HEARTBEATS & ALGORITHMS by Jenny Lee

Derby Theatre Studio Saturday 24 September, 8pm

A dark, heart-achingly funny thriller about the leading role technology plays in our lives.

On Saturday 24 September, Derby Theatre will present Heartbeats & Algorithms, a dark, heart-achingly funny thriller about the leading role technology plays in our lives.

A computer programmer’s algorithms predict human decisions in seemingly unpredictable predicaments in the latest work from 2015’s Ideastap/BBC Writersroom award winner Jenny Lee.

A sell-out hit at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, Heartbeats & Algorithms was shortlisted for the Les Infants Terribles Award, hosted by Ideastap/Pleasance, and the Bush Theatre’s Development Programme.

With its themes of privacy and surveillance Heartbeats & Algorithms reworks an oft-explored zeitgeist as it follows Banks, a computer programmer whose creation uses personal data to predict the unpredictable.

Heartbeats & Algorithms, directed by Dancing Brick joint-director and associate director of Olivier Award winning company OperaUpClose, Valentina Ceschi, imagines an algorithm that can tell businesses when a person might take up smoking again, or how a swing voter might vote, and which discovers, late one night, its creator’s most intimate secret.

Financial Times ★★★★

Exeunt Magazine ★★★★

The Scotsman ★★★★

A Younger Theatre ★★★★

Writer and performer Jenny Lee said, “We share more information about ourselves with the technology that we use than with anyone else in our lives. It’s a relationship that ought to be empowering, providing us with the information, products and media we want. But the more intimate we are with our technology, the greater its ability to influence our behaviour and the narrower our choices become. Heartbeats & Algorithms connects these questions about how technology may be limiting our choices with a human story about a woman who’s compelled to consider how the choices she made in the past will affect those of her future.”

Jenny Lee is a theatre maker, writer and performer. Recent projects include a development residency at Soho Theatre for Super Ordinary (2014), Food Futures with Graham Rose (Stan’s Cafe), commissioned by mac Birmingham (2014); and An Ideal Woman, winner of the Ideastap/BBC Writersroom award 2015. As an actor and devisor, credits include Sum Zero (2011) by Ella Hickson, Lyric Hammersmith; Moon River (2012) directed by Caroline Horton, Pleasance; Brave New Worlds (2013) by Dancing Brick at the Soho Theatre; Bloody Foreigners (2010), Channel 4, winner of Best Documentary at the Fly International Film Festival.

Valentina Ceschi is a theatre-maker and opera-director and associate director of Olivier Award winning company OperaUpClose, and is joint-artistic director of Dancing Brick (dancingbrick.net), an award-winning theatre company whose credits include 21:13, 6.0: How Heap and Pebble Took on the World and Won and Captain Ko & The Planet of Rice. Recent productions include L’Elisir d’Amore for OperaUpClose, Thumbelina’s Great Big Adventure at the Cambridge Junction, House Party (UK tour) and We Can Make You Happy (Vault Festival/Assembly 2015). Valentina founded Brave New Worlds, a design-led collaboration whose work has premiered at the Barbican Pit and Soho Theatre. Whilst at Ecole Jacques Lecoq Valentina’s work was performed at Centre Pompidou.

Tickets: £10, £8 concessions. For more information and to book tickets call the Box Office on 01332 593939 or online at http://www.derbytheatre.co.uk