Creative Conversations
I had a one-to-one this afternoon with curator Erin Li. She’s based at the Delfina Foundation in London as a curator working across multidisciplinary arts projects with a focus on performance and participatory works. I had two key questions that I wanted to explore with her:
How to find support for multidisciplinary performance work?
Where the opportunities might be to share this type of work?
It was a really useful conversation that offered loads of food for thought, particularly around documentation, sharing the work via workshops and the power of self-organising. She also introduced me to some inspiring work including:
‘Gastronomic Grieving’ by Michele Chu exploring how the processes of eating and digesting unlocks feelings of loss in our bodies.
Michele Chu & Sudhee Liao How to Build a Multisensory Grieving Ritual. Workshop @ HART Haus, Hong Kong, 2021. Film still Arman Dzidzovic.
‘Find Your Eyes’ by Benji Reid, a performance exploring Reid’s own history of depression, grief and shame. Working with three dancers Reid photographs them in real time during the performance creating an additional visual narrative within the live work. Best known as an award winning photographer he has a background in multi-disciplinary, multi-sourcing approach to art-making and hip-hop theatre. I find his return to live performance while integrating his photography skills sited so strongly within visual iconography really resonated with the work I’ve been making, but on a much smaller scale.
Show image from Find Your Eyes by Oluwatosin Daniju.
I also found myself being led to the work of Savannah and their workshop, Symptom Scores, a movement research workshop that took place at Chisenhale in June. Informed by a somatic and political lens, the research project explores possibilities for experientially unfolding information within bodily symptoms and reflecting on patterns they hold for us individually and collectively. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of visual scores for some time now so I was drawn to this work through the image alone. That’s one of the brilliant things about the web when the journey works – one door can open onto another and you can discover work you might never have found without this portal.
