Block Universe International Performance Art Festival, 2016

What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come to downtown New York to perform alongside the early post-moderns at the Judson Church? That question is the impetus for this performance by American choreographer Trajal Harrell, making a rare appearance in London with Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church (S). One of the most prominent choreographers of his generation, Harrell revisits the history of contemporary dance, highlighting how history is partly a fiction. This performance takes a new critical position on postmodern dance aesthetics emanating from the Judson Church period. By developing his own work as an imaginary meeting between the aesthetics of Judson and those of a parallel historical tradition, that of voguing, Harrell re-writes the minimalism and neutrality of postmodern dance with a new set of signs.

Image credit: Arron Leppard

As this is a participatory workshop, please be sure to wear comfortable clothing.

Artist niv Acosta is in conversation with Louise O’Kelly, Founding Director, Block Universe. This is ahead of the UK premiere of niv Acosta’s DISCOTROPIC | Alien Talk Show at David Roberts Art Foundation (Sat 4 June) as part of Block Universe. In this performance niv Acosta seizes on an elementary medium of intimate exposure—television  and the confessional culture of the talk show—to explore the relationships between science fiction, disco, astrophysics and the black American experience.

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Choreographer and Dance Art Foundation Artistic Director Joe Moran teams up with Block Universe festival to invite Swedish choreographer Mårten Spångberg to London to lead a free one-day Study Lab at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Mårten Spångberg will also present the UK première of The Internet at the ICA for Block Universe 2016 on Wednesday June 1st in partnership with Dance Art Foundation.

This informal one-day event offers an immersive encounter with the philosophical concerns and complex thinking of Mårten Spångberg’s distinctive and provocative choreographic approach. The Lab will include both dialogue and practice, and forms part of the final event series of Joe Moran/Dance Art Foundation’s two-year research Why Everyone One Wants What We’ve Got focused on the critical acumen of dance.

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Responding to the festival’s theme of The Future Perfect, Sam Belinfante will work with the renowned vocal and movement artist Elaine Mitchener to present an evening of performances that unpick the relationships between sound, language and technology. At the core of this event will be a series of improvisations that place Mitchener and Belinfante in direct opposition through a set of formal one-to-one setups, ranging from interview-type situations to the more intimate and intensive arrangements of psychoanalysis and interrogation. In-ear feedback technology will provide private, random directions to each performer, whilst allowing for moments of serendipitous synchronicity. This event will also include a movement of Elaine Mitchener’s extraordinary new work Industrialising Intimacy. Throughout this work, Mitchener investigates the loss of privacy in our society versus the strength of true intimacy in a world undoubtedly hyper-mediated through and by communication technologies. Additional interventions will be provided by composer and performer Neil Luck, whose Selected Poems are musical settings of his most disconnected thoughts and fantasies.

With thanks to Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz and the Wellcome Collection.

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In  Undead and Other Tales,  a singer performs a score based on Gaetano Donizetti’s  Aria of Madness, from his 19th-century opera  Lucia di Lammermoor. The composition moves between opera and sounds that transcend human quality and sounds relating  to maritime traditions of preventing death as well as using repetition, reverses and loops; the aim is to deconstruct cultural traditions portraying psychological and physical states of instability.

Undead and Other Tales will be performed by Lisa Cassidy.

Costume made by Eliza Collin, assisted by George Toon and Emma Northcott. Puppet maker Garry Rutter, puppeteer Adele Guidoni.

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Erica Scourti’s mytho-biographic performance explores the automation of personality, drawing on ancient Greek tales of the underworld and the notion of human and technological proxies. This performance  traces a speculative situation of the artist being fired from her own job and replaced by automated affective agents and human assistants, questioning the role of efficiency-enhancers in an economy that valorises the authentic presence of the artist.  Personal Proxies  humorously explores self-doubt, anxieties of legacy and self-improvement.

Assistants for this performance are Maria D Sotiropoulou, Skye Arundhati Thomas and Afra Zamara.

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Presented by Block Universe in partnership with Dance Art Foundation, Mårten Spångberg’s The Internet pushes the boundaries of performance, intertwining music, dance and sculpture. Investigating the influences of digital communication on choreography and representation, within this performance social networks become secondary audiences, and health apps, games and dating tools are used to generate dance, rhythm and vibe.

