Sharon Smith

Sharon Smith is a founding member of Max Factory (UK) and now a member of Gob Squad (Berlin). She makes work between the languages of dance, theatre and visual art. Her projects are generally collaborative and so produced out of dialogue and negotiation. She works with Katie Duck in Amsterdam in an improvised performance collective and holds improvisation as a useful practical tool for understanding better ones performative involvement with a live event. She runs the Blue Stocking Social Club, rooting experimental performance in a northern English tradition of community and audience engagement. She has a PhD in the area of Live Performance Practice.

Max Factory is a performance-based collaborative project by Felicity Croydon and Sharon Smith. The two started working together in 1996, and are currently based in London. In their work Max Factory explore the liminal territory between visual arts, performance and theatre. They assimilate culturally codified systems of meaning to emphasise their arbitrary and fundamentally absurd nature. Often this is done by undermining the repertoire of images, ideas and assumptions about the female body. There is a post-feminist inclination in much of Max Factory practice, implied as an attempt at redefining the sphere of femininity and as a critical interest in the formation of personal and public identities in our commodity-obsessed, media-saturated culture.