These classes offer 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.
These sessions open out SERAFINE1369’s ongoing research into the radical, transformative potential of this thing we call dancing (which is also always poetry) as a technology.
For safety, we would like to encourage everyone to take a Covid-19 lateral flow test before attending. The studio will also be well-ventilated even in colder weather – please bring extra layers for warmth. Siobhan Davies Studios current risk assessment and policy is available to read here.
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.