Artist-Researchers and Works

Querquia Backman

Ruse of Engagement

The World Wide Web has given rise to a plethora of “professional” amateurs. What makes one viral performance more compelling than the other? What gives a performance its ring of veracity? Is truth proven by “contagious” click? This interactive installation connects the live with the virtuosic, the present with the cyber, in an attempt to extract reality from the/a[c]t/ricality.

 

 

 

Edit Biro

Last Chance for Remembering

‘Last Chance for Remembering’ is a durational video and interactive processual installation. The concept is drawn from Edit’s research on the phenomenology of trauma, memory, and forgetting, individual and collective remembering and commemoration past events.

There are times when we all feel or might have felt disconnected and decentred in our bodies. When your body and mind is scattered in thousand little pieces out to the universe; when they do not belong to you anymore; your feet are above the ground, and your body feels as if it was floating in the air; your breath is constantly uneasy and incomplete; you no longer manage to reach people, make yourself be heard. You are invisible. You start not to notice others, the details, the colour of their eyes, their moods, their anxieties. Everything in the world that you knew before is different, what you see, hear, smell, or touch. You are racing with time, with an unspeakable enigma, and you cannot catch up. Then you realise that something is really wrong…

 

 

Gillie Kleiman

DANCE CLASS: a performance

This is a dance class that wants to be a performance (it wants to shine, show off, be in the limelight).
This is a performance that wants to be a dance class (it wants to do things together, wear comfortable clothes, prance around the room).

Most of all it wants to have fun.  It loves to groove to its favourite songs, perform impromptu and inappropriate dances for its friends, and revel gloriously in the fantastic pleasure of a good handshake.  Like your dad’s dancing, it can be a bit embarrassing, but it means well and no harm is ever done.

The danceclassperformance is a one-hour event in which all the participants do some dancing and do some watching (even at the same time). It is open to all levels of dancers and spectators, and is particularly suitable for those who might have attended neither a dance class nor a performance before. Please bear in mind that all should come in loose, comfortable clothing and be prepared to watch and dance in bare feet.

To attend, please send an email with the number of places you’d like, and at which time you’d like to come, to prebookingisadirtywork@gmail.com. Places are strictly limited.

 

Rania Leontiou

in its own time… the body
At this time, on time, all the time, at the time, at one time, in its own time… the body. Movement starts somewhere and evolves away from the starting point, it develops in the present finding transitions from one place to the next anticipating the end. The present motion unfolds creating layers and becomes the past. The mind becomes aware of the “here” in relation to the changes and successions in the “there” in the positioning of the body. Present is illustrated from the awareness, knowledge and progress of the past.

This work tries to create a thinking place where the relationship between present and past challenge the mind as the body starts to moves between the two notions. The space once abandoned is being occupied, the different movement patterns unfold in a reversed manner shifting the climax and the structure of the piece as the experience and realization of time takes place.

 

Nic Lloyd

Right Here Your Timing Helps Me
.-. …. -.– – …. –   .. -.   -.– — ..- .-.   -… . -.. .-. — — –
.-. …. -.– – …. –   .. -.   – …. .   … – .-. . . -
- …. .   .-. …. -.– – …. –   — ..-.   .-.. .. ..-. .   .. …   .-   .–. — .– . .-. ..-. ..- .-..   -… . .- -

Measuring the world in metre and foot, marking time with its deserved prosody, well versed and under rehearsed, sometimes stanza lone, homophone ringing off the hook.  Quitting the beat that just won’t, floating the idea that right here your timing helps me, rhythms redacted with exacting precision or utter derision, when the beat of the drum calls you to follow some do, but some don’t.  Pattern and sound bandied about whilst casting around for novel treatments of situations where clichés abound, when I get stressed my accent comes out.  Attempted horizontal transpositions of embodied time may result in nothing more than a beat without a drum.

 

Kate McIntosh

Worktable
You will be asked to do the work here. You’ll get the right equipment, and safety goggles – then it’s in your hands. For you to decide how things come to pieces and how they fall back together. Bring the insides to out, fold it round again. For you to repair and burst apart. Sign in and get to work.

