Hostings 14 - GHost-dance IV: the ghost without, the ghost within

GHost Hostings 14 - GHost-dance IV: the ghost without, the ghost within
A night of three distinct performances exploring ghosts as socio-cultural movement and human energy from without and within.

London Lucumi Choir photograph©Nadjib Le Fleurier

12th March 2014

6.30pm – 9.30pm

Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design

Studio Theatre

Granary Square

London

N1C 4AA

GHost Hostings 14 is supported by the Drama And Performance Programme.

Central St Martins School of Arts

GHost hosts an evening of cross-disciplinary performance which continue to explore the GHost-dance theme.

PROGRAMME

Home Stasis 73

I Am Still Within You Eleanor Clare, Kam Wan and Marcus Davidson.

THE LONDON LUCUMI CHOIR " The energy of Orisha, In Art Dance and Song: A multi-disciplined look at Yoruban deities"

Note: running order may be subject to change

HOME. Stasis 73

“The house I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile.

I don’t know much about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow

sometimes, when I stop to think…………….

sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms with a single iron bed and

nothing of my own, watching the evening spider.”

George Seferis

HOME is of an immersive live sound, movement and projection performance consisting of drones and sonic explorations, utilizing manipulated and effected instruments and imagery, field recordings, voice and text, creating an atmosphere of sorrow and longing.
Referencing the ghost of deracination, and the idea of the created boundaries between migrating societies and their cultures : utilizing an empty interior as a signifier for the longing and sorrow for the lost ‘home’ to animate the movement between the two places of physical and psychological dislocation.
“It wasn’t easy, because you leave your home,
your possessions, your memories, your youth,
you leave your dead there………
and carry their memories in music and; dance”.
Ali Oney removed from Rethymno Crete to Ayvalik Turkey. Population Exchange 1923.

Stasis73 formed in 2009 by a collective of creatives from Hastings, film makers, painters, writers and musicians. The aim of the project is to move beyond the concerns of more traditional music making, yet not fall into the trap of being labelled experimental. Live sound and film installations of drones and sonic explorations, utilizing electro-acoustic manipulated pure noise, voice, text, whisperings, field recordings, decay, extended drones, and original, found & archive imagery, creating a multi-layered environment.

www.stasis73.com

I Am Still Within You.  Eleanor Clare, Kam Wan and Marcus Davidson.

The suggestion of a journey, magical and mystical, at times painful; the need to connect to something constant. Between darkness & twilight is where this work belongs: a sight just half seen. Visions appear transiently in the space between sleep & waking, the unconscious and conscious. The moon becomes symbolic because of its association with the feminine and its constant transformation from dark to light. One can take solace in the idea that there is something (albeit elusive) which resides through the process of change, dispersion, disintegration and regeneration.

I Am Still Within You is devised by Eleanor Clare, Kam Wan and Marcus Davidson. During the performance, singers move through the darkness. At times they will be lit by the projection, but the emphasis will be on the affect of their voices in the space, and the movement of sound with a sense of physical presence.

Biog

Eleanor Clare, Kam Wan and Marcus Davidson have been collaborating on this project since 2013. The concept was initiated by Eleanor Clare, through lyrics and a basic melody, with an idea of moving through darkness. Kam Wan created and devised the film projection and installation, using footage of the moon which he had been collecting over time. Marcus Davidson created the sound track and the vocal harmony, working with his own research into music devised from the sounds of space. The genesis of this project can be traced back to the artist and composer Ellen Southern, who invited Eleanor Clare to produce new work taking inspiration from her remix score of ‘The Brilliant and the Dark.’ The showing of this work is kindly supported by Bergen Kommune, Norway.

Here are our websites too:
www.eleanorclare.com

www.kamwan.com

www.marcusdavidson.net

The energy of Orisha, In Art Dance and Song: A multi-disciplined

look at Yoruban deities. Daniela Rosselson De Armas and The London Lucumi Choir

The London Lucumi Choir was formed in November

2006. It is still directed and led by one of its founder members, Daniela

Rosselson De Armas, who is a musician and a Priestess of Oshun. It is an unusual choir which sings songs for Orisha; deities that mediate between human beings and God ( Olofi) as sun in Cuba and other countries in the African Diaspora. Although it is a non audition community choir, it works

with highly qualified and knowledgeable artists and priests of the tradition. The songs that are sung within the choir are cultural representations of songs that are actually sung today within ceremonial

