Please note: This event ended on 10 July 2026
In this Lunchtime Talk, theatre artists Naomi Smyth and China Fish will share their ambitions to combine audience participation, improvised performance and responsive technologies.
Naomi and China have recently started a new company Smish Theatre. Winning At Life is their first work in progress theatre show, which follows a team of two podcasters and friends as their quest for self-optimisation spirals into a competitive, data-driven hellscape- with darkly hilarious consequences.
In this Lunchtime Talk they will share their process, themes and what they have made so far, and outline their plans for the shape of their practice. Inspired by pioneering multimedia theatre company Forkbeard Fantasy's archive that spanned 1873-2023, they hope to make Winning At Life a modular 'storyworld' that has many lives in different forms.
About Naomi and China
Naomi and China are theatre artists with 20 years' experience in improvised, immersive and interactive comedy performance. China is also a singer songwriter, developing her audio practice into live and spatial audio with a DYCP. And Naomi is a digital artist and doctoral researcher in digital theatre who has worked with spatial tech like motion capture, social VR, binaural audio and volumetric scanning. They won the first annual Forkbeard Fantasy Award from Bristol Theatre Collection last year.