"surge" (goldsmiths Making Performance graduate shows 08)

friday 27th june 2008

“surge”
goldsmiths “making performance” graduate show 2008
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/surge/

Surge
A Festival of eight Final Shows from the MA in Performance Making 2008, Department of Drama, Goldsmiths
24-28 June 2008
Eight ways of moving.
Eight ways of telling.
Eight ways of testing the thresholds of performance.
Surge showcases the diverse work of emerging artists from Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the UK over five days. Spanning physical theatre, live art, dance and performance installation, the pieces celebrate the immediacy and power of live performance encounter.
Performances take place in and around Goldsmiths Campus and in the Greenwich Tunnel.

The MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths brings together talented emerging and practising artists from a wide range of artistic and geographic backgrounds. This multidisciplinary course is a laboratory and meeting point in London for artists to collaborate, develop their skills and to rethink the ways in which live performance is created. During the course of the Surge festival of 8 shows over 2 days, the public will have the opportunity to take the pulse of contemporary performance in times of limbo and crisis, from a range of international points of view and approaches.
This years projects have been supported by a team of visiting professional artists that include: Graeme Miller, Zeljko Hrs, Geraldine Pilgrim, Mischa Twitchin and Jack Klaff.

“wukong and the tiger share a moment’s repose”
Dafne Louzioti // Greece
Gary Tang // Singapore

how long do we spend waiting?
how long does a breath last?
what if time didn’t matter?
the temporal interstice of or waiting is put under the microscope in an exploration of individual and social patterns of behaviour.
Dafne Louzioti and Gary Tang are cartographers of time in a quest to define the uncharted territory, manipulating the very fabric of time in the process.

Gary Tang and Dafne Louzioti share between them work in theatre, dance and visual art. an interest in finding common ground in seemingly disparate cultures is the driving force in this collaboration and informs both the process and the resulting performance. the dynamics of yin and yang, eternally opposed but inextricably bound together are a crucial element in this work.

time. yin and yang.
projected patterns and digital countdowns in a white space – the performers in white tops and brown trousers
chairs. words about time. chaotic movement in burst of energy without a pattern alongside a slow steady sequential regimental placement of the chairs.
moments of clashing and stasis
soundtracks coming into my head like half-remembered smells
"a man stands before a wall"
the violence of ripping things apart
a return to the stillness of things as they were when we entered

evocative
wonderful

“pigeon suite”
Catalina del Castillo // Colombia

pigeon performance of pigeon life in a crazy pigeon world.
let the pigeon surge!

Catalina del Castillo is a Colombian artist born in Bogotá in 1981. in 2005 she obtained a BA in contemporary dance in Caracas, Venezuela. her performance research has its background in the languages of dance, circus and activism. she has participated in dance festivals and circus conventions in Colombia, Venezuela and Uruguay as choreographer, performer and teacher.

a clown angel.
bright green props suspended on wires - a radio that plays different music and george bush declaring war in the name of peace. a spray of perfume. a kettle and a cup-for tea and a cone of popcorn. 3 white "egg" juggling balls. a broom. a red heart-shaped purse. pink boots. white (angel) wings and a white shift tied with pink ribbon that she puts on to do her ritualised angelic sequence of posing and smiling under “peace on earth” banners in multiple languages. destroyer planes. a bomb. the white eggs lost. looking everywhere – including through the audience – with some clown-tripping and bag searching – desperate but not quite dispelling the humour. the little toy alarms and she makes her angelic peace routine again.

more charming than substantial

“and whose heart is not a hungry fish?”
Jocelyn Chua // Singapore

“a heart is a piece of muscle like any other in the human body. it is elastic. it can stretch. it can scar… it is sometimes also prone to doing stupid things.”
a journey through the forbidden territories that belie our human love affairs, this performance combines movement choreography with documentary reports and personal stories through the eyes of a singaporean woman.

Jocelyn is a published writer and theatre performer from Singapore.

A one- woman show about being a graduate singaporean woman and thus “an essential part of the gene pool who therefore should not be left on the shelf” and her experiences dating older foreign men.
it could have been trite or cute or indulgent but in fact it was none of these things. instead it was smart and sassy and funny and grown up and completely engaging
involved a combo of dance with a movement sequence which was repeated in different ways -once on her back, with and without speech.
she also manages to incorporate some harder-hitting connections with prostitution and war and invasion
her performance style is completely guileless and beguiling. her language similarly is immediate and vital and somehow delivers absolutely through the center.

riveting throughout and her immediacy with us in the audience never felt threatening in any way (even during her predatory sequence to me as an older foreign man sitting center front row)

“2 divide”
Bruno Humberto // Portugal
Borja Sagasti Inurrieta // Spain

“One, two. Are you there?”
this performance explores division and bipolarity. division within ourselves, division between me and you, between us and them. bipolarity as our contemporary syndrome, between left and right, North and South, East and West. absurd, personal and mythological narratives come together through the languages of physical theatre, sound and installation.

+ born in Portugal in 1981. performer, deviser, self-taught composer. Bruno studied media and culture research and has been doing site-sepcific performanvce since 2004. he is based in london where he is part of the collective poemstomyotherself http://www.poemstomyotherself.org.uk/
+ born in spain Borja started his theatre studies in Barcelona focusing on the methodologies in jaques lecoq’s techniques of physical theatre. he co-founded the performance theatre company ‘Fang Fastik’ in Barcelona and from 1992 – 2002 collaborated with various theatre companies including ‘la fura dels baus’, ‘els comediiants’ and ‘monty cia’. in 2006 Borja toured with ‘generating company’ for the show “hard drive”. last year he finished the advance course in ‘creating theatre’ at the london international school of performing arts.

this was the most popular show of the night and for me the most perplexing.
apparently an exploration into bipolarism – which perhaps watching it I was trying to take too literally - it involved two guys each with a kazoo and a walkie-talkie.
again a lot of use was made of the chairs 9same white as space as dafne’s + gary’s performance).
so we began standing around the edges as if in an installation and then were allowed to sit once they had been laid out in rows for us. throughout this there is much “One, two. Are you there?” and again a clear distinction between the order of one (“don’t get so emotional”) and the frenetic panicked movements and hiding under the chair of the other. but “we have to do this.” “ok so let’s do it” “let’s do it now” brought the two men together in the center under a radio mike to circle their different moments to the kazoo accompaniment from the other.
and it was then a love story and its best moments were in these simple declarations: “is there anything better than to need and be needed?"
at the end adoring house erupted.
but a lot of it was marred for me by (apparently) funny words i couldn't hear and impossible sight- lines I couldn’t see the enough of the action i couldn't see through a pity 'cos everyone else seemed to love it and the two cute performers who made it.

and in 2 years time in june 2010 one of these shows will be the one i made. as i turn 50....