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In this new commission, which will be presented in the Parthenon Gallery at the British Museum, artist Alexis Blake will work with a group of professional dancers to question historical representations of the idealised female body. Referencing Diana Watts and Dora Menzler’s contributions to the women’s physical culture movement of the early 20th Century, which drew inspiration from Greek philosophy, history and ideals, this choreographic work will explore notions of national collective identity vs personal expression through form, symmetry and balance in movement.

Conditions of an Ideal is a co-commission from Block Universe and Delfina Foundation, and is supported by the Mondriaan Fonds and The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

With thanks to the CROSS International Performance Award, The British Museum and Ian Jenkins.

Co- Producer/ Rehearsal Director:
Zara Truss Giles

Dancers:
Eleni Papaioannou
Ruby Embley
Tanja Erhart
Vanessa Abreu
Nandi BheBhe
Kezia Pollendine
Ellen van Schuylenburch

Musicians:
Luisa Gerstein
Sarah Jones
Lani Rocillo

Film Crew:
Lucas Van Woerkum
Jasper Van Gheluwe
Robert Berger

Image credit: Arron Leppard

In a UK premiere of  DISCOTROPIC | Alien Talk Show, niv Acosta  seizes on an elementary medium of intimate exposure – television  and the confessional culture of the talk show – to explore the  relationships between science fiction, disco, astrophysics  and the black American experience. In collaboration with local  performers, Acosta tapes a talk show to revisit past futures  and claim a fantastical site of possibility.

SPECIAL GUESTS:
Rumbi Mautsi
No-Filter Rawchelle
Fannie Sosa‬
Rochelle & Serena

WITH SPECIAL SEGMENTS BY:
Tavia Nyong’o & Jeffrey Williams

Video Designer: Bleue Liverpool

Talk Show Host: Yessenia Acosta

Production Assistant: Katia Aisha

Jacket design: Joana Rosa Architect

CREDITS:
MAP Fund
Christian McLaughlin
Paul Maheke
Radical Black & Brown Hotties
Caitlin Marz
Fake Accent
Alicia Keys
Pierre Debuscherre
Celia Rowlson-Hall

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Jesse Darling + Raju Rage share an interest in the study and practice of gender and empire and its technologies of violence, tenderness and complicity. Having worked previously and respectively as a pastry chef and big-batch caterer, this performance, their first collaboration, will present the indigestible truth as a gift economy: ‘let the one without hunger lift the first knife’.

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Philip Ewe’s one-man performance for Block Universe finds the self in energetic and at times absurd crisis for new options. Shadowed by London’s corporate skyline, Ewe’s new work continues his interest in developing layers of subjects, objects and turns of phrase into tactile pipelines between audience, space and corners of the psyche.

The way documentary has been famously described as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, Ewe’s practice comes out of tackling real, often urban, locations as a kind of catalyzing zone for subliminal campaigns towards the self, in all its varied and sometimes fictive versions – at once real, performed and mediated. Inhabiting a dynamic combination of improvisation and script, the work will roll as a one-man pinball machine posing, in the name of progress and failure, questions and answers and then more questions.

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The Hydra myth tells us a story of a many-headed serpent that has the ability to regenerate lost heads. As soon as one of its heads is cleaved off, Hydra re-grows the lost body part. Hydra  is also the name of a freshwater animal with extraordinary regenerative abilities. The genus stem cells appear to have a capacity for indefinite self-renewal. Hydra stands for organisms that  do not age or die of old age.  Current researchers from the trans-humanism movement circulate the idea of wanting to cure ageing. According to those thinkers, ageing falls into the category of a disease that needs to be rectified. The actual causes of ageing still remain unknown. A Biologically Immortal Living Being Can Still Die looks at this subject matter by confronting the varying philosophical and scientific meanings of ageing with the ubiquitous desire of  society not to senescence. Ageing becomes the phenomena that has not been resolved yet or made controllable by mankind. It gives us a biological timetable we have to stick to and will most likely die of.

Performed by Henry Babbage.

Image credit: Arron Leppard