Launched last year, the annual performance art festival Block Universe returns for a second edition running May 30 – June 5, 2016. Performances will take place at major museums and offsite locations across the city of London including the ICA, Somerset House, Royal Academy of Arts, British Museum, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and David Roberts Art Foundation.The line-up brings together UK-based and international, cutting-edge performance artists who work at the cross-section of contemporary visual art, dance, and music – a cross-disciplinary practice that populated the 1960s and has ever since increasingly been explored by new wave artists who look back, yet recreate anew.Blouin Artinfo talked to the festival’s founder, Louise O’Kelly, and participating artists Alexis Blake and Grace Schwindt, to get an insight on their philosophies.What does ‘Block Universe’ stand for and why did you name the festival as such? Louise O’Kelly: Block Universe is a physics theory that describes an alternative theory of time. So, as opposed to the teleological version where we are coming from - the Big Bang - and continually moving forward in time in an ever expanding universe, in a Block Universe the past, present and future can exist simultaneously. For me, this concept was pertinent when discussing how we sustain an engagement with performance beyond the ‘singular’ moment of its passing, as discussed in many theories about performance, particularly as a festival that is concerned with sustaining a legacy for performance in the UK. What is this year’s theme about?For the second edition of the festival, we are looking towards the future. With the theme ‘The Future Present,’ we’re playing with time, and artists are considering this in a multiplicity of ways, whether that is through our relationship with technology in the construction of identity, mediated relationships, immaterial bodies, aging or immortality, and a continual striving towards a perfect self. For your new performance, “Conditions of an Ideal,” you are using Diana Watt’s The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal (1914) as a starting point, and you are about to set its illustrations in motion. In doing so, what are you aiming at?Alexis Blake: I’m thinking about the quality, meaning, and transition from one pose to the next, whilst questioning “what does each gesture mean when it is embodied in a contemporary body?” Specifically, since these are old postures - and in a way we know their forms because they have been reproduced throughout history - now that these are decontextualized, I’m interested in what meaning they carry and how the viewer experiences them today.Diane Watt’s thesis focuses on the idea of balance. How will you demonstrate this with your performance?“Conditions of an Ideal” is very much the successor of my previous work, “Allegory of a Woman,” now looking at Watt’s notion of the ideal appropriated in history by the fascist movement and the idea of balance - there’s still a very limited idea of what a body can do. I don’t see that someone blind is disabled, he’s just less able, and may have more sensitivity in another sense that I don’t have, so it’s about balance; it is not a fixed point, it is always a negotiation (between the senses).There’s this binary idea of able-body and non-able body, so I am interested in cracking open this binary, by working with a group of female paraplegic Olympians and professional dancers of all ages. The performance will take place at the British Museum and will be surrounded by the Parthenon, which is very loaded, strong, and powerful, and, hence, it needs a counterpoint.How does your new performance, “Undead and Other Tales,” investigate the concept of construction and deconstruction of meaning musically? Grace Schwindt: I am interested in moving language and voice apart; the voice starts as something human but then moves away from the human body and becomes an entity of its own. Soprano Lisa Cassidy will perform a score that is based on the “Aria of Madness” from Gaetano Donizetti’s 19th-century opera “Lucia di Lammermoor.”The composition moves between opera and sounds that transcend human quality as well as using repetition, reverses, and loops, with the aim to deconstruct cultural traditions that portray psychological states of instability.You are known for creating sculptural costumes that carry ambiguous meanings. What costume is the performer wearing and what does it signify?It will be an evening, floor-length dress, sculpted as bird-skeleton hybrid to represent the fragility of the human body. I was always drawn by the fragility and symbolism of birds, which foretell either death or fortune. Some of the composition originates from the different sounds that fishermen make to prevent death, and the overall act is like a ritual, referencing also the systems of control by the presence of a puppet that is made of driftwood.Other works at the festival will address digital conceptions of performance (Erica Scourti, Mårten Spångberg, and Jesse Darling), gender and racial identity (Trajal Harrell), queer identity and voguing (niv Acosta), and ageing (Lina Hermsdorf).Block Universe – Performance Art Festival runs from May 30 – June 5 2016, at various sites across London, UK. To preview some of the performances, click on the slideshow.Check the full programme of performances here: http://blockuniverse.co.uk/
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