Thurs 24 Nov 2022, 6:30 – 7:30pm
APT GALLERY
6 Creekside, Deptford
LONDON, SE8 4SA
Tel: 020 8694 8344
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Performance
6:30pm
A constellation of 12 performers are still in different positions, forming an inadvertent tableaux. Each minute, on the minute, they move. A work of loose dancing and rigid structure that continues SERAFINE1369’s research into time-based scores for performance, the unit of one minute and the concept of stillness. Towards a practice of witnessing relation on an embodied level – between bodies, bodies and space, viewer and viewers and bodies and space and the day and the circling, fragmenting, contracting and expanding, not straightforward movement of time.
Early research towards a new group work featuring 12 performers invited based on gathering a group that represents each sign of the zodiac.
Sound and Technical Design – Josh Anio Grigg
SERAFINE1369
SERAFINE1369 is an independent mixed media artist, performer, writer, bodyworker and researcher working with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. Their methodology is intuitive and many-headed, considering the interrelatedness of myriad systems. The forms and poetics that emerge through the synthesis of their research – into therapeutic somatic bodywork techniques and movement efficiency; experiential and visionary anatomy; dancing and strategies for expansive non-hierarchical pedagogical practice; divination and other oracular and associative technologies; conditions and alternative work models; theatrical and cinematic devices – organically extend into facilitation, text, video, installation, sound, healing practices, curation and performance. Their work is choreographic and uses (de)composition as a state of cycling and crumbling towards the stark expressive utterances of the minutiae of sensing. Underpinned by an interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life.
SERAFINE1369 is busy with propositions and practices – of dancing, spatial arrangement, sonics and modes of receiving – that counter the tendency towards bodily compression, inflammation and alienation, invited by life in the hostile architectures of the metropolis. The non-linear passage of time, cycles and systems of counting have a recurrent thematic presence in their work, themes of being haunted and being trapped. Their body and movement studies focus on electricity and water – nervous systems and their transpersonal functioning. This approach acknowledges the cosmic oneness of all things as manifested through the ecologies of relation and the fact that everything is made of the same stuff, whilst being intensely curious about the magic and mysteries of life processes of distinction, variation, cycles, decomposition; movement as it transforms and sustains.
The political implications of this work encourage an anti-colonial, anti-assimilationist practice concerned with the integrity and efficacy of structures (bodily and social), collaboration, hosting and an interest in somatics, semiotics and symbiotics from a body-led, experiential position.
Often layering references from subculture and esoteric practices, SERAFINE1369 makes bold, subtle, aesthetic, sensual, live and visual work that deals in intensities; atmospheres created by the tensions between things that make meaning, implicating the bodies of audiences as well as performers and using movement as a tool for flattening hierarchies of perception between visible and invisible (felt / sensed / remembered) presences. They understand working with bodies is working with vibration – sound, light, frequency; their performances are containers, frames or machines, that conjure weathers and many voices through the interplay between dancing, sound, objects, words and light. These lines of tension create a sense of expansion, dimension, dissonance and resonance.