contexts. They are accompanied by Bata drums. Bata drums are three drums that are played together to form complex rhythms that also connect to what is being sung. In a ceremonial context, the songs' purpose is to "bring down" the Orisha to "mount" their initiates. The Orisha then dance, cleanse and give advise to the congregation. Obviously in a performance or cultural context this does not happen! The choir became finalists of the BBC Radio Three choir competition of the year in 2008 and have opened for big stars such as Eliades Ochoa ( Buena Vista Social Club) and Buika. They have performed at festivals, charity events, clubs and conferences and educational days at schools and are looking forward to playing at GHost. The performance at GHost Hostings will demonstrate a selection of songs to Orisha illustrated by dance moves which show the energy of the different Orisha by Afro Cuban Dancer, Yolanda Perez. It will be accompanied by a slide show which demonstrate Religious Altars, Orisha in nature and some wonderful art work by Contemporary Artists Janine Francois.
 ( introducing Oshun), Jacob V Joyce. Jacob will also be giving a run down on each Orisha in his own, inimitable style.

LINKS:

https:// londonlucumichoir.com

https:// facebook.com/TheLondonLucumiChoir

http://jacobvjoyce.com

http://yewandeokuleye.com

http://reintroducingoshun.tumblr.com

http://oshun-ibu-anya.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89GP83iuzp0 Yolanda dancing Oya

Hostings 13 - GHost-dance III: time travelling mediums

 Hostings 13 - GHost-dance III: time travelling mediums

February 17th 6.30 - 9.30

Central St. Martins College of Arts and Design, LVH E003

Granary Square London, Nr Kings Cross

London

N1C 4AA

GHost hosts an evening of presentations and performative presentations exploring the idea of ghosts as material transmutations in time.  

GHost Hostings 13 is supported by the Centre for Performance, Central St Martins School of Arts

Hostings 13 image - Anne Robinson Is It You 

PROGRAMME

Vicky Smith Haunting a medium through physical residue. 

Jessica Worden Materialising the Body: Material Phenomena and Sartre's Theory of Viscosity. 

Anne Robinson Is It You? Time travel and Physical Thinking.  

Eleanor Bowen  Drawing and Longing 

If you wish to attend please register for FREE seats by following the link below

ABSTRACTS 

Vicky Smith. Haunting a medium through physical residue.

I will talk about how imagery created directly onto film can deal with things that have been abandoned or are undervalued. Using clips from my recent film/ performance, 36 Frames Per Feet, I will illustrate how film, once inhabited, now presents only the trace of the absent body. I will discuss this in relation to Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the modern body in an age of animated machinery and his suggestion that the death of a technology releases the hopes which were embedded in it at its birth. Early cinema was proclaimed as ‘life itself’ (Doane, 2008). I will show how, by enlivening film with my own body and refusing to let film die, my research corresponds to the concerns of Ghosting with regard to themes of absence, presence, the politics of commodification and as a lamentation for what is lost.

Vicky Smith’s practice incorporates experimental animation and performance. Her work will be shown at The Tate Britain this Feb, 2014, and has recently been exhibited at:  No. w.here, London (2013) Lo and Behold, London (2012/2013), 100 Feet touring (2013-14) Edinburgh Film Festival (2012),  Melbourne Experimental Film Festival (2012).  Recently published work includes: Full Body Film in Sequence (2013). She was Workshop Organiser at the LFMC , lectured in Film Studies at UWE,  and is currently at UCA, teaching Digital Film and Screen Arts and researching into the aura and trace using films made without cameras.

Jessica Worden. Materialising the Body: Material Phenomena and Sartre's Theory of Viscosity (because slimy substances stick to the hands , and clothes, and because they stain) — Sartre, 1943.

Sartre describes the viscous in terms of its qualities, trying to create parameters around a state that is ‘always fleeing’. (Sartre, 1943) There is ample critique of Sartre's theory of viscosity (the slimy)— particularly the use of feminine metaphors to describe its negative attributes. By applying the properties of viscosity to the role of material phenomena in altering definition(s) of the female body, it is possible to underline the radical nature of these performances and potentially reclaim the viscous. Ectoplasms have been extensively cataloged and documented since the 1880's; the advent of their distinctly material ormations occurred simultaneously with the changing roles of women in society. Viscosity defies definition; it is my intention to suggest through visual and textual re-appropriation ways in which women utilised ectoplasmic manifestations to influence the definition their bodies and modes of (re)production by embracing viscosity.

