PERFORMANCE:Block Universe Performance Arts Festival 2019
Block Universe Performance Arts Festival bring together cutting-edge performance art at the cross-section of contemporary visual art, dance and music, Block Universe, is London’s leading international Performance Art festival and commissioning body. The festival has produced over 52 productions, 25 new commissions and brought 11 international premieres to London over the past 4 years with the mission to create a long-term, sustained engagement with performance art in the city.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Block Universe Archive
Block Universe, returns to London with an expanded 14 day program of new work, premieres, talks, screenings and workshops, from a wide range of artists, both local and international. As the festival celebrates its 5th anniversary, Block Universe also presents a sister programme for the first time, expanding to continental Europe. This takes place in Germany at E-WERK Luckenwalde, as part of Berlin Art Week (14/9/2019). E-WERK Luckenwalde is a new Brandenberg institution set to open in 2019 in a former power station, an iconic site near Berlin. Block Universe 2019, taking place across two countries and marking half a decade of curating and commissioning, marks the festival’s largest and most diverse programme to date. Projects include a series of premieres from UK and international artists, thinkers and practitioners, which are set to take place across both cities in May and September. “Words that we share: Performance as Poetry” (18/5/19) at Whitechapel Gallery: 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. Sophie Jung present “The Bigger Sleep-rehush”, a major installation combined with performances throughout the festival. Combining spoken word and sculpture to draw out the fundamental ambiguity of language using words, gestures and found objects, her practice addresses representation and its pitfalls, both culturally as a system of disguised and shifting signs and personally as a way to track and record life. 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 Originally made for the decennial art exhibition Munster Skulptur Projekte 2017, The Friedenssaal in Münster’s historic town hall served as the starting point for a work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. Michael Portnoy has 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. CAJ COLLAB invites two artists from different disciplines who have never worked together before and gives them one day to create a performance. This Year Eleanor Sikorski and Lindsey Mendick have been invited. Paul Maheke and Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) collaborate to produce “Sènsa”, 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 provides the soundtrack and Ariel Efraim Ashbel the lighting design, within which Maheke perform. This work is developed in collaboration with Performa in New York, where it will tour after its presentation in London. Ravioli Me Away (Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald) present their new opera, which has 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.
Info: Block Universe Performance Arts Festival, Various Venues, London, Duration 18/5-2/6/19, http://blockuniverse.co.uk
