GHost presents the second in a new series of Hostings – 'GHost-dance' – exploring the idea of ghosts as cultural and political movement.
21st May 6.30 - 9.30
please arrive at 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start
Central St Martins College of Arts and Design
Studio Theatre
Granary Square
London
N1C 4AA
(near Kings Cross over and underground stations)
please arrive at 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start
Central St Martins College of Arts and Design
Studio Theatre
Granary Square
London
N1C 4AA
(near Kings Cross over and underground stations)
With:
Gen Doy, Song for the Deaf and Blind
Mitsu Salmon, Skating
Christian Weaver, Trillando en el cajón: mediating positive and negative forces in the realm of the dead through music and dance
Michelle Hannah, BLACKCAT
Dr Mark James Hamilton, SaVAge SEAnce: An Invitation to Activate Your Ancestry.
and
Installation by Jennie Fagerstrom
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Gen Doy, Song for the Deaf and Blind
Song for the Deaf and Blind was
first performed in early 2013 at the Huguenot Cemetery in Wandsworth
Town, south London, where it was recorded for an installation. This
performance develops some key themes of Gen Doy’s work….the
attempt to bear witness to, and to remember, people subjected to
injustice and violence by forces of the state, the importance of
history and those marginalised by mainstream historical narratives,
the power of site-specific commemorative acts and the ways in which
the past returns not as nostalgia, but to come into collision with
the present.
Gen Doy was a lecturer and researcher
for many years at De Montfort University before taking early
retirement to develop her art practice. She lives in London, and has
two grown-up sons. Her works have been exhibited, installed, and
broadcast on radio.
Gen works with written and spoken
texts, field-recordings, still and moving images, and performance, to
construct narratives that are not linear, but suggestive and open to
creative interpretation by the listener/viewer. The voice has become
important in her work, as she exploits its sensual and seductive
potential, to bring to light and sound people and events hidden or
forgotten. The words of people from the past, and emotions from
barely smouldering embers, pass through the flesh of her body and
live again in her voiced breath. Her aim is to make poetic art with
“guts”.
http://www.gendoy.com
http://www.gendoy.com
Christian Weaver, Trillando en el cajón: mediating
positive and negative forces in the realm of the dead through music
and dance.
In the 21st century Cuban
capital, Havana, and throughout much of the island, communities of
diverse and mixed origins dance with the ghosts of their ancestors on
a daily basis. The ceremony known variously as ‘cajón pa’ los
murtos’, ‘cajón espiritual’, ‘cajón pa’egun’, or simply
‘un cajón’ makes use of espiritist techniques, along with
sentimental, spiritual and ritual elements of various religions to
extract useful advice, guidance and cleansing from ancestor spirits.
The ‘cajón espiritual’ has its roots among Cuba’s marginalised
and disposed who sought reassurance and support from both their
direct ancestors and various international ancestor spirits who’s
repute or power made them attractive as guides. The tools they chose
were simply those at hand, and whose efficacy was already established
to them. Not the least of these being drumming (in this case on
wooden boxes, from where the ceremony derives its name, cajón),
singing and dancing, as participatory acts. Although the cajón
includes potent elements and symbols taken from a range of influences
(including Lukumí, and Native American), the principal elements are
derived from Catholic and Congo religious practices, and to a lesser,
but still important, extent, Kardecism. The process through which
these forces are meditated and usefulness extracted, is known as
trillando (from the Spanish verb trillar, to thresh).
Powerful religious and spiritual fragments are threshed together
within the ritually controlled environment of the cajón in order
that the beneficial can be separated from the unavoidable (and
balancing) negative. This paper examines the central role of music
and dance in the process of trillando, how social cohesion is
encouraged through participation in these activities, and the
relationship with the dead enacted in order that social usefulness is
extracted and exploited by the community.
As an initiated drummer, Christian
Weaver regularly performs ritual music for ceremonies in Havana. He
has researched the music and dance of Afro-Cuban religions, and the
vernacular music of Cuba’s urban poor, since 1994. He was awarded
his PhD in Ethnomuiscology in 2010.
http://www.latimbala.com/
Mitsu Salmon, Skating
I studied and performed the Butoh dance
form in Japan for three years. Butoh emerged after WW2 and sought to
embody ancestors, ghosts and darker aspects of the psyche. In this
piece I draw from Butoh's use of possession and exploration of the
unconscious.
http://www.latimbala.com/
Mitsu Salmon, Skating
I studied and performed the Butoh dance
form in Japan for three years. Butoh emerged after WW2 and sought to
embody ancestors, ghosts and darker aspects of the psyche. In this
piece I draw from Butoh's use of possession and exploration of the
unconscious.
'Skating' is a dance/ theatre piece
about embodying histories, searching for identity and failure.
The piece begins with looking for a
role model as a Japanese American young girl and being unable to find
one. Then while watching the Olympics with my grandparents, who are
from Japan, I discovered the Olympic ice skater Kristy Yamaguchi.
Afterwards I began ice-skating. Throughout the piece I speak of my
family's history, that of my grandmother growing up in Japan during
WW2 and my grandfather being Japanese in the USA army. My
grandfather was in the USA occupational forces in Japan and his
fellow soldiers were in internment camps during the war in the
states.
While imitating Kristy Yamaguchi
through movement, projected footage of the ice-skater herself is
intersected with film of the USA occupation of Japan.
I fall repeatedly, failing to achieve
an ideal Japanese American identity and also struggling to shed my
family histories. The dance is how my body holds the painful
histories of my ancestries - ghosts of war and assimilation.
'Skating' explores the
intersection of personal history to cultural history. The piece
begins with humour and story telling and builds to a dance where my
ancestors ghosts ate channeled and exorcised.
