Performance is a Dirty Work

Fourteen artist-researchers explore alternative modes of sociality in, with, and for performance.

Friday 20th May, 7pm to 11pm and Saturday 21st May 2011, 12pm to 10pm
BAC, Lavender Hill, Battersea, London, SW11 5TN

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A group of fourteen artist-researchers assembled in the context of a master’s programme, we wrestled with every attempt to become one, clean, whole. This is not a nicely balanced and agreeable group. Instead, it is fourteen people letting their work cross, meet, tangle – a dirty work of sharing headspace, thoughtspace, workspace, playspace. The lonelier work of incubation and solo cultivation opens up for cross-contamination, group infection. Watch the work of the group not fall apart but fall together.

In the search for common ground, we turn to the one thing we know we share: you. We ask you to work. We ask you to work just as hard as we do. We ask you to work harder. We want you to contaminate the work through your experience of it. You can find works designed to be watched from start to finish, works you can dip in and out of, works where you will be in a group, works where you will be on your own, works to wander with, and works to focus on. This is an invitation to perform, do, think, try, talk, have trouble, have fun, and get your hands dirty. Shuffling and layering images, ideas and impressions together, letting things decompose and sprout again in the imagination, putting awkward things side by side: making sense of experience is a dirty work.

As in a giant game of pick-up sticks, that which does not fit produces the most exciting friction, the most enticing gaps, the most tumbling and virtuosic falls, crumbling into the debris that forms the new playground.  At moments in the game, order, pattern, or beauty might emerge. These are welcomed, but recognised as temporary, dependent on their contexts and components. Contingency’s the name of the game: instead of waiting for the perfect circumstances, resources, or timing, we choose to work with what’s here, and who’s here.

In the spirit of dirtiness, we resist clarification and explanation.  Don’t get us wrong, we like talking about the work – it’s just that we’d rather you talk about the work. Common knots in the tangles between and within works are probed and pulled apart through a number of audience-centred talks. We have reimagined the performance discussion, where the artist doesn’t do much talking, if any at all. We seek to foreground your interpretive and experiential work, offer alternative ways of relating, and above all, welcome you in.

With works by:
Querquia Backman
Edit Biro
Gillie Kleiman
Rania Leontiou
Nic Lloyd
Kate McIntosh
Revanta Sarabhai
Julia Schwarzbach
Molly Beth Seremet
Emily Smith
Tom Stone
Lucy Thane
Ruth Turner
Karin Verbruggen

Admission for this event was free

Produced in the context of and supported by the Master’s program Performance and Creative Research at the University of Roehampton.