career’. Almost everyone who sees him in fact.

Now the wily swine has turned this to his advantage, mixing delicate poetry with the nose splintering violence of AMATEUR BOXING!

Hinton’s spent 2 months undergoing a crash-course in BOXING in some dog rough gym. Tonight he will demonstrate new COMBINATIONS of wordsmithery/fistycuffs.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL

He and another fighter will PAN EACH OTHERS FACES IN whilst RECITING BEAUTIFUL POEMS!

Whether you’re blood thirsty hoodlums, ennui stricken ponces- or real people who fit neither stereotype- don’t miss HARD BARDS!

Take a look at some footage from the evening: