PERFORMANCE:Block Universe Performance Arts Festival 2018

For its fourth edition Block Universe returns to London for its annual festival of Performance Art celebrating cutting-edge Performance at the cross-section of Contemporary Visual Art, Dance and Music. The ten day-long festival aims to create an accessible entry point for audiences to experience challenging and creative performance work, celebrating a new generation of artists in the UK Performance Art Scene.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Block Universe Archive

This year’s edition explores themes that act as a counterpoint to the current divisiveness created by contemporary politics, focusing on, as well as questioning, utopian ideals of community and collectivity. By addressing the ways in which we relate to one another, the contributors respond both to the larger fabric of society that binds us as well as to the politics of sex and love in our personal relationships. 2018 will feature three UK premieres by: Maria Hassabi, Giselle Stanborough and Nora Turato, and seven new, site-specific commissions by: Evan Ifekoya & Victoria Sin, Gery Georgieva, Hanne Lippard, Alex Mirutziu, Last Yearz Interesting Negro/Jamila Johnson-Small, They Are Here and Laura Wilson). Over the years Maria Hassabi has developed a distinct choreographic practice involved with the relation of the body to the image, defined by sculptural physicality and extended duration. Her works draw their strength from the tension between the human subject and the artistic object, the dancer as a performer and as a physical entity. Giselle Stanborough’s works combine online and offline elements to address how user generated media encourage us to identify and perform notions of self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation. Motivated by a curiosity in the increasing indeterminacy between the private and public spheres, her work often addresses contemporary interpersonal experiences in relation to technology, feminism and consumer capitalism. As part of her practice Nora Turato harnesses the versatility of language as an instrument in her absorbing spoken word displays that blur the line between contemporary music and performance art. Evan Ifekoya and Victoria Sin are interested in exploring futures of corporeality, sexuality and linguistics through the lens of speculative fiction towards strategies of social justice for queer and radicalised bodies. Gery Georgieva’s work encompasses video, sculpture, performance, multimedia installations and occasional musical collaborations. Creating lo-fi assemblages and film sets for performative to-camera improvisations, she uses the immediacy of her own body as material to consider the construction of authenticity, taste and belonging. Hanne Lippard focuses on the production of language solely through the use of voice. In performances, installations, videos and audio pieces, she arranges, composes and combines her own wordplays with words by others. Fragments from everyday speech, sourced from various online platforms, are constantly reworked through the use of repetition, pronunciation and rhythm. Phrases and images associated with contemporary topics such as work, success, and lifestyles are evoked. By merging content and form and through a gentle rhyme, her vivid words begin to lose their prescribed value and modify to take on new meanings. Alex Mirutziu’s practice extends over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry and performance as well as critical and curatorial projects. In his work he expands on the notions of approximation and proximity in connection to time, dislocating modes of arrival at meaning. Last Yearz Interesting Negro/ Jamila Johnson-Small works with in-between spaces; with things that exist in and through cracks in time, memory, attention, syncopation, trance states, internal narratives, electronic music and two-step dances, navigating bodies as object, animal, human, machine, environment, and energy to build atmospheric landscapes created by the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meanings. They Are Here is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker & Harun Morrison. Many of their works can be read as a series of context specific games. The entry, invitation or participation can be as significant as the game’s conditions and structure. Through these games we seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary, micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. Laura Wilson investigates the forces of representation that determine our understanding of the material world. Her practice is wide-ranging, working across performance, sculpture, video and lectures. Negotiation is a necessary strategy in the production of her work, which often involves collaborations or exchanges with specialists, enacting the creation or displacement of materials and ideas.

Info: Block Universe Performance Arts Festival, Various Venues, London, Duration 26/5-3/6/17, http://blockuniverse.co.uk