July is a very busy month! I’m really excited about all the projects coming up this month and very happy to be performing in familiar work as well as a new collaboration!
I will be revisiting MASS with Robert Clark as a choreographed audience-participation experience in an embodied cognition experiment at the Wellcome Collection on Thurs 7 & Fri 8 July. Contact me if you’d like more info!
On Sat 16 July I’ll be back with Janine Harrington’s Screensaver Series to celebrate the launch of The Dance Space in Brighton, as part of Our City Dances. We are performing three times in one day, and tickets are free to book here.
I am really honoured and excited to be invited by Whitechapel Gallery to create a performance for Nocturnal Creatures on Sat 23 July, in a collaboration and response to artist Emma Talbot’s exhibition The Age / L’Età. I will be joined by collaborator and artist Bettina Fung, in a performance featuring recorded readings by author and activist Starhawk. Performance times are at 7pm and 9pm in Gallery 2 of Whitechapel Gallery. More details here.
I had the privilege of performing in not one but two performance commissions at the National Gallery in London this autumn, both part of Dance to the Music of Our Time, a live exhibition presented alongside Poussin and the Dance.
This was my second time working with Hetain Patel after filming a small part in his film Trinityearlier this year.
Baa’s Gold 10 recounts the story of the burglary of Hetain Patel’s ‘Baa’, or grandmother in Gujarati, whilst at home in Bolton where she lived alone. In a pursuit for gold, Patel’s Baa endured a violent ordeal at the hands of a gang of men who specifically targeted Hindu widows for their cultural tradition of only wearing gold jewellery. As the story is recounted multiple times in the form of a spoken screenplay by a group of performers, Baa regains her own agency, enacting revenge in the final version of the screenplay.
Patel’s performances process events from his own biography through a range of media, often recounting these stories in various ways. Patel presents his own domestic British Indian story in amongst the Western canon of art history as equally epic and fantastical, using both the traditional act of live performance, and the modern form of cinematic storytelling.
I was delighted to work with Florence Peake again in December to create a new work Factual Actual as part of five dancers, a mix of long-term collaborators (including myself) and new ones.
Large, exuberantly painted canvasses are folded, dragged, and suspended by five dancers, moving between flat and sculptural forms and theatrical elements of concealment and revelation. Factual Actual extends what painting can do and its relationship to movement, upending the static representation often found in museum collections through chaotic shifts and ever-changing compositions.
Factual Actual treats the canvases, painted by Florence Peake, with a joyful irreverence, extending the relationship between dance and movement. Unpicking the romantic representation of dance in classical painting and its idealised depiction of the body, Peake looks at the idea of the collapse of the canon of white Western classical painting through the literal manipulation of the large canvases as they are collapsed in form. The dancers work with the idea of collapse and use it as a metaphor to address wider concerns of institutional power structures and the ways in which we can overcome them.
I have returned back to London after two months of intense summer heat in Hong Kong, having witnessed a dramatic and historical moment for my home city and my sense of belonging and identity. This month I’m doing some research for choreographer (and friend) Gillie Kleiman on her new project friend, while also preparing for upcoming performances and an R&D project with choreographer Annie Hanauer starting in September.
Iris Yi Po Chan 陳以葆 