I am delighted to be co-curating SLANT’s third event, ‘Writing Bodies’ with the wondrous Iris Colomb.
Language can sometimes feel immaterial. Writing, in particular, can seem static or disembodied. Through performance we unfurl, propel, project words into the world, devising new language dynamics with and through our bodies as diversely political and plurally gendered sites. How can language move through a body? How can a body move through language?
‘Writing Bodies’ is a live-streamed exploration into the moving body and its role in language creation, investigating the word-producing body as a site of origin, support or obstruction.
OUR PROGRAMME
Writing Bodies presents the work of a broad range of multidisciplinary performers. I am honoured to perform alongside headliners Niya B and Michael McShane & Ekaterina Luzgina and contributors Diana Hope Tegenkamp, Two For A Fiver and Jenn Kirby, Robbie Blake & Sinead Hayes.
They will present six pieces, exploring challenge and possibility in the body (Tegenkamp), reaching beyond the human (B), exploring the generative relationship between sounding and moving bodies (Kirby, Blake & Hayes), playing with the body’s disruptive potential in domestic (Two For A Fiver) and more overtly linguistic contexts (Nelson), and creating entirely new bodies of language (Luzgina & McShane). These writing bodies challenge expectations, generating novel performative ways of working with words in motion.
Read our curator’s note here.
Writing Bodies [Part 1]: 8pm to 9pm, Sunday 21st of March (BST)
Diana Hope Tegenkamp - UNMUTE
Camilla Nelson - Reading Movement
Two for a Fiver (joined by Keith Jarrett & M@artadelas) - High Noon
Writing Bodies [Part 2]: 8pm to 9pm, Monday 22nd of March (BST)
Ekaterina Luzgina & Mike McShane
Jenn Kirby, Robbie Blake, and Sinead Hayes - Retain, Reject, Transform
Niya B - I Was Once the Snake Woman
Location: Online at IKLECTIK off-site
Tickets: FREE, no booking required
For full details visit: https://slant-events.com/writing-bodies
Some works which we love:
Daniel Linehan — ‘Untitled Duet’, (2013)
Carolee Schneeman – ‘Interior Scroll’, (1975)
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion — ‘Speaking Dance’, (2012)
Cecilia Vicuna — ‘Ink & Blood As One’, (2013)
Anne Bean & Dov Eylath — ‘Blue for You’, (1981)
Bill T Jones — Fragment from ‘Breathing Show’, (2008)
Alain Arias-Misson — ‘The Yale Public Poem’, (2019)
Clarinda Mac Low — ‘The Pronouns, Experiment #1’, (2012), based on Jackson Mac Low’s ‘The Pronouns, Forty Dances For The Dancers’ (First published in 1964),