“The fate of thought depends and will depend for a long time between regret and assay“. Jean-Francois Lyotard, What is post-modernism? 1982
Permanent Gallery hosts Testing Grounds, a Live Art or Music event where artists are invited to make new work, rather than reproducing a set performance. Testing Grounds is an experimental meeting place for artists, audiences and ideas and aims to be an environment supportive of artistic risk.
This edition invites 4 artists from the UK and abroad proposing to explore the dislocation between text and image, focusing on structural fragmentation. Sian Robinson Davies (Nottingham) creates subtle and humorous constructions of different narratives which translate formal spatial arrangements into language. David Berridge (London) will adapt texts from Kafka’s notebooks into musical and visual choral pieces. In his improvised music piece, Phillip Henderson (Nottingham/Farnham) will question “vertical temporality” with an electric harmonium, metal detector and improvised arhythm on drum kit.
Also showcased is a new performance by Catalan artist Joan Casellas (Barcelona). Joan Casellas has been performing extensively worldwide since the 1990s as an outstanding representative of the Spanish parallel art scene. This will be Casellas’ first UK appearance since 1994, when The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, organised an exhibition documenting his performances and interventions.
The event promises to be a stimulating and playful selection of works for the imagination. Read the rest of this entry »
protoPLAY are currently developing a new piece called 2(two). So far the work has been made twice with the same funamental structure but quite different aesthetic outcomes. The work is at once playfull, engaged, engaging and conceptual, and we are very keen to explore how it can be developed in the near future. To this end we’d be happy to hear from potential partners and venues who would like to consider being involved in the next phases of the projects development as a performance, installation, video-work or performance-installation. 2(two)’s new incarnations will persue new aethetics, and new media.
TESTING GROUNDS, LIVE ART & MUSIC: CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Testing Grounds is now accepting applications from artists for 2 different events at A Space Arts (Southampton) and South Hill Park (Bracknell).
Testing Grounds is a performance platform and development programme for artists actively exploring Live Art or Music. Testing Grounds is an experimental meeting place for artists, audiences and ideas and aims to be an environment supportive of artistic risk.
Applicants must commit to develop and present a new piece of work, or take past work in a new direction. Testing Grounds aims to be a supportive opportunity to test new ideas rather than reproducing a set performance.
We offer a fee and production support.
The event at A Space Arts takes place on the 29th of August.
The event at South Hill Park is happening on the 31st of October.
The deadline to apply is on the 13th of July. Please note that for this event we are looking for proposed new works with a strong crossover between Live Art and music or sound, in form, in content, in context, or structure. Contact nadegederderian@hotmail.com for more information, or download the application and information pack here: TG SouthHillPark application pack 2009
AND NEWS..! protoPLAY have developed 2(two) in Estonia in April 2009 at the Diverse Universe Festival organised by Non Grata in Estonia, as well as a new performance, working title: ‘When Ideas Become Objects, Then Objects Are Ideas’. Details coming soon.
2 (Two): The work is informed by protoPLAY’s ongoing investigation into collaboration and issues around notions authorship contemporary society the problematics of individual identity, and strategies for group creative space.
Audience put their head through holes under a raised platform, on which the performance is taking place. Underneath other audience members would see headless bodies, and above, disembodied heads would surround the performance area. 2 clearly destabilises the clear split or boundary which traditional structure of the spectacle makes between the audience and the performance. Whereas traditionally the passive subject is emphasized by watching actions made subjects and objects from a far, in 2 the head, the actual priviledged seat of the subject is made into an object (separated from body) on the floor, which is then plays an intrinsic part within the performance space. y]
For Highlights and Previews on Friday 13th March 2009, protoPLAY is presenting an eclectic selection of Live/performance artists from the UK and Estonia.
Each of the performances opens up a transformation in the imagination by which aspects of the world, usually oblique and inscrutable, unfold to reveal hidden possibilities for exploration and understanding.
The works are incredibly diverse in their approach and tone. But we hope that the real diversity will be inside YOU: That the nexus - that point of connection in your body which meets the work, through which one’s imagination is opened, and filled with a sense of possibility - might move around inside you, resonating from head to toe:
From the lucid reflection in the intellect as Augusto Corrieri draws attention to the latent possibilities in the conventions of performance and Orions Maxted’s Dada-esque values, minimal actions and consistent-illogic; to the playful mind-popping of protoPLAY’s interdisciplinary work; to the visceral reactions of your senses and emotions to Non Grata’s and Tajana Kristall’s post-primitivism; or to the physical interactions of your booty getting it on as drummers AK/DK driven yet falling apart music brings the evening to a climax.
Non Grata returns to Brighton on the 10th of March for a group performance at Permanent Gallery. Artists include Anonymous Boh, Horsecow and Dionysus P-Monroe.
“Around the name NON GRATA there have been different hushes and shushes for a long time.
The conventionalisation of art has embodied the horrible and unwanted disembodiment of the human person, from which the meaninglessness of nowadays art, is pouring out.
For those, whose world of arts starts from the point where the art world ends, NON GRATA has been a liberator, an orphic break in the seemingly unalterable course of pragmatism.
The main point of the group is ethical - it is the image of primitivism, impersonality and experimental creativity. The performances of the group take place according to the logic of avoiding codes. The presentations are physical texts, whose orthography and reading are kept within limits of real actions by the group members. Aesthetical and provocative challenges are represented in places, where the Art World doesn’t work.”
