Friday 16th October, 7-10pm, 2020, OPEN Ealing Arts Centre
Performance Platform is a diverse artist led organisation focused on providing a regular live platform for performance art.
It provides a supportive inclusive environment and encourages intergenerational dialogue by working with emergent, mid career and established artists.
It doesn’t impose curatorial themes on artists, it sees its role as facilitating and supporting artists to share their work and to develop new audiences for that work.
Performance Platform was established during the pandemic. It offered the first Covid secure performance art events in London. Performance Platform is now programming regular events to support cultural recovery and to encourage wider audience engagement.
HELEN DAVISON
Helen Davison’s practice occupies the moments where communication fails. They use the palpability of the voice, the resonances of the body, and actions which respond to trace histories held within objects and spaces to find moments of connection outside of their self. By embracing process rather than outcomes or images they yield to chaos and entanglement, reaching towards cathartic transformation and seeking agency in otherness.
Helen has presented work nationally and internationally including: LATITUDES festival (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia); Parlour Geometrique, Chiswick House (London, UK; Middlesbrough Art Weekender (Middlesbrough, UK); ‘’till Time is Through, ]Performance s p a c e[ (Folkestone, UK); Revolve Festival, Uppsala Konstmuseum (Uppsala, Sweden) and has been commissioned to write text responses to live performance works for MEANDER, PAErsche, Köln, Germany, (re)collecting (f)ears, Selina Bonelli and Salvage Festival, ]Performance Space[ and Writing Bodies, Tentacular Magazine.
Helen is founding member of SITE (2018 – present): an initiative inviting performance artists to collaborate on site specific performances and actions. They are also an independent curator having initiated Flowing Through Selves(2017 – present): a platform for LGBTQAI+ performance artists and (im)possible performances (2021): an Arts Council funded project and online exhibition.
Click here… for Helen’s Website
PIERCE STARRE & NICHOLAS BALL
‘TROUSERS’
Trousers first appeared, within recorded history, amongst the nomadic Steppe people of Western Europe. Evidence suggests that they were worn during this time by both women and men. The ancient Greeks ridiculed the wearing of trousers; considering their appearance to be feminine.
Throughout most of modern history, however, trousers were worn almost exclusively by men and patriarchal structures promoted males as the dominant partners within relationships.This was the case in the United States at the end of the 19th Century, when the idiom “Who wears the trousers?” appeared within common usage. This term was used as a means to describe a heterosexual relationship, in which a position of power and dominance, is held by a female, rather than by a male.
Patriarchy continues as a hierarchical structure, in which men are encouraged to be socially dominant; spewing repugnant ideals of misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.These ideals are utilised to violently dominate and oppress women, queer, trans and genderqueer individuals.
Trousers explores the lived experiences of a queer/genderqueer couple and the ways in which internalised and oppressive dominant social narratives manifest within the power dynamics of their relationship.
Pierce Starre (They/Them) is a live performance artist based in Liverpool. Their work predominantly explores their cultural experiences as a queer, working class, neurodivergent Child of Deaf Adults (CODA), within a broader social and political context. Their artworks provide the viewer with an opportunity to be immersed within an embodied experience, creating a platform for connection, reflection, and discussion.
Pierce participated in Live Art Development Agency’s DIY16: 2019 – Ania Bas & Amy Pennington: Performance for Shy people. Playwriting for dyslexics. They also received mentoring support from Ireland’s leading Performance Artist; Amanda Coogan. In January 2020 Pierce performed as part of the CO-CREATION LIVE FACTORY “Dissenting Bodies Marking Time” at Venice International Performance Art Week. Their recent performance, Reflection, was shared as part of Performistanbul’s Stay LIVE at Home project; the work has been added to the British Library collection. Pierce is also a recent recipient of an Arts Council award as part of the Arts Councils Covid-19 Emergency response fund.
Click here… to visit Pierce’s Website
Nicholas Ball is a Liverpool based multidisciplinary Artist and Art Psychotherapist with a practice rooted in Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic theory. His work often centres around early life experiences, trauma, attachment and the subconscious. Nicholas is part of a group of radical anti-oppressive therapists working towards personal, local and systemic change through an intersectional lens. Previous works have explored internalised dominant social narratives, such as patriarchy, toxic masculinity and cultural homophobia.
The artists have worked together previously through a 12 hour live streamed durational work titled (In)visible, which was commissioned by UnShut Festival 2020. The work explored what it means to be visible as a queer couple in a heteronormative world.
Photo Credits: Ian Whitford
Performance Platform 