Karen Christopher and Tara Fatehi (with participation in absentia by co-collaborators Omikemi and Jemima Yong) will present some early material from Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz, including an exhausting list of who we make work for.
The early stages of working on Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz are built on an underwater flow, various currents that flow past each other in different directions the way shoals of fish do. We will work with blending and combining, dissolving outlines. We are looking into the deep sea to see what we find. We are looking for simultaneous durations and song-like structures. We are asking: who says time moves in only one direction?
Each member of this collaborative group has distinct interests and approaches to making work, and we hope this project will speak to a tolerance of difference around our sensibilities and how to be in the world right now, while sharing a desire for connectedness.
artists
Karen Christopher
Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. Her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is devoted to collaborative processes, listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet, paying attention as an act of social cooperation. Recent works engage with interconnectivity: the entanglement between people and of people with their environments, other living beings, and the vibrant matter with which we interact. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until they disbanded in 2009. Karen is based in Faversham, Kent.
Karen has been making performance duets for the past 15 years, each with different artistic partners. She wants to move from that working mode, and collaborate with a larger ensemble, and contacted the others in Autumn 2023 about working on this project. The piece will be jointly made, directed and performed by the group.
Tara Fatehi
Tara Fatehi is a performance maker, performer and writer. She creates poetic-political pieces playing with ambiguity, mistranslation, disjunction and unfinishedness. Tara has performed at the V&A Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, Nottdance, Chapter, Julidans, Montpellier Danse, Dansens Hus, Alkantara and Rosendal Teater among others. Her ongoing projects include Mishandled Archive (dispersing a family archive in public space through dance and photography) and From the Lips to the Moon (an unusual music and poetry night). Tara is currently performing in pieces by Hooman Sharifi (Norway) and Teatr O Bando (Portugal). In 2021, Tara was the first ever resident artist at the United Nations Archives at Geneva. Tara is based in London.
Omikemi
Omikemi is an artist creating care-driven spaces focused on listening and alongsideness. They sometimes do this through writing, body work, workshop facilitation, creative mentoring and friendship. Their writing has been published in numerous publications including Rialto and Ten: poets of a new generation (Bloodaxe). Recent care-driven collaborations include CRIPtic for Spread the Word, Arika, Radical Rhizomes and Spare Tyre Theatre. They have worked as a freelance writer and creative mentor for Disability Arts Online and a body worker for The Heartwood, an online and in-person Black-centred body work space. Omikemi is based in London.
Jemima Yong
Jemima Yong is a performance maker and photographer. She is Sarawakian, born in Singapore, and has developed her artistic practice in London, UK, where she is based. Collaboration and experimentation are central to her work. Recent performances include Something in Your Voice with Emergency Chorus and Marathon with JAMS, which received the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2018 and was presented by the Barbican Centre. Jemima’s photography has been featured by the BBC, Time Out, The Guardian, Swazi Observer and The Straits Times. She is an associate artist at Forest Fringe and is one fifth of DARC (Documentation Action Research Collective). Jemima is an alumni of United World Colleges, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and The Curious School of Puppetry.
Karen and Tara recently made the 8-hour performance installation ‘Always Already’. Omikemi contributed writing to ‘Paper leaves and other constructions’, that project’s Reading Companion booklet, and Jemima directed the video series ‘Fractured seeds in hearts of machine’, which used performance material from ‘Always Already’ reconfigured for the camera.