Mobile Salon

5.30pm at the Tobacco Factory

The Haircut Before the Party (THBTP) are a radical hairdresser collective are taking up a “line of flight” across Europe through political and economical crisis, to discover the meanings of revolution today.

Throughout 2012 they will be setting up temporary salons that act as meeting places, sites of exchange and social environments in which people are invited to receive haircuts for free and discuss political issues in a space that encourages immediate solidarities and trust.

THBTP will be visiting Bristol's Mayfest for a one off revolutionary hair salon with Dr Claire Shaw of Bristol University. You are invited to help us shape and (de)construct the revolutionary identities of the past and present. Claire will help us explore who the 'New Soviet Man' was and what depended on him while at the same time THBTP will style and transform both her hair and these questions into future subjectivities of today. Expect radical readings and banter about beards.

Claire Shaw is a lecturer and researcher in Russian history at Bristol University. Her work looks at the construction of individual and collective identities during the Soviet era, focusing in particular on how Soviet people engaged with the revolutionary 'project' to create a utopian society. She is currently writing a book, 'Deaf in the USSR', which examines the history of the deaf community in the Soviet Union. Alongside her research into identity politics, she is also interested in the development of leisure activity and underground fashion trends in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.