Block Universe International Performance Art Festival, 2019

Ravioli Me Away will present their brand new opera, which will have its London premiere within the festival, marking the final date of a national tour. The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a work about freedom, individual and collective aspiration and the cycle of life, taking the audience through a multidimensional journey as ‘the trapped soul of humanity’ searches for a body that can give it meaning. Ravioli Me Away – Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald – have been a band since 2013. They are a high energy collective, undefined by genre, dangerously ambitious, and working with stylistically schizophrenic motifs spanning all-known past, present and future human cultures and sub-cultures.

The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is produced by Ravioli Me Away and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge. Touring and commissioned in partnership with BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Box, Plymouth; Block Universe, London, with additional support from The Albany, London; Heart n Soul, London; Nottingham Contemporary and The Barbican Theatre, Plymouth. The project is supported with a Grant for the Arts using public funding by Arts Council England.

Photos: Rui Pignatelli, 2019

*New Commission, supported by Arts Council England and Institut Français, London.

Paul Maheke and Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) will collaborate to produce a performance using African cosmology from the Bantu-Kongo and creation stories as its source material. A collaboration of music, design and performance, music producer Nkisi will provide the soundtrack and Ariel Efraim Ashbel the lighting design, within which Maheke will perform. This work is developed in collaboration with Performa in New York, where it will tour after its presentation in London.

Photos by   Manuela Barczewski

Block Universe and Tate invite a selection of artists, curators and writers to reflect on contemporary choreographic practice. Responding to the term ‘post-dance’, coined at the MDT conference in Stockholm (2015), the event considers the implications of an expanded notion of choreography.

Our contributors will be asked to issue provocations and responses that consider choreography in artistic practice. Exploring questions around liveness and the embodied labour of dance, join us in discussing what this means for an expanded understanding of contemporary dance and movement-related practices. Invited to present provocations are artists’ Malik Nashad Sharpe, Paul Maheke, Florence Peake & Eve Stainton from the perspective of their collaboration and academic Amanda Øiestad Nilsen. The event will be chaired by Curator of Nottingham Contemporary, Cedric Fauq.

There will be space for group discussion with the audience during the event. Following the event join us for a performance hosted by CAJ COLLAB in the East Room. CAJ COLLAB is a collaborative platform that invites two artists from different disciplines who have never worked together before to create a piece of performance in one day.

Click here to listen to the conference. Please note the recording is in two parts.

Photos by Manuela Barczewski

UK premiere, supported by Arts Council England. With thanks to Pramma.

Renowned performance artist Michael Portnoy has also revealed the shocking news that he is 35 years older than he has claimed and has been disguising his true age with prosthetic makeup throughout his career. At the festival, in Portnoy (Born 1936) Improvises, he reveals himself for the first time without a mask, improvising and confusing us in his inimitable way with the collision of movement, language and alien logics. Art historian Claire Bishop
will give an introductory lecture on Portnoy’s newly discovered early history in New York in the late 1950s, discussing his influences and antagonisms within the avant-garde communities of dance, poetry and visual art.

Photos by   Manuela Barczewski

This symposium, created in partnership with Goldsmiths Visual Cultures Student Society, will reflect upon contemporary performance practices, looking at the relation of self, identity politics and digital space in the realisation of live work in the UK.

With speakers Isobel Harbison, Hannah Perry, Emily Rosamond, Erica Scourti and Chooc Ly Tan.

Chooc Ly Tan – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://chooclytan.com/about.html

Emily Rosamond – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://www.emilyrosamond.com/

Erica Scourti – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://www.ericascourti.com/

Hannah Perry – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://www.hannahperry.com/

Isobel Harbison – Find out more about Performing Image here https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/performing-image

Supported by Arts Council England

First UK presentation
Supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute and the Goethe-Institut London, with the additional support of Outset Contemporary Art Fund and the Climavore Residency.

Artist’s talk: Alexandra Pirici in conversaiton with Iwona Blazwick, Director of Whitechapel Gallery.
Monday, 20 May 11am at the Climavore Residency.

Alexandra Pirici  brings the ongoing action Leaking Territories (2017), to London for the first time. Originally made for the decennial art exhibition Munster Skulptur Projekte 2017, The Friedenssaal in Münster’s historic town hall served as the starting point for a work remediating political world events with live bodies, conjuring and linking together actions from different times and spatial realities, revealing the concept of a well delimited, well enclosed horizontal territory and stable identity as a fiction.

Performed by: Luisa Saraiva, Susanne Songi Griem, Boar Beniamin, Pia Wagner, Fang-Yu Shen, Rolando Matsangos.

Photos by Manuela Barczewski

In the 1980s, the influential Performance Magazine (1979-1992) started presenting performance art events in London, including Art in Danger, At the Edge and Last Sweat of Youth at the Diorama and AIR Gallery. This culminated in EDGE 88, one of London’s first site-specific performance/installation festivals and the focus of the recent Edge of an Era project exploring performance art in the late 1980s.

EDGE 88 was a forerunner of London based festivals that emerged in in the 2000s such as Block Universe, Fig 1 and 2, SPILL Festival of Performance, Steakhouse Live, Tempting Failure and others, and this event brings together a panel of artists and curators from the 1980s and now to look at the context that EDGE 88 operated in and how that compares with the current landscape in which Block Universe presents its work. Featuring Rob La Frenais (original director of EDGE and co-curator of Edge of an Era), Helena Goldwater (artist and co-curator of Edge of an Era), Phoebe Patey Ferguson (academic, artist and curator of VFD, London), Louise O’Kelly (Founding Director and Curator of Block Universe) and Alex Eisenberg (LADA and co-curator of Edge of an Era).

