performingbordersLIVE: Our Bodies in the Commons

This event has now passed

Information

Times:

Session 1

  • 13:30 – 15:00 – Guided Dance / Somatic Movement Workshop

  • 15:00 – 16:00 – Eating together + talking

Session 2

  • 15:00 – 16:00 – Eating together + talking

  • 16:00 – 18:30 – Rallying the Commons Reading Karaoke: Rustling Words & Screening of Performance to Camera

Tickets: Free
Session are booked separately, although you are encouraged to spend the day with performingborders if you can. Book a ticket for both sessions if you would like to take part in the whole day. 

If the session you would like to book for is sold out, please email boxoffice@bac.org.uk to be added to a waiting list. We will contact you if a ticket becomes available.

These events will take place in our Rec Room.
Session 2 will also be l
ive streamed on HowlRound Theatre Commons

After three years of digital-only transnational collaborations, performingborders is opening a space for movement, sharing, and conversation, to re-centre our bodies in the explorations of borders, live art, community, and resistance.

In this event, performingborders will create a gathering that considers what we can do when we harness our resources, time, bodies, and care, to collectivise them. Starting from a place of lived experience, ‘Our Bodies in the Commons’ moves away from disembodied and individualised discourse around solidarity and care, towards actions and gestures that are building and maintaining collective ways of working together.

Two sessions will run throughout the day to feed into these reflections.

First, a Dance + Embodied Movement workshop with Camille Barton where we will process feelings gathered in our bodies throughout the pandemic and use them to build, futures together.

The second session will be a Reading Karaoke led by Youngsook Choi where we will experiment with communal reading as a site of radical joy, collective un/learning, and solidarity building, lifting threads from our second e-journal Rallying the Commons. The session will include participation from the e-journal contributing artists Helena Walsh, Harun Morrison and Ximena Alarcón-Diaz.

The day will end with a special screening of It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this, a performance to camera by SERAFINE1369 which we commissioned last year.

The second session will be live-streamed via HowlRound Theatre Commons, and you can access it here: https://howlround.com/happenings/performingborderslive-our-bodies-commons

Session 1:Dance + Embodied Movement with Camille Barton

Times: 13:30 – 15:00

In the morning artist Camille Barton will open the day with their embodiment and dance practice focusing on the connection within ourselves, our bodies, and those around us. This introduction to the day will integrate and process feelings gathered and deposited in our bodies throughout the pandemic and use them to build more beautiful futures together. Through the use of bass and other sonic and embodied interventions, this session will be used to ground ourselves in preparation for the rest of the day.

This dance space is open to all abilities and welcomes everybody to join in movement and embodiment work together. There will be a space for conversation and refreshments after this event (between 15:00 – 16:00) and before the afternoon session. This will be free and everyone is invited to sit at the table to rest, gather, talk, and eat.

About the Artist

Camille Sapara Barton is a Social Imagineer who operates as a catalyst for social change, dedicated to creating networks of care and liveable futures. They work as an artist, facilitator, consultant and curator across the realms of embodied social justice, grief, pleasure and drug policy.

Rooted in Black feminism, ecology and harm reduction, Camille uses creativity, alongside embodied practices, to create culture change in fields ranging from psychedelic assisted therapy to arts education. They are certified in the Resilience Toolkit – an embodiment framework to navigate stress, increase resilience and grow our collective capacity to change the conditions that create systemic harm.

Refreshments

Times: 15:00 – 16:00

There will be a space for conversation, refreshments, and drinks between the two sessions.

This will be free and everyone is invited to sit at the table to rest, gather, talk, and eat ahead of the second session.

Session 2: Reading Karaoke: Rustling Words

Times: 16:00 – 18:30 

In-person and Live streamed on HowlRound Theatre Commons

In the afternoon session Youngsook Choi will guide us through performingborders’ latest e-journal Rallying the Commons. Our journey through the journal will include embodied interventions into its content, texts, and images to collectively explore other ways of working together. Through the format of a Reading Karaoke, we will experiment with communal reading as a site of radical joy, collective un/learning and solidarity building. We will be joined by artists and contributors from the e-journal Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Harun Morrison and Helena Walsh, throughout the session.

The day will end with a special screening of It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this, a performance to camera by SERAFINE1369 which we commissioned last year, and provide body butter for audience members to apply on their bodies whilst watching.

There will be a space for conversation and refreshments before this event  (between 15:00 – 16:00). This will be free and everyone is invited to sit at the table to rest, gather, talk, and eat ahead of the session.

