Alongside the street theatre work which she has been devising and producing, Jessica Rost has been creating performance art for several years now. She has produced many short artist films which feature her unique costumes and spoken word work.
Most recently, she performed Bath Meditations, a series of sound recordings of her taking time to bathe in outdoor locations, from the bath that she made.
She has also been performing Becoming Batty, a stilt walking performance with spoken word. It was first shown at The Tetley in Leeds 2020 and performed live at Common Ground in Blackburn. You can see footage of Becoming Batty being performed at Common Ground, Blackburn during lock-down below:
In 2017 Jessica performed Safe at MK Gallery as part of MK Calling; a two hour live-streamed piece, welding myself into a cage constructed out of recycled bicycle frames. Have a look at the time lapse footage here.
Other solo performance work includes: As it is in Life, as it is in Death, as it is in Art, which was performed at WestburyArts Centre in Milton Keynes and Darwinias Random Selection, which was scratch performed at The Fishmarket in Northampton and selected for the Esculator Arts scheme.
Her piece Gasping Goldie toured to ArtWash laundrette in Oxford, MEANTIME Space in Cheltenham and the Open University in Milton Keynes.
Jessica’s solo performance work is international, including performances of Road to Plastic Democracy at Goethe Institute in Dhaka, Bangledesh as part of a British Council Fellowship, and Arachne Revealed, a video performance made at Braziers International.
The content of my performance work is often around ideas of tolerance/intolerance, understanding and misunderstanding, bio-diversity and cohabitation. These interconnections are implied on an individual, political and universal level in the work.
Jessica Rost
Jessica has created numerous costumes for touring productions which she directed as Artistic Director of Festive Road including; Brewing Up in 2012, Fair Play in 2013, The Jurassic Jockeys in 2014, Best Company in 2015 and The Futurists in 2017. She produced and directed for one-off events like Paraffinalia -an out door winter festival in Milton Keynes.
In 2012 Jessica was also one of five national designers selected to create costumes for the Cultural Olympiad project Carnival Crossroads-Eastbound, for which she designed 100 costumes and several large structures.
Rost Productions also runs its own stilt performing group called the Extreme Ramblers which appears at festivals, carnivals and street events nationally.
You can see examples of Jessica’s performance work here.