I am a Dutch/American artist currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Breathlessness in Performance in the Contemporary Performance department at Brunel University. I have been working with live art since 2005, having also run a live-arts platform from 2006-2008 in Rotterdam, NL. My practice is influenced by photography, but based in performance writing. I produce artist books, installations and performance pieces. My aim is to explore writing-as-performance and the interplay between the visual and the textual

 Anne Robinson. Is It You? Time Travel and Physical Thinking 

 This paper focuses on the two-screen performative video work, Is It You? a ‘ghost dance’ with polyrhythmic patterns made in response to the spectral traces of physically ‘remembered’ songs (including Toots and the Maytalls’ Pressure Drop). Is It You? engages with the ‘frame’ as temporal marker,  using slow shutter-speeds and high speed filming to capture the ‘same’ moments in time using different time bases. This is an unsettling experience of time deconstructed through cinematic devices which catches the spectator in a circuit of afterimages and pushes them into a strange, dissonant perceptual dimension, parallel to the temporal alterations in shamanic drumming. The experience of sound in the work is also immersive, pushing language to the threshold of recognisable auditory form. The talk draws on a body of practice-led research into temporality and philosophical perspectives from Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Gidal. Extracts from Is It You? (2012), Que Sera (2010) and Inside Out Blues (2013). 

 Anne Robinson’s practice encompasses painting, moving image and performance and is concerned with the perception and politics of time passing, recently working with the Commonist Gallery, ‘Winter Shuffle’, Supernormal, Psi19 and GHost IV following a PhD on temporality, film and painting. In summer 2013, she took part in the ‘DeTours’ residency inMarseilles, resulting in the performative song-film ‘Inside Out Blues’. She works with film as an artist and educator, currently senior lecturer in Film at LMU, curating the event One More Time there in 2011. 

Eleanor Bowen.  Drawing and Longing (performed text with slide projections)

My presentation for GHost is developed from material that was published in Performance Research, ‘On Choreography’ (Vol. 13: 2, 2008). It investigates the alchemical notion of parastasis as phenomenon of haunting that, rooted in the ancient desire to stop time by replicating or fixing the present, was eventually realised in the photograph. Such a haunting does not relate to the making of photographs, the spirit world of the darkroom, but reflects the unseen presence of the camera itself and its relationship as such to time travel. Incorporated into the presentation are readings of snaps from ancestral albums, found photos and pinhole images made in an underground archaeological site, not a burial but the archive of an archaeologist who was also my father.

Eleanor Bowen is a writer and visual artist, currently with a studio practice in London. She holds an MA in Visual Art and Theatre and a practice-based PhD from Wimbledon School of Art, in which she explored the relationship between early photographic practice and drawing. Publications include contributions to Performance Research, ‘Lexicon’ (11: 3, 2007) and ‘On Choreography’ (13: 2, 2008), http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/drawing-and-longing-proposal-drawing-paratext, ‘Between Laughter and Crying’, co-written chapter with Dr Laura Gonzalez for ‘Madness, Women and the Power of Art’, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press (2014) which is to be developed as a co-performed text for ACTS RE-ACTS (March 2014, Wimbledon College of Arts). 

Photos from GHost Hostings 12 - GHost-dance II

GHost Hostings 12 - GHost-dance II, a set on Flickr.

Hostings 12 - GHost-dance II

GHost presents the second in a new series of Hostings – 'GHost-dance' – exploring the idea of ghosts as cultural and political movement.

Hostings 12: GHost-dance II

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)

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

SaVAge K'Lub : Rosanna Raymond – Sistar S’pacific, Emine, Jo Walsh, 
Dr Mark James Hamilton, SaVAge SEAnce: An Invitation to Activate Your Ancestry.
and
Installation by Jennie Fagerstrom

Sell Tickets Online through Eventbrite

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

Christian Weaver,  Trillando en el cajón: mediating positive and negative forces in the realm of the dead through music and dance.

In the 21^st 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.

'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.

www.mitsusalmon.com

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.

michellehannah.org

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. 

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

Hostings 11 -GHost-dance I Photo Album

GHost-dance, a set on Flickr.

On the 17th April three brilliant presentations and one incredible film initiated a new GHost dialogue. The spectres of ghosts as cultural and political initiators were made present and not past.

Thank you to David Jacques, Alan Murdie, Marcy Saude and Chris Moffat. Thanks also to Birgitta Hosea and the Centre for Performance at CSM for hosting us.
To be continued...

Here are some images from the night.