This summer, Slung Low invites you into The Knowledge Emporium – an old fashioned sweet shop converted from a 60s’ caravan – to share and celebrate the knowledge that makes you unique. Taking place as part of the city-wide In Other Words Festival, the project is helping celebrate the reopening of the Liverpool Central Library. Located in Williamson Square, The Emporium has been asking visitors to swap stories in exchange for sweets, and is located outside the Liverpool Playhouse all this week. This collected knowledge will accumulate in two performances on Saturday 18 May.
The Knowledge Emporium is an old-fashioned sweetshop in a converted 1960s’ airstream caravan. The Emporium trades in sweets, the sort you remember as a kid, but it is a sweetshop with one big difference: it doesn’t take money. It trades only in knowledge, your knowledge- your stories, your recipes, anecdotes or facts.
Throughout the week you’re invited to The Emporium to share your knowledge by entering it in The Big Book of Everything We Know. In return for your generosity, you can help yourself to some sweets. At the end of the week, Slung Low will create a reading from the material collected, celebrating the collective knowledge of the community as part of the In Other Words Festival. This city-wide literary celebration is designed to commemorate the reopening of the Liverpool Central Library, which takes place on Friday 17 May.
The Knowledge Emporium began its journey at Tavistock Place, off Portobello Market, in July 2010, where over 1000 people made entries in The Big Book of Everything We Know.
Since then, it has travelled around the country to differing communities, collecting knowledge and performing readings of what people know.
Slung Low’s Artistic Director Alan Lane said: “The chance to return to Liverpool – a city where Slung Low has been most inspired over the years – with the Knowledge Emporium is incredibly exciting. If there was a place in the world destined to truly appreciate the motto of the Emporium – that every individual has a piece of knowledge, a story, a memory that would be of interest to other people – then it is the city of Liverpool. We can’t wait to swop our sweets for your knowledge.”
Slung Low is an award winning company based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Creating site specific and theatre installations Slung Low have created work with and for a variety of renowned theatre buildings and festivals including; The Almeida Theatre, The Barbican, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, The Cultural Olympiad, The Lowry, The Gate Theatre, and Liverpool 08 European Capital of Culture. In 2010, their co-production with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Anthology was voted the Liverpool Echo Production of the Year, and they were also responsible for the closing ceremony of the Everyman Theatre in 2010. The company is based in 5 railway arches that have been converted into office and studio rehearsal space called The Holbeck Underground Ballroom.
