MEAT PEOPLE was commissioned by London Contemporary Dance School 2019
Choreographed by Samir Kennedy
Sound by Samir Kennedy
Costume by Florence Meredith
Lighting by Mickey Manion
Performed by -
Nichole Bennis
Anna Dunlop
Annie Edwards
Iona McGuire
Laura Ahumada Garcia
Niall Egan
Jonathan Starr
Dulcie May
Olive Hardy
Elise Norgate
Jessie Richardson
Samir Kennedy - LOOKS LIKE GOD
Have you ever been in the same room as a zombie? Have you ever tried spice? Have you ever shared oxygen with a zombie? Have you ever wanted to fuck a zombie? Or looked at your colleagues and wanted to eat their faces off? Have you ever fucked someone who might as well have been a zombie? Have you ever loved somebody so much it made you want to die and come back to life just so you could eat their intestines?
Looks Like God is a new visceral performance installation by artist Samuel Kennedy. It appropriates the zombie body in all of its abject and grotesque glory, to seek out where revulsion and attraction coexist in a putrefied wasteland of displaced desire and hypersexual sexiness.
Created and performed by Samir Kennedy
Sound and Design by Samir Kennedy
Dramaturg: Martin Hargreaves
Filmed at Sophiensaele as part of Present Futures Berlin
Shot by Adam Munnings
TEMPORARY STORE by Colette Sadler
In a performance-installation ‘island’—suggestive of an exhibition space, a show-room, or a shrine— objects, bodies, and their digital spectres are on permanent display for all eternity. The performers are presented alongside ceremonial relics in a location pervaded by a fictitious corporate entity called Vessels Inc. This domain and the bodies/items it contains function as an archive; a memory storage for information/life. Sadler searches for a choreographic interface between the realms of virtual and physical reality. Reinforcing the suspension of linearity and temporal progression, is Elaine Radigue’s score Trilogie de la Mort, based on the Tibetan Book Of The Dead.
Temporary Store is imagined as a ‘purgatorial pop-up’; a ‘post-temporal’ space where past and future intersect with one another, where time itself melts away to an endless unchanging now. The work thematises the ubiquity of time and death that conditions the physical body by exhibiting the dancers as post-human ‘containers’. Any notion of an ‘inside’— previously associated with a soul or a desiring self — has been evacuated. Caught in a circularity of endless gestural loops, these commodified vessels carry the relics of human communication systems, yet share a single code. Pointing nowhere in a sea of nothingness, they become immortalised like works of art in a highly aestheticised environment from which ‘life’ has been removed.
There is nothing to buy in Temporary Store but there is a coin from ancient Greek mythology, once laid on dead tongues to pay the ferryman for a passage to the underworld over the river Styx. Referencing and enacting the ritualistic in its first and middle parts, the piece ends with an image of a monochromatic futuristic morgue, in which even vessel bodies will eventually become virtual shadows of themselves.
Concept and Choreography – Colette Sadler
Performers/Artistic Collaborators– Samir Kennedy, Leah Marojevic
Research Assistance – Maxwell McCarthy
Installation and Video Design – Mikko Gaestel
Light Design – Veli-Ville Sivén
Music – Elaine Radigue: Trilogie de la Mort
Costume – Rike Zoellner
Artistic and Dramaturgical Advice — Assaf Hochman
Photo and Image Design – Mikko Gaestel
Production – Feral Arts
Florence Peake
RITE : ON THIS PLIANT BODY WE SLIP OUR WOW!
Exhibition open Saturday 12 May - Sunday 2 September 2018
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
On Sunday 6 May, the De La Warr Pavilion presented the premiere of RITE: on this pliant body we slip our wow!, a performance created by Florence Peake with a cast of five dancers in a bed of six tonnes of clay.
The performance and exhibition forms an expanded body of work reinterpreting a pivotal moment in modernism’s history: Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. This notorious production provoked riots when it opened in 1913.
The mound of clay that remains in the gallery from the performance will now be the centrepiece of a new exhibition featuring a painted frieze encircling the gallery walls, with sound by Beatrice Dillon.
Drawing on the The Rite Of Spring’s rich legacy, RITE reclaims triumphant physicality as political statement– presenting the primal body as a powerful force in the struggle for change.
Supported by Arts Council England and De La Warr Pavilion.
Initial research for RITE was supported by the Jerwood Choreographic Research Project 2016-17 with partners Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Cambridge Junction, Dance4, Greenwich Dance, LIFT, London College of Fashion, Sadler’s Wells, Site Gallery, Tintype Gallery and by public funding through Arts Council England. It was developed through residencies at Somerset House Studios, Site Gallery and Cass Sculpture Foundation in partnership with West Dean College and through a solo show at Studio Leigh.
Thirst (2017) is a performance intervention by choreographer Joe Moran created with dancers Samuel Kennedy and Christopher Owen and first performed at Sadler's Wells, Sept 2017 and Queer Art Now, Oct 2017. Two men navigate a complex, shifting terrain of power, submission, complicity and consent. In a single physical act, one man moves from lying to standing to lying, mounted by another man who never touches the floor. Film: Reynir Hubter
On The Habit of Being Oneself by choreographer Joe Moran is an arresting dance experiment placing full-bodied dancing under the spotlight. On a stripped back stage seven dancers navigate complex choreographic puzzles through continuous, relentless dancing. Reconfiguring choreography and the dancing body, the result is a challenging and refreshingly immediate encounter with dancers and dancing.
4 hour durational performance installation.
Karaoke, Men, Mother and Me is about Karaoke, Men, my Mother and a bit about Me.
“D’ya want an ‘am sandwich darling?
“Grunt"
This one is for my Mother and her lovers, those sad fuck blokes that bled us dry.
Shot at the ancient site Volubilis in Morocco
O Centuries is a collaborative dance film project initiated by film maker Lee Foster
The first in a series
Music video for Safe Barracks, made in collaboration with Lee Foster
Work in progress, touring 2017. Duet integrated with projection performed by Robert Clark, Samir Kennedy.
A durational performance installation.
The exploitation of sexual capital is common practice. It is sold to us in easy to swallow snapshots and snippets.
We want to see everything, and we want it now. We want it all to be broken down into bite-sized, sexy, consumable chunks for us to endlessly and mindlessly gorge on. I'm just joining the party.
Created and performed by Samuel Kennedy
No thanks to Beyonce
to find a place is Rahel Vonmoos’s vigorous yet tender enquiry into displacement – a topic which is both ancient and acutely contemporary.
Direction and video Rahel Vonmoos
Choreography in collaboration with performers: Bernadette Iglich, Helka Kaski, Luke Birch and Samir Kennedy
Dramaturgy Dr Martin Hargreaves
Lighting design Fay Patterson
Soundscape Rahel Vonmoos using sound by Terry White at Whitechapel station; own recorded sound; original sound by Bo Harwood, Motion, Untitles EP and Fernesz; extracts from Opening Night by John Cassavetes (1977)