Friday 11th June, 7-10pm, 2021, OPEN Ealing Arts Centre
‘D I S T A N C E D’ is a series of events born out of necessity. It’s motivated by a desire to support performance art, artists and audiences in London at this challenging time.
‘D I S T A N C E D’ provides a supportive inclusive environment and encourages inter generational dialogue by working with emergent, mid career and established artists. It doesn’t impose curatorial themes. It simply works with a set of precautions designed to limit the risk of infection.
See below to find out more about our participating artists…
ASH MCNAUGHTON
‘CLOSER’
Ash McNaughton (B.1990 / Scotland) is an action based artist currently situated in Folkestone, UK.
Their practice is a process-led exploration of materials, gesture, movement, and sound. Site-responsive, durational, and ritualistic in nature; Ash implements methods of endurance, repetition, and resistance to access altered states of being while reaching out into the spaces in-between. Their actions encourage a synergetic exchange between their physical, psychological, and spiritual body and the environments they inhabit. This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us. A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.
Ash is a co-organiser of SITE – a platform for collective site-responsive art interventions, and a member of the international Anam Cara collective and the Encountering A New Normal community. They are Project Assistant at ]performance s p a c e[ (Folkestone) and facilitate workshops which hold Performance Art practice at its core which have been hosted by Grays School of Art, Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, and Middlesex University. They obtained their BA Hons in Sculpture from Grays School of Art (2013) and MA in Performance (Contemporary Art Practice) from the Royal College of Art (2018). They have performed within the UK and Europe including: The Aberdeen Art Gallery (Aberdeen, Scotland, UK), Haddo House Arts Festival (Ellon, Scotland, UK), Tramway (Glasgow, UK), Venice International Performance Artweek (Venice, Italy), Electrocamp Festival (Mestre, Italy), Revolve Festival (Uppsala, Sweden), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Tempting Failure (Croydon, England, UK), and Salvage Festival (Folkestone, England, UK).
Click here to visit Ash’s Website…
MAGDA TUKA – WITH SUPPORT FROM ‘O P A E A N’
‘AND IT’S DOUBLE (FRAGMENTS)’
The ideas in this work, which trace their roots back to the subversive theatre of Communist Poland in the sixties, are explored here in the form of an under-the-table lecture. Through her practical research, Tuka is following a distinct strand in Polish Romanticism that is connected with the act of crucifixion.
My practice is rooted in Jerzy Grotowski’s notion of Art as vehicle. I began my career working for ten years full time as an actor in the Warsaw-based Studium Teatralne company of Piotr Borowski, a long-term associate of Grotowski during his late Pontedera phase. For me, the essence of this formative work was in its physical training. A rigorous investigation into the relationship between the body and space, between precision, improvisation and intuition; the aim, a creative onstage existence, a continual search, on a moment by moment basis, for what and where the performer’s attention is.
In a break from this tradition, I undertook what became a series of collaborations over several years as a performer with Bojan Jablanovec’s Via Negativa theatre company in Ljubljana. In my opinion, the importance of the VN approach is its focus on communicating to the audience via an “essential” creative message devised from the personal experience of the performers.
On these foundations, I began initiating projects. In 2012, with an intuitive trust in the creativity of opposites, I incorporated the organisation Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne and devised a succession of shows with dancer Anita Wach, in collaboration with sound designer Opaean.
My process of creative thinking often starts from the vision of a character who represents a complex of ideas, problems, irresolvable circumstances. I am interested in exploring situations where the body is thrown into heightened modes of operation determined by self-imposed conditions. Treated rather instrumentally. In service of ideas, meanings. Often naked, exposed, trapped in uncomfortable circumstances, but not humiliated. And no religionism.
Work has been variously supported through a succession of grants, scholarships, residencies, co-productions and festival selections, presented in theatre, gallery, cinema, church, and online; in Poland, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, USA and Germany.
Click here to visit Magda’s Website…
O p a e a n – A frequent Tuka collaborator, Psychological Art Circus sound designer, Opaean will be performing material from his new set, Doctrine of Sound®.
Photo Credits: Ian Whitford
Performance Platform 