The afternoon session will be live streamed by HowlRound Theatre Commons and you can access it here.

About the Artists

Youngsook Choi is a London-based artist/researcher. Her interdisciplinary practice, mainly performances and installations, explores the concept of political spirituality by experimenting with intimate aesthetics of solidarity actions and collective healing. More recently, grief has been the focus of Youngsook’s practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy around certain types of death. ‘Not This Future’, commemorating the Essex 39 tragedy, and ‘In Every Bite of the Emperor’, the ongoing ecological grief project around traumatised lands, are in tandem with this inquiry.

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening and sounding our sonic migrations: the resonances of geographical migrations. She is a Deep Listening® certified tutor, with a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation. Throughout her career, she has created telematic sonic improvisations and interfaces for relational listening, to understand sensorially migratory experiences.

Her major works are Sounding Underground (IOCT-DMU, Leverhulme Trust, 2007-2009), the telematic sound performances’ series Networked Migrations (CRiSAP-UAL, 2011-2017), and INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening (RITMO-UiO, Marie Skłodowska Curie IF, 2017-2019). In Bath, with The Studio Recovery Fund 2021, she created the INTIMAL App© for people to explore their “migratory journeys”. Emerging from her INTIMAL project, Ximena leads a collective of Latin American migrant women – Intimal – who come together to listen to their migrations and expand their notions of femininity, territory and care. She teaches Deep Listening® at the Center for Deep Listening, and independently, with an emphasis on Sonic Migrations.

Helena Walsh is an Irish live artist. She has been based in London since 2003. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. Walsh has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. She graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art in 2001 and completed her Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. In 2013 she completed a practice-based PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London focussed on Live Art and femininity in post-conflict Ireland. Walsh is a founder member of the pro-choice feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion). Between 2013 and 2018 she played a key role in sustaining the collective collaborations of Speaking of IMELDA, contributing to the development of the group’s public performances, publications and media campaigns. Walsh regularly presents and writes on feminist performance practice. She has published in collections focussed on live art and the performing arts in an Irish context. She is a lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.

SERAFINE1369 (previously Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist, dancer, writer and facilitator, Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology.  This work brings an urgency around understandings of, and sensitivity to, connection, distinction, relation and context, SERAFINE1369’s approach is experiential, embodied and structural.

SERAFINE1369 works with darkness, voice, movement, overwhelm, vibration, inviting forms to emerge and mutate, interrupting the fiction of linear time; atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Their raw material is messages from an oracular body, on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic/psychic levels. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement – choreography becomes a ritual decomposition process for channeling, challenging and unsettling embodied (internalised or naturalised) concepts.

SERAFINE1369 has a relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice, gathering and transmitting information through working in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles. SERAFINE1369 makes performance, installation, sound, video and text that elaborate on their research into bodies, systems, movement and dance as a tool for divination, towards making spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable. basictension.com

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based on the inland waterways. He is currently Designer and Researcher in Residence at V&A Dundee. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2023/24. Since 2006, Harun has collaborated with Helen Walker as part of the collective practice They Are Here. Harun has recently had solo exhibitions at Nieuwe Vide project space in Haarlem, Netherlands (2022) and Eastside Projects, Birmingham, (2021). He is currently exhibiting Dolphin Head Mountain at the Horniman Museum. This spring Harun will develop new work for the group exhibition.

ACCESS

PRE EVENT INFORMATION

This event takes place in person in our Rec Room. This space is on the second floor, with step-free access via a lift.

If you have booked a ticket you will receive an email from us before your performance detailing important information about your visit.

SESSION INFORMATION

Content:

  • Potential some loud sounds from screenings
  • Session two will include some loud noises and low lighting
  • Session two will include use of perfume

Childcare can be provided. Please let us know if you need childcare and the age of the child/children so we can plan the work of the childminder.

Both sessions will be BSL interpreted.

There will be captions on the live stream.

Both sessions will be Relaxed. We invite you to make yourself comfortable and move around if you need to and if you need to leave the performance at any point you will be allowed to return to the space when you feel ready.

PRE-SHOW INFORMATION

VISIT OUR ACCESS PAGE

CREDITS

Presented and curated by: performingborders

Broadcasting partner: HowlRound Theatre Commons

Funded by: Arts Council England and Necessity

Image credit: Emperor’s Jade Rabbit by Youngsook Choi (2021) The image used has been cropped

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