These sessions are a continuation of Eve Stainton’s interest in creating contexts for moving that are non-judgemental and are supportive of queer and marginalised communities. Eve will share some movement practices related to their current project Dykegeist, a choreographic work interested in the ‘predatory lesbian creature’, as well as offering ways into connecting with feelings and sensations, mainly rooted in somatic philosophies.
The sessions will be guided and may involve touch with; this can always be adapted. There will also be moments to reflect and feed back.
Please note Friday’s class will be led by SERAFINE1369.
This class offers simple invitations for movement of thought/voice/body, creating the conditions to invoke states of focus (singularity) and openness (multiplicity) akin to trance or meditation, inviting our bodies to become medium. The intention is to open up space listen to and observe our selves in chaos, in flux, in overwhelm, in stagnancy, as unfolding oracular text and without judgment. SERAFINE1369 sees this as somatic technology of dancing as an oracular device for unsettling and reading what surfaces as a way to self-regulate and ground.
Eve Stainton is interested in the politics of un-codeable queer presence and its intersections with race and class. They create multi-disciplinary performance worlds that hold movement practices, digital collage, welded steel, and other invisible forces, often psychedelic and clashing. Stainton is interested in co-occurrence as a way to unravel essentialist thinking, with intent to create more expansive understandings of the lesbian identity, non-gender/variance, and perceptions of the ‘real’.
Notable presentations include New commission ‘Dykegeist’ for ICA (2021), Close Encounters, Copenhagen, (DE), Venice Biennale performance programme with Florence Peake (2019), Block Universe (UK), The Place (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), Crac Occitanie (FR), Sadler’s Wells Lilian Baylis (UK), La Becque (SE), LCMF (UK), CCA Glasgow (UK), Tangente (CA). Features include AQNB, FACT Mag, Dazed Beauty, Twin Magazine, Art in America, This is Tomorrow. Eve Stainton has also collaborated with Anthea Hamilton, Tai Shani, Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Sonia Boyce, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Holly Blakey, Goldfrapp, Vivienne Westwood, Claire Barrow, Art School, Molly Goddard, walking for London/Shanghai/Paris Fashion Weeks.
SERAFINE1369 (formerly Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist and dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology.
Their research is presented as live performances, installations, video and writing.
SERAFINE1369’s practice is relational, cumulative and often collaborative and they work in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles to build spaces for communing, attuning, communicating. The work involves dancing, listening, text, darkness, voice, video, bass to invite forms that emerge through the live unfolding of the tension between things that produce meaning, towards making spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable.