Live Performance | YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal
Florence Peake, Remake, performer: Rachel Gildea Photo: Gian Paolo Cottino
SERAFINE1369’s programme visions concludes with durational performance works by keyon gaskin and Florence Peake. The intention of the prior weeks of the programme is to invite an arrival at live performance from an embodied perspective, where it is understood that everyone present is implicated.
visions is a programme of live performance that seeks to encourage an embodied approach to engaging with live work and choreography where all bodies present are implicated and senses beyond visual sight are activated. It is an invitation to be with what is conjured, stirred up and rising to the surface of each of our particular bodies, in relation and response to environment. As such, each offering is somehow immersive. All events are free to attend and happen during regular opening hours of the Gropius Bau.
The scenography, designed by Soft Tissue Studio, subtly morphs with each intervention.
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body’s physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas. Peake’s work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake’s painting is as an extension of the body and performance: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Their painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.
Peake is part of the Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Peake’s work has been presented at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020),Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).
Florence Peake, Factual Actual, National Gallery. Performer: Natifah White
photo: Anna Arca