Somerset House Studios presents 3 Evenings, an off-site landmark event at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in East London. Marking 10 years since the launch of Somerset House Studios’ this special programme celebrates the radical spirit of experimentation – at the core of the Studios’ ethos – bringing resident artists together with international special guests to create site-specific performances amongst Wapping’s dramatic boiler house and heritage hydraulic machinery.
3 Evenings will present live performances by artists, musicians, choreographers and more, each exploring the question of what it means to perform with technology today. Friday presents Gazelle Twin, Jenkin van Zyl, Lawrence Lek; Saturday: Team Rolfes, Holly Blakey and Tai Shani, and Gary Zhexi Zhang, Klara Kofen and Cameron Graham; Sunday will see Precious Renee Tucker, Ligia Lewis and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s returning alter-ego, Roberta Breitmore, take to the stage.
Holly Blakey & Tai Shani present I am a Glass Doll under the Heel of a Dirty God, a collaborative performance debut between the choreographer visual artist. Drawing on erotic film and cosmology, this site-specific multi-camera, multi-screen piece broadcasts between 3 Evenings and 3ETV, playing with ideas of perspective, voyeurism and broadcast. Shani’s work on myth, and feminist counter-history weaves into Blakey’s movement language of intimacy and violence in this one-off spectacular collaboration.
The launch of online TV station, 3ETV, expands the programme beyond the weekend, collaborating with like-minded partners to bring the programme to a global audience. For two months beyond the live event, 3ETV will be broadcast via Somerset House’s online platform for art, ideas and artistic process, Channel, and will expand into nine simultaneous TV streams which the audience can navigate online: looping and reframing performances and contributions by an array of artists, philosophers and technologists, many of which have been specially commissioned for the programme.
At the heart of Somerset House in London, the Studios has become a vital space for artists working across art, culture and new technologies, shaping the future of creativity, at Somerset House and elsewhere. This landmark programme brings this ethos to life at a large-scale offsite venue. 3 Evenings is a playful reimagining of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a groundbreaking series in New York 1966, widely regarded historically as the first large-scale collaboration between artists, engineers and scientists.