Visionhale

Bar from 6.30pm | Performances from 7pm

Visionhale is a mini-festival of performance lectures by dance artists illuminating issues close to their hearts. Hosted at Chisenhale Dance Space over two nights, Visionhale poses as a springboard and landing pad for various danced acts of enquiry and advocacy. After each lecture performance the subject in hand will be further explored through a brief group conversation in which audience members are welcome to put their observations, thoughts and questions to the presenting artists.

The programme:

THURSDAY 5 FEBRUARY
Becoming Witch – Charlie Ashwell 
Benz Punany – Alexandrina Hemsley & Jamila Johnson-Small

FRIDAY 6 FEBRUARY
Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got – Joe Moran  
Doggerland – Kitty Fedorec

TICKETS
One night: £8 advance/conc, £10 on the door
Both nights: £13 advance/conc, £15 on the door
Book tickets: 020 8981 6617 from 12th January

THURSDAY 5 FEBRUARY

Becoming Witch – Charlie Ashwell

‘Becoming Witch’ is a lecture performance which brings together two figures of ancient and recent history: the dance artist and the witch. What are the practices and politics that emerge from those who move in and out of visibility and traditional and non-traditional modes of working and living?

Witch as outsider. Witch as nomad. Witch as Other. Witch as occupant of the periphery. Witch as often, but not always, female. Witch as conversationalist; gossip; healer; mystic; myth. Witch as survivor.

Benz Punany – Alexandrina Hemsley & Jamila Johnson-Small

‘Benz Punany’ is a response to and deconstruction of Project O’s first dance show, ‘O’. Faces freshly flushed with the passion of indignation and continually pursued by the term ‘Angry Black Woman’, Alexandrina and Jamila started work on O in 2011. Now older, tired and more confused ‘Benz Punany’ addresses the difficult in-between times of exhaustion, ambivalence and death that have marked their collaboration. A celebration of Project O and the joys of dancing, sharing and being heard.

FRIDAY 6 FEBRUARY

Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got – Joe Moran 

Choreographer Joe Moran introduces ‘Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got’, his new yearlong research project. Conceived in the spirit of agitation and confrontation, ‘Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got’ is a playful and provocative take on the institutional appropriation, or perhaps one might say subjugation, of dance and choreography by the visual arts. For Visionhale, Joe invites a group of dancers to together share questions and concerns driving the research, which will culminate in a touring lecture-performance in 2016.

‘No, no, we don’t need dancers and whatever that are complacent, nor simply against—way too easy. What we need are folks that don’t shy away from complexity and problems. The new hot cool choreography and dance in the museum is a fabulous opportunity, but only if it is taken seriously enough, only if we dare go dirty, you know what I’m sayin’?’ – Marten Spangberg, Stockholm

Doggerland – Kitty Fedorec

‘Doggerland’ is a work about loss, control, and coastal erosion as explored through ritual acts and falling sand. ‘Doggerland’ attempts to look at the human need to control ones environment, internal and external, and how that becomes expressed through a spectrum of behaviours. It ties the socially acceptable religious and superstitious to the ‘unacceptable’ behaviours that spring from mental illness. It is inspired by Kitty’s personal experiences with mental illness, and different approaches to recovery, as well as interactions with the East Anglian coast and sites of historical ritual. It aims to prompt questions about letting go
and our struggle not to be washed away.

Visionhale is produced by Flora Wellesley Wesley and supported by Chisenhale’s Allotment Project Scheme.
Illustration by Hamish MacPherson.