Words by Jo Leask.
Sunday afternoon spent at the APT gallery in Creekside, Deptford, for the final day of Fest En Fest 24 feels like visiting an oasis of hope and a well of alternative dance creativity. Put together without proper funding, curators Hanna Gillgren and Heidi Rustgaard (H2DANCE), have created something remarkable for this year’s expanded choreography festival. A week which brings together artists in an intimate setting for performances, art-works, discussion and social gatherings.
What I loved about my visit to see Ming and Hanna Gillgren’s live performance project was being able to participate so easily with group activities as well as the other works on show, both in the gallery and the studio. These included Nicola Conibere’s stunning video installation Holding-Still-Holding-Still- Holding which features three portraitsof different dance artists, arranging objects for support in order to maintain a position over a duration of time. Preceding Conibere’s installation we joined Sonya Lindfors, Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer and artistic director of Helsinki based UrbanApa in an upbeat, round table discussion. Listening to her talk about the work she’s doing with UrbanApa, a “inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community” it was inspirational to hear how she’s building a strong platform for feminist intersectional discourses and practices in Helsinki.
Several art works were exhibited in the gallery space including Marina Collard’s Corner Piece and the collage of images from the queer ecological, collaborative project, Perfect Flower. Collared explores the connections and tensions that can be felt within a quiet space, from the rhythms and dynamics of print on soft furnishing (a chair and wallpaper). In a quiet, corner of the gallery, aggressive monochrome patterns covering a chair and wallpaper makes the hideaway feel chaotic and exhausting. Perfect Flower centres on the queer potentiality of the interconnection between humans, plants and animals, and the belief that humans are positioned horizontally with other species.
Created by architect Ulrike Steven/What If: Projects, in collaboration with participants from Stratford Youth Zone’s LGBTQIA +, photographer Henri T and Rustgaard, Perfect Flower illustrates the community outreach work that is so important to Fest En Fest’s curators. The beautifully bizarre photographs, capture the inventiveness of the young participants as they adorn themselves with unconventional costumes made of cardboard boxes and colourfully sprayed with toxic-free paint. The strange, sculptural shapes they wear as extensions of their bodies refuse a heteronormative obsession with binaries and vertical straightness. Henri T’s images catch the groups’ response to a variety of urban spaces that have traditionally been heterosexual, concrete and ungreen, opening up the possibility of new queer perspectives that embrace human, plant and animal.
Angela Woodhouse and Caroline Broadhead’s thermal videos Who Cares visually articulate the potency of touch as two dancers explore with movement and vibrant coloured thermal imaging. Vibrant colours describe the traces of where they have touched and how, marking their own and each other’s bodies. The five videos, contained in small frames and hung on the walls of the gallery, seem to magnify their bodies and actions with greater intensity. The miniature form captures the sensation and feeling of the dancers’ sensory journeys as they shift across each other’s body boundaries, making us revisit our own response to touch and its implications.
A Loaded Beast is a combination of Ming and Gillgren’s converging practices: Ming’s choreography and performance, Gillgren’s dramaturgy and production. Their performance project explores how they work together, expanding ideas about dance making and generating new ideas and perceptions.
When I enter the studio space, Ming lies sprawled on the floor. Long, black woven braids attached to her own hair, create lines from her head that extend outwards across the space. She moves slowly on hands and knees, uttering deep sounds, offering the ends of her extensions to members of the audience, connecting her body to all of ours. She pauses in moments of contemplation, reflecting on the different images she’s making that embody her identity as a Black woman, establishing her physical presence through her voice.
Setting up a microphone and changing her costume, she builds a rich sound score of fragmented text and sound. It includes different languages, hissings, clicking, rapping, repetitions and layering.
To this loop of self-generated sound, she performs a floppy movement sequence following the stumbling, shuddering pace and dynamics of her voice. With a mixture of clowning, breaking and contact improvisation, Ming improvises around tripping up, initiated by changes of weight and fast footwork that sends her stuttering across the studio or falling to the ground in soft, melting movements. She’s riveting to watch – a strong, grounded body, morphing between rapping, dancing, posturing and image making as she disrupts and deconstructs familiar rhythms and gestures. Embedded in her choreography are the pedestrian actions of setting up her equipment, gathering up cables and setting up the space; and the labour needed to perform such tasks. In a final scene, she stands proud on a raised platform, stripped down to her white pants stained by crushed raspberries, offering yet another ambiguous perspective of a bleeding, woman’s body.
Fest En Fest is an exhilarating festival that pushes boundaries in a generous, caring and collective way. The roundtable discussions made participants and audience members feel hopeful and included in these difficult times. Overall, I felt this was a productive model of a festival and one that I want to support and get involved with.
Header shot of Ming’s Loaded Beast by Henri T.