Purple Ladies
Upcoming
Performing Displacement
Various sites 2016-current
Performing Displacement is a research project that unfolds via performance between Dagmara Bilon and Teresa Albor. Both immigrant artists based in London, who make durational live art, explore migration issues and the vulnerability of women, through performance. Their process has involved research into questions of home, identity, integration, safety and loss, as well as a re-enactment of women's stories as 'our' stories. As a collaboration, they have an intergenerational perspective: there is a 25-year age difference between them. They attempt to develop their performance-based research as a practice by which human rights can be understood as part of an evolving cultural and political process.
Their collaboration was ignited while taking part in Tanja Ostojić workshop: Misplaced Women? and since then they have performed together at Project Space in Hackney, the Solidarity Not Charity refugee fundraiser event in Peckham, One Court Gallery in Richmond and in a Public Market during Refugee Week.
Pulse
hARTslane, London 2018
An immersive performance installation in collaboration with Clive Burton.
Active buildings have physical and spiritual energies, which become interactive with their inhabitants and visitors. Pulse engages and activates these energies through rendering the building empty and employing the electrical wiring outlets as a metaphor for the nervous system.
The human/building interface and other layers of reference are facilitated and activated by the impromptu improvisation of the performance artist who explores themes of home and identity in a post-referendum Brexit era. The main task of the performer is to engage in conversations with the audience about home, family and migration while walking between the complex patterns of electrical wires and taking selfies with the audience. In between the conversations, a choreographic score based on various interpretations of being an endangered species and displacement is performed.
In this immersive experience, there is no audience only visitors who become integral in the artwork.
3069 Soft Toys
Leyden Gallery, London 2017
A live action devised within a Procreate Mother House residency and performed as part of Desperate Artwives Takeover.
Placenta
Hundred Years Gallery, London 2014
Live action.
Wilgefortis Project
Various sites, Spain / UK 2012-ongoing
Based on the story and cult of Saint Wilgefortis, patron saint for women of abusive or unwanted marriages. An arts-centred research project making works in the form of painting, video, action-based performance and site-sensitive installation; inspired by an early historical phenomena of the bearded woman, a symbol of female resistance to a patriarchal order. Through embodied investigation and the creation of moving images, the interest in this research was to follow a fascination with the imagery and symbolism of Wilgefortis as an expression of silent protest towards notions of female oppression.
Various performance interventions were explored, e.g. on the Balcony of Europa in Nerja, in the King Arthur pub, Glastonbury, and in London at Clarence Mews, No Format Gallery, and 47/49 Tanner Street as part of The Alchemy of The Purple Ladies.
Breathing Image / Song of Love
Area10 Project Space / Wiltons Music Hall, London 2009/10
"a person cannot distinguish themselves as separate from the object or thing they behold"
The Freudian term is 'projective identification', for storytellers 'sympathetic magic'. The ability of the mind to step away from its ego for a time and merge with another reality. The corner turns into the sea, the waves continuously rise and fall. The performer is dressed in red and carries a red suitcase. Her persona contrasts with her surroundings. Is this a dream? She puts down her suitcase, takes off her shoes, her coat, her wig. She leaves a trail behind and merges with the waves...
Special thanks to Marta Angelozzi
Red River on White Squares
Area 10 Project Space / The Other, London 2008
A durational live installation featuring a composition of 7 red objects and 7 female performers to construct a three dimensional landscape. From birth to death and after life...crossing over the threshold between matter and spirit. In this piece time is not linear and the episodes unfold simultaneously. Each performer working in relation to one object, a repetitive movement phrase, and a unique rhythm.
Performers: Alexandra Baybutt, Agnes Czerna, Eszter Goncz, Jemima Jones, Philippa Karamoegou, Christelle Lafille, Natascha Ruegg
A Valediction
East London rooftop / derelict West London building / Romanian National Opera, Cluj Napoca 2007
Devised in collaboration with Eirini Kartsaki through a process that tried to answer questions such as: how can the body create its own vocabulary and communicate unresolved anxieties and an unexpressed fight? How can movement and text co-exist and interconnect? What is the role of structure in a performance of fragments? Alternating between chaotic spectacle and fragile intimacy, A Valediction is based on fragmented narratives, juxtaposing sound, language, movement and visual image.
Out of Nothing
International Dance Festival, Reykjavík / Area10 Project Space, London 2007-09
Out of Nothing was a durational performance installation devised in collaboration with Andreas Constantinou. The work explored the use of fragmented images based on themes of gender, identity and sexuality, and was developed over the course of a week's residency in Iceland through movement improvisations made around the window structure in a disused space. Commissioned by the International Dance Festival in Reykjavík, the material generated was subsequently moulded into a one-on-one show performed in the Area 10 bunker and portakabin®, and on the top deck of the Psychological Art Circus Routemaster.
The Life and Death of Christelle Lafille
Area10 / The Place, London / Faki Festival, Zagreb 2006
Inspired by Laing's The Divided Self, The Life and Death of Christelle Lafille depicts the story of modern woman in conflict between the demands of conformity and instinctive drives, gradually disintegrating from one whole into, literally, many pieces.
Performers: Sam Booth, Stella Anna Glockner, Penny, Eirini Kartsaki, Christelle Lafille
About7 - Movement Laboratory 2
Area10 / Westcombe Park Gallery, London 2004
no beginning no middle no end
enter exit anytime anywhere
3-hour site-specific performance, a journey of 100m toward a cone sculpture, bodies transform into disfigured shadows, a group of individuals move as one body mass and disappear under a projection of light.
Performers: Agnes Czerna, Melissa Dornelles, Andrew Downes, Dani d’Emilia, Andrea Meneses, Christelle Lafille, Robert McNeill, Edgar Oliveira, Maia Sambonet, Juli Talerico; Cone: Joel Gray, Kevin Leahy, Matt Pike; Sound: Pelado, Projections: R McNeil, Shinjoru; Coordinated with Marta Angelozzi
Listening Bodies - Movement Laboratory 1
Laban / Peckham Rye Common, London 2003
The lab focussed on exploration of the body as a moving organism and a vehicle for movement expression surfacing from the attention to stillness. The conscious mind served as an observer to a moving life force and to involuntary movement functions. Movements became amplified extensions of that which is experienced in the present time.
Performers: Marthe Louise Bolkan Schneider, Simona DeGregorio, Anne Heilmann, Pauline Huguet, Kirstin Line, Robert McNeill, Ann Sanh, Anastasia Tsonou