Some of the questions that the panel will address are: What are the changes in the artistic landscape and the visibility of performance art practices? What artistic lineages do artists identify with now and how does this affect their relationship to the history of performance? What are the political resonances between the late 1980s and now and how does this impact on the work that is being made and presented?

As part of the evening we will also screen a short film by Morgan Quaintance commissioned for Edge of an Era, 2019, Anne, Paul and Richard, which evokes the spirit of the 1980s through the work of Bow Gamelan Ensemble (Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson).

All photos by Manuela Barczewski except last image: Video still from EDGE 88, Told by an Idiot – Derek Kreckler, Adrienne Gaha and Sarah Miller, 1988.

Supported by Arts Council England

Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick in conversation with Block Universe artist Alexandra Pirici.

Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick and Block Universe artist Alexandra Pirici, for a lunchtime talk, discussed the artists ongoing practice and her work Leaking Territories, on view at London’s Imperial War Museum from 22-28 May, 2-6pm daily.

Alexandra Pirici is an artist with a background in dance and choreography who works undisciplined, across different mediums. Her work has been exhibited within the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, the Venice Biennale – Romanian Pavilion at the 55th edition, Tate Modern London, New Museum New York, Art Basel Messeplatz, The 9th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10, Centre Pompidou – Paris, Museum Ludwig Cologne, the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Russian Museum St. Petersburg, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, HAU Theatre Berlin, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, among many others. Alexandra Pirici works in museum, theatrical frameworks and the public space. Her performative artworks fuse dance, sculpture, spoken word and music. They deal with monumentality or history, playfully tackling and transforming existing hierarchies; they reflect on the history and function of gestures in art and popular culture, or on questions about the body, its presence, absence or image, and the politics of capture.

Climavore Residency in partnership with Outset.

Photos by Nikos Akritidis

Reading and artist talk with Block Universe artist Sophie Jung at 30 Old Burlington Street (Cork Street Galleries) on Sunday, 19 May 2019.

Sophie Jung read The Bigger Sleep libretto and was joined by Paul Clinton for a conversation, discussing the artists practice and her work The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) which premiered in London with Block Universe on 18 May 2019.

Excerpt: We don’t fall in love with the fictional detective because she knows all the answers and always gets it right. We identify with her because she too is caught in signs, bungling interpretations of words or events, and only occasionally stumbling upon something like a workable meaning. If Jung were pretending not to perform, not to be delivering words for an audience, but just saying them straight and sincerely, in full confidence of their meaning, that would be the real con trick. Authenticity here is in acknowledging the pretence.

Sophie Jung might be the loose end artist. Her way of allowing things to hang is another way of keeping them dynamic, without resolution, not finishing an idea or a work. This suspension, or lack of resolution, is as much a purgatory and limbo as it is a way of keeping things alive and open.

The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) is an adaptation of Jung’s major installation at the Kunstmuseum Basel into a site-specific performance for Block Universe’s 2019 edition.

Programme
12noon Reading by Sophie Jung
1:30pm Sophie Jung in conversation with Paul Clinton

A limited and signed edition of Sophie Jung’s libretto was available during the event.

The set of The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) could be visited daily from 11am to 6pm from the 19 May to 1 June.

We thank Cork Street Galleries / Pollen Estate for generously providing the space.

Photos by  Manuela Barczewski

* Supported by Arts Council England

An afternoon of poetry readings by artists and writers whose work reveal the performativity of language, as part of Block Universe, London’s leading international performance art festival.

The playful relationship between experimental writing practices and performance is enacted as words are transposed across formats, from the page, through the digital and in live utterances. Current Whitechapel Gallery Writer in Residence Rachel Pimm is joined by writers Iphgenia Baal, Himali Singh Soin and Abbas Zahedi.

The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) is an adaptation of Jung’s major installation at the Kunstmuseum Basel into a site-specific performance for Block Universe.

While in the former iteration, ‘Frau Welt’, the languid protagonist of the piece, resided in her glamorously furnished “now-a-clock”-mansion, her delusion has now visibly cracked. We are asked to enter the psychological space of a starkly lit basement below a vacant building, in which the lethargic haggle between presence and absence, or the speculative and the substantive has become undeniable. A redundant figure, still posturing as rulingly classy, Frau Welt reads her script, veers off, sings and sighs, shrugs and goes on rehearsing for a future that has long been cancelled while her unnamable servant serves her “burbon after borbon after burbun after borbun”

Harnessing the complexities of language, Jung makes subtle alterations to open up new dimensions of meaning, that throw the theatricality of the real and the authenticity of play-acting into relief in a glossy but crumbling world of anticipatory grief, derailed by the “vacuous promises and looped distractions of terminal capitalism”, in which nothing seems as it is.

The set could be visited daily from 11am to 6pm from the 19 May to 1 June.

Performance schedule:
Saturday, 18 May 2019, 9pm
Wednesday, 29 May 2019, 9pm
Thursday, 30 May 2019, 9pm
Saturday, 1 June 2019, 9pm

Special Event (Free):
Sunday, 19 May 2019, 12:00 Reading, 1:30pm Sophie Jung in conversation with Paul Clinton

Cork Street Galleries, 30 Old Burlington Street, London W1S 3AR

* UK Premiere -
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Swiss Cultural Fund and National Culture Fund, Luxembourg (FOCUNA)