March, April and August

Phoebe Collings-James and Jamila Johnson-Small have developed a new collaborative work which will be performed, for the first time, in our music festival on 1 September.

Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival
By Phoebe Collings-James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro

Life grows between the cracks of this current flesh

Charting psycho-emotional landscapes and mapping them on to the physical we work with our multi-dimensional bodies as the primary technology and source material for a collaborative live performance work that is embodied through a symbiotic relationship between dance, music and sculpture. The group form a chorus centred around a conceptual deconstruction of ‘percussion’ as it functions instrumentally and also as a radical proposition to the various ways you could think about the power of ‘striking an object’ and the impact of the sonic as resonating frequencies and vibrations. Our bodies navigate the sensory labour of their being ‘played’.

For this performance Phoebe Collings-James and Jamila Johnson-Small are joined by Yasmine Akim, Onyeka Igwe and Katarzyna Perlak.

In my mind the process of ceramics becomes enzyme like in its ability to facilitate a movement in the object and all those who interact with it. I could call them live and active gut cultures or subaltern spirit guides or the detritus of devotional memorabilia. Wrapping green and yellow fungi around them, letting language starve them of breath. But I will not. I will leave it for you to read, in your arms to hold. Or drop.- Phoebe Collings-James

Navigating ‘the gaze’, and I do not mean this as something singular, is survival work that all ‘othered’ bodies are obliged to do. Within my work I try to make space to have different kinds of relations because it is temporarily my house, my church, my empire – a certain kind of fragile, unknown and precarious sanctuary with the audience as a crucial part of the energetic and physical environment - Jamila Johnson-Small