ID takes to the park to launch the Festival of Learning with a picnic and free performances. Pack your sarnies and come join!
In the afternoon, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo presents TiLTING VERTICALITIES, an informal participatory performance which audiences are welcome to take part in and/or watch. After this there is a gathering in an orchard for the picnic, with a Beatmotion intervention by Akeim Toussaint Buck with June Yuen Ting and Alison Thomas. The evening concludes with a solo performance by Dinis Machado – a dance for a dress in the park.
This is a physically distanced event and capacity is very limited. Please feel welcome to arrive whenever you like from 4pm onwards.
Free event : click here to book
Participatory performance
TiLTING VERTICALITIES invites you to step inside and perform, encountering and exploring notions of equilibrium, trust and support. For those who want to take part actively, it involves a simple ‘score’, or instruction, which is to experiment with moving within a large loop of stretch fabric with another person. Held and supported by the fabric, it becomes about communicating through movement itself – how to stand, how to balance and how to play with structural tension, inclinations and orientations, moving and being moved in direct relation to each other and sharing ground. For those watching, the work offers sculptural and poignant images as the participants negotiate interdependence, cooperation, harmony, affect, change, anchoring and support.
Margarita Zafrilla Olayo and collaborators will guide participants in the score. No prior movement experience is necessary and people of all physicalities are warmly welcomed to join.
‘A dance for a dress in the Park is an attempt in motion to recover feminine absences in my body. What does it mean to be queer when you are alone, away from another’s gaze? What is queerness as a way to relate to oneself?
During the last year, while the world withdrew into isolation, I started spending long periods in the forest thinking, fantasizing about and experimenting with this dance. Spending time in the forest made me notice, and relate to, matter in transformation. The way the same matter assumes shapes as a tree, a bug, a mushroom, a bear or a berry. Also the way the berry becomes the bear when it is eaten, how the tree becomes a mushroom when occupied by the fungus, how the mushroom becomes part of my body when I eat it.
I feel how close our bodies are to becoming the tree and the mushroom, how matter re-configures itself. At the same time my mind is occupied with gender questions and things I was not expected to do, to feel, to wear, to become. Gender, like the forest, feels to me like a mutable constellation, where one thing can become another but can also decompose and rest in the space in between.
a dance for a dress in the park builds a fictional body searching for a relationship with a dress, while paradoxically dissolving in continuous metamorphoses. Impressions, flashes, vague memories, and emptied out narrative fragments. Moving through desire.’
Margarita Zafrilla Olayo is a London-based artist working with dance and performance, choreographic projects and objects, video, and installation, exploring how our bodies are transformed by movement. Classically trained as a dancer, she holds a BA (Hons) and PgDIP in Contemporary Dance and Performance from London Contemporary Dance School and MA Creative Practice from Trinity Laban/Independent Dance. Her work has been presented at Siobhan Davies Studios and Robin Howard Dance Theatre (UK), Northern Sustainable Futures in Moskosel (SE), Tanzinitiative in Hamburg (DE), MACRO—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (IT), Ritratti d’Artista in Ascoli Piceno (IT), Royal College of Art Situated Practice group Archive(r) at Tate Britain Archives, and Coinciding with the Venice Biennial 2019 at GAD Giudecca Art District, amongst others
(They, Ela, Hen)
With a background in dance and visual art, Dinis Machado’s work is informed by how the sculptural construction of objects, spaces and bodies is reclaimed and worked as choreographic material. In a post-somatic perspective, and caring about bodies that do not conceive, perform or imagine themselves as they are medically described, Machado works with ideas of mutation and transformation – psychedelic bodies that they imagine, claim, and consubstantiate for themselves.
Born in Porto, Machado has been based in Stockholm since 2012. They studied MA Choreography DOCH (Stockholm), Independent Studies Program at Maumaus – Visual Arts (Lisbon), BA in Theatre by ESTC (Lisbon) and studied ballet and contemporary dance at Balleteatro (Porto) from 1994-2002. In 2020 Machado was awarded the Birgit Cullberg Stipendium by the Swedish Art Grants Committee / Konstnärsnämnden. Their works Site Specific For Nowhere and Cyborg Sunday were part of Moderna Museet’s quadrennial Moderna¬utställning¬en (2018). Their work has been presented in Austria, Croatia, Uruguay, France, Sweden, Germany, England, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Portugal in contexts such as ImpulsTanz, Weld, Dance 4, Chelsea Theatre, FIDCU, NAVE, Festival Arqueologias Del Futuro, ZDB/Negócio, METAL, Chisenhale Dance Space, Colchester Arts Centre, Rivoli, CCB, Festival DDD, Citemor, AGORA, Reflektor M, among others.
Akeim Toussaint Buck is an interdisciplinary performer and creative born in Jamaica and raised in England. Akeim’s intention is to create moving, thought-provoking, accessible and free-spirited projects.
Since graduating from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in 2014, with a first-class honours BA in Performing Arts. Akeim has been involved in multiple cross-artform projects with artists and communities from around the world. The aesthetic of his work combines dance, film, poetry, beat-box, singing and acting. Fused to create performances that tell stories capable of bridging the intersections of a variety of audiences.
Akeim’s work has been supported by Yorkshire Dance, Leeds Playhouse, Leeds Inspired, IRIE! Dance Theatre, Spin Arts, Serendipity, NSCD, Sadlers Wells and Arts Council England. His choreographic work includes Snakebox’s PLAY, Windows Of Displacement, Sib Y Osis and Beatmotion. Akeim’s film work includes Galvanise and Windows.