 

 

 

 

 

Revanta Sarabhai

LDR
A young man does his best to write profound poetry for his beloved. Another, eagerly awaits his lover’s phone call but inevitably seems to miss it. A woman spends her entire life ‘virtually’ re-telling every bit of it to her partner. And conversations fade into frustrated silences as detachment ensues, the longer two lovers are apart.

Integrating dance, theatre, text and video – LDR explores the nature of long distance relationships through their myriad complexities and disjunctions, whilst dealing with a fundamental quest: how can we find togetherness when living apart and on the move? An affective soundscape layers the interplay of text and movement with a multitude of ‘voices’ – that speak of waiting, desire and the silence between separation.

Performed by Revanta Sarabhai and Sarathy Korwar

 

Julia Schwarzbach

Jaune
´Jaune´is the memory of a place, where nights are silent.

A place of high mountains and cold winters.
The body moves with surprises and sudden changes. it expands in stillness.
´Jaune´is a place that invites you to come, to stay and to leave as you wish. it unfolds in the here and now. with you, with me, with our memories and our perceptual experience of the moment.
To be in ease with that.

 

 

 

Molly Beth Seremet

Martin’s (words lost)
This devised theatre work employs memory as a form of presence in absence.   Perhaps it draws on objects and archetypes to speak, to disclose, to open up, and in doing so, to create a portrait of a particular family, girl, life.   Or, perhaps it uses familiar items, people and occurrences to create a wider bridge, a path that connects us through the mundane, the everyday, the experiences special not because they are noteworthy but because they are lived, embodied, owned.  And possibly, it just expresses a woman’s longing to dance with her previously-living grandfather.   In any case, this piece considers memory as verb, as vital process, as something to be lived even in its study.  Memory and remembering are physical entities to be engaged, grappled and tangled with.  Memory is a slippery substance, and is therefore invited to emerge through work with existing and new text, re-imagined choreography, sound, reuse of objects and artifacts.  A grandfather.  A record-player.  Some relearned choreography, set to some re-imagined music.  A children’s story.  A stack of letters.  A famous painting. Iceland.  All this is an attempt to traverse the distance between now and then, mine and not mine, what is and what was.

 

Emily Smith

Affect/Attention

This piece takes as its subject your current emotional state, and its own attempt to influence it. It gives you a space to sit alone with your body and its responses to watching, and asks what it might mean for art to attempt to choose your feelings for you. Is it a polite request? an enticing option? A hidden side-effect? A bold provocation? Or a step-by-step formula?

 

Tom Stone

‘Have a Seat’

Tom Stone’s piece for Performance is a Dirty Work takes the form of a one-on-one performance where narrative and object lead the audience member on a journey through a landscape of converging opposites.

The work leaves the confines of the Town Clerk Office and escapes into a hinterland through the introduction of match sticks and coffee cups. Angry mallards and underground rivers take centre stage as a meandering narrative pulls the participant in and out of thought; the only static assurance is that of the participant’s body.

Day dreamers are welcome.

 

 

Lucy Thane

I am not a village
Saffron Hill, travels from her home in Clerkenwell to visit her sister Lavender in Battersea; Using the movements, music and people of London as her guide.
A participatory perambulation, performance  and installation.

 

 

 

Ruth Turner

I Dare A Ball To Bounce

These ideas were much better at the end of the development process. Trying to not let them develop was a bitch. This frenetically-spoken performance is a spanner in its own making. Free-flowing ideas fall flat, over and over again, if they dare to last.

I Dare A Ball To Bounce chases its dreams in a world where dreaming gets you no-where, good ideas get you only fifteen minutes and talent is measured by reviews. Even in the event of rehearsal, Ruth Turner becomes the only thing in the way of her success - Except it has already happened and this is its eulogy. You have been reading the obituaries section accidentally.

Ruth is indebted to many ideas which she has not had. This is a tribute to them.

 

Karin Verbruggen

There has been an accident and they have left me here in this condition to do this

She has a go at it. She’s not quite sure. (Performing) personhood is being investigated. Small talk can be a big issue and big questions in life might come down to small actions. This performance by Karin Verbruggen is not asking  you to make sense, although you might find yourself trying to, or even doing so. This performance is an attempt. An attempt to be (in)coherent, to (mis)match, an attempt to attempt.