Origins
Frith taught in the early 1970s at Manchester School of Art (later Manchester Metropolitan University). Unhappy with the prevailing abstraction of the period he experimented with extending purely visual forms to include live performance and music, influenced by Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms and Claes Oldenburg, and working with groups of his students. At the Bede Gallery, Jarrow, he worked on a large scale project with his friend Dave Pearson, filmmakers and artists, and including the musician Alan Price, as well as engineers from the local shipbuilding industry.
In the mid 70s he met Welfare State and worked with that company for two years. He formed Horse + Bamboo Theatre in 1978, with a group of ex-students, musicians and members of Matrogoth Theatre from Leiden, Netherlands.
For the past decade or more Frith has worked closely with Alison Duddle, originally of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre from Minneapolis on the majority of the company's productions.
Read more about this topic: Horse And Bamboo Theatre
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