Mitsu Salmon is currently a MFA student
in performance at the School for the Art Institute in Chicago. She
creates original performance and visual works, which fuse multiple
disciplines and cultures. She was born in Los Angeles, California
and studied experimental theatre and painting at NYU. She has lived
and created work in India, England, Germany, Amsterdam, Japan and
Bali. She has presented at places such as Performance Space 122,
Dance Theatre Workshop, Highways Performance Space, Links Hall, the
Berlin Performance Art Festival and the London Performance Art
Festival.
Michelle Hannah, BLACKCAT
"There is a strong sense of
Romanticism in my practice, mainly in the roles which sound,
performance and expanded cinema has in tackling the themes of
metaphysics and science fiction. BLACKCAT is a performance of an
appropriated and fragmented version of Bowie’s Cat People by means
of a vocal processor. The starting point of this is from its esoteric
femininity to create BLACKCAT as a visual presentation of channeling
vocals and cosmic noise as form, presented as a dispersed engagement
between myself as ‘blind ‘ ethereal performer and you as a
viewer. I wear theatrical white blind contacts to erase my sight.
Blinded and struck for a moment, this ‘illuminated singer’ no
longer discerns the limits of the room. I become at once trapped in
the point of darkness and light."
Michelle Hannah is a Glasgow based
artist born in Alexandria, Scotland and a graduate from the Master of
Fine Art course at Glasgow School of Art. Selected
exhibitions/performances/screenings include NGCA, Modern Edinburgh
Film School, CGP London, Whitely Arts Festival, University of London,
Vetlanda Museum, Glasgow Project Rooms, Gi 2012, Dresden Film
Festival, CCA, Generator Projects, Embassy Gallery and is now the
curator of a performance and video based event under the theme and
title 'NITEFLIGHTS' which will appear throughout Glasgow.
The SaVAge K'Lub - Rosanna
Raymond – Sistar S’pacific, Emine, Jo Walsh, Dr Mark James
Hamilton: SaVAge SEAnce: An
Invitation to Activate Your Ancestry.
"Our
dead are woven into our souls
like
the hypnotic music of bone flutes:
we
can never escape them."
Albert
Wendt
This
SEAnce is a participatory presentation, inviting those gathered to
experience a core concept informing the SaVAge K'Lub's creativity:
even the long-dead are nearby. A performance will occur (a
word used in its widest and least defined sense). The deeds enacted
will aid those present to call upon potentials immanent in their
human being, in their genetic material. Ancestry will be addressed as
a vital force, a sustaining resource.
Albert
Refiti (Samoan visual arts scholar), writing of an earlier K'Lub
event in Canada, states that Raymond refuses to relegate ancestors to
a mythical past, and addresses them as available and present, located
within one’s body. Raymond, says Refiti, embraces the tensions of
tradition and contemporaneity prominent in—but not limited
to—cross-cultural artwork. The K'Lub site their presentation at the
intersection of polarised values, seeking relationship between
cosmopolitan and village-centric values, engaging with the spectral
phantom of sameness and the haunting substance of difference.
In
the SEAnce, the K'Lub will elaborate on Polynesian protocols of
meeting and invocation to invite attendees to establish a position
between the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Through simple communal
movement and vocalisation, these elemental ancestors will be evoked.
Subsequent deeds will seek out connections to ancestral Mountains,
Rivers, Lands, Houses and Forebears. Here the collective may begin to
individuate. Multiple perspectives will be entertained.
For
some gathered, it is possible that a deep sense of ancestry may be
contacted. At the same time, it might be that the nostalgia,
Romanticism, and exotica are indulged. And what of lineages beyond
bloodlines? The cross-currents created by cultural adoption and
appropriation will be supported. The K'Lub does not guard against the
disruption of categories—authentic and original meets fictive and
faux. Mindful of the layered significance of the Ghost Dance proper,
the SEAnce will ask not whose the ancestor is, but what this ancestor
can do for the emancipation of all.
The
SaVage K'Lub is a London-based interdisciplinary collective of
artists and scholars led by Raymond. The group explores: the
relationships between experiences of difference and belonging;
complex intercultural affiliations; continuations of native and
migratory narratives; things eclipsed by the fray of dominant
communities' interactions. The K'Lub has a special interest in the
combination of careful craft in all disciplines (including the
continuation of traditional skills) with the vitality of parody,
satire and hybridity to delight and motivate, producing art which
communicates social commentary and proposes departures toward new
philosophies.
She uses the body and movement as a
means of inspiration and expression to create sequences. Translating
her ideas onto the fragile nature of paper, supported by low tech and
light. Her work touches on the notion of romanticism and nostalgia.
Skogsrå Jennie Fagerstrom
Jennie Fagerstrom brings intimate
lanterns to light the loss of way and figures of the non existence to
cause erasure of the real. Images referencing the female skogsrå of
nordic mythology, seductively luring men to their doom in the lost
depth of the forest.
Born in Sweden, lives and works in
London.
Studied Fine Art at Central Saint
Martin's College of Art & Design, London.
She uses the body and movement as a
means of inspiration and expression to create sequences. Translating
her ideas onto the fragile nature of paper, supported by low tech and
light. Her work touches on the notion of romanticism and nostalgia.
Recent showings and exhibitions-
St Leonards Church LCV event March 2013
" Follow the Lanterns. The Sea and I EP launch with London
Contemporary Voices"
Stroud SITE Festival 2012 May, group
exhibit "Golden is Silence"
Studio 23 Netil House London June 2012
Coming soon-
Clerkenwell Design Week London May 2013
Performance and installation night
Stockholm, Sweden 25 May 2013
