BEFORE BED
Before Bed is an intimate experimental reading collective located in Sydney, Australia founded by interdisciplinary artist, Audrey Newton in 2019. Before Bed encourages a shared, interconnected, and comfortable reading and listening experience for its audience. For the 2021 Unfix Festival, Before Bed will extend its invitation to international guests and will ask its guests to return the favour by participating and reading to its Australian audience.
Before bed invites readers and listeners to come together in exchange before it is time to sleep. The focus of this exchange is for the participants to read to the audience, and be read to. Before Bed is collaborative in nature and invites participants to choose a 500-1000 word reading in response to the theme of ‘Touch.’ Readings can be the participant’s own or excerpts from essays, novels, poems, news reports, novellas or theory. The possibilities are left to the reader to decide.
Before Bed is not the time to multi-task. It is the time to slow down and listen to readings or be part of a group of people reading fragments of text about touch. When part of the group of readers you can write a short piece of text or select one by another writer to read. Conversations about the texts build as the sequence layers more and more elements in a random and poetic construction.