LIVE WORKS
The Ways, the Fortune, the Fall (2024)
A work made in winter for the spring, listening in the darkness to the subterranean murmurs of things about to emerge that can't yet be seen or touched. They say that it's always darkest before the dawn.
CREDITS: concept/choreography SERAFINE1369 / performance Steph McMann, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, SERAFINE1369 / sound Josh Anio Grigg / light Jackie Shemesh / latex costume design AGF HYDRA / production Nancy May Roberts (Metal & Water Production)
Commissioned by Experimentica 2024
IV (2023)
is a system of loose dancing and tight structure; a choreographic machine; a meditative play between instinctive rhythms and the counting of time.
It is a work about finding space and trying to be free.
This is a relational practice, one that does not presume, where we work to disentangle from and unsettle our assumptions, and also yours. Here, we encounter one another and ourselves.
CREDITS: concept, choreography, direction, costume SERAFINE1369 / performance Steph McMann, Darcy Wallace, Natifah White & SERAFINE1369 / sound design Josh Anio Grigg / light design Josh Anio Grigg & SERAFINE1369 / production support Nancy May Roberts / rehearsal support Iris Chan, Chisato Shemesh / sound system Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.)
Commissioned by The Yard Theatre. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Images (left) by Camilla Greenwell & (below) Mariana Machado
PRESENTATIONS: E-WERK Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, May 2024 / The Place, London, April 2024 / Zona&, Timisoara, December 2023 / Beursschouwberg, Brussels, September 2023 / The Yard Theatre, London, April 2023
CREDITS: concept, choreography SERAFINE1369 / performance SERAFINE1369 & Steph McMann / sound design Josh Anio Grigg / costume SERAFINE1369 / text SERAFINE1369 / commissioned by Robert’s Institute of Art / images Anne Tetzlaff CONDITIONS: Flexible / Contact for rider PERFORMANCES: Punk & Judy, Margate, August 2023 / the long night, River Rooms, Somerset House, London, October 2022 / Roberts Institute of the Art evening of performances, March 2022
(unarticulated architectures of) AMBIVALENT LONGING (2022)
When we speak I feel myself, Opening
(2022)
CREDITS:
concept, choreography, direction SERAFINE1369
performance SERAFINE1369 & Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
sound design Josh Anio Grigg
light design Jackie Shemesh
costume & latex artefacts AGF HYDRA
text SERAFINE1369
commissioned by Sadlers Wells and Van Cleef & Arples for Dance Reflections 2022
image Katarzyna Perlak
CONDITIONS:
Stage, proscenium
Contact for rider.
PERFORMANCES:
Premiere, Lilian Baylis Sadlers Wells, March 2022
I I I
(something flat, something cosmic, something endless)
(2021)
A work made in a moment when all that was there was this body, its dreams and nightmares and cycles and needs, sensations and wanting. I went mining. I haunt this work. I is a collection of already historical circumstances, remembered and un-remembered. I is a crowd. I is a trick of the light.
A durational performance inducing a state of expansiveness and detachment from the pressure to create - or be formed by - meaning through conventional narrative arcs. Its duration witnesses / tracks the rhythmic cycles, the peaks and troughs of an endocrine system beyond the arc of climax. The work situates a research and obsession with the unit of ‘one minute’ - asking whether we can transform the stuff of time or whether it transforms us. Considering the invention of colonial time and agency, the ways we inhabit its units of fixed endless measurement, even as this Time slips out of relation to the celestial bodies that have long been its anchor and justification.
Working with live and recorded text written over the last year from dreams and heartache and reflection - a wasteland of feeling - I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) is a wide and flat landscape as score for performance. A reading, a listening, a movement.
CREDITS:
concept, choreography, performance SERAFINE1369
sound design Josh Anio Grigg
text SERAFINE1369
commissioned by Liverpool Biennial (2020/21)
image Katarzyna Perlak
CONDITIONS:
Outdoor space (ideally), stacked sound system at least 2m tall, 3 person team
Contact for rider.
PERFORMANCES:
Shedhalle, Zurich, June 2014
HKW, Berlin, July 2023
IMMATERIAL, Mexico City, February 2023
ARS 22, Kiasma, Helsinki, June 2022
Montag Modus, Radialsystem, Berlin, August 2021
The Bluecoat, Liverpool, June 2021
Heavy handed, we crush the moment
(2019)
Somewhere between a dreamscape, a meditation, a nightmare and a nightclub. A choreographic space that is both social and meditative, reflective and relational. A space that allows space for varying relationships to linear time and coherence. A climate of intensities, alienation and sensation. A sonic environment that facilitates shifting states of dancing and being.
Interested in the sensory impact of the live encounter for performers and audience, Heavy handed, we crush the moment is an invitation to reflect on boundaries, intimacy, spectacle and the inevitability of movement; a gathering of energies – both held and unravelling – formed between the works of different artists and a public.
CREDITS:
concept, choreography Last Yearz Interesting Negro
performance Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
rock sculptures/set design Studio Augmenta
hanging structure & costume AGF HYDRA
light design Jackie Shemesh
sound design Josh Anio Grigg
music +TETRA+, ABENÇOADA, Rebecca Bellantoni, Phoebe Collings-James, Andrew Kerton & Hannah Holland, David Panos, Verity Susman
text/lyrics Last Yearz Interesting Negro
commissioned by the barbican, london, 2019 featuring guest performances from keyon gaskin and antonija livingstone&kizis, dj sets from elijah* and planningtorock
image Katarzyna Perlak (above) Maurizia Martorana (left)
FEATURES:
Interview with curator Lotte Johnson
CONDITIONS:
Live load suspension from ceiling, full blackout, transportation and access for 3 x large sculptures requiring 4-persons to lift, specialist sound system, team of 4 plus 2 guest artists (and collaborators)
Contact for rider.
BASICTENSION (2017 - ongoing)
CREDITS:
Performers vary. Cast has included (at different times) Matthew Woodcock (Kaunas, 2020) / Kitty Fedorec, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Eve Stainton, Alice Tatge (London, 2018) / Stephanie McMann & Jamila Johnson-Small (2017, 2018, 2020)
Concept and choreography: Last Yearz Interesting Negro
Voice: Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Stephanie McMann
Sound Design: Josh Anio Grigg
Music: Josh Anio Grigg, Junior XL (Shelley Parker, versions 2017 - 2022)
Text edited from writing by: Rachel Baker, Jonathan Burrows, Rosalie Doubal, Jane Frances Dunlop, Josh Anio Grigg, Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson-Small, Gillie Kleiman, Stephanie McMann, Sara Sassenelli
Image: Ayka Lux, 2018 (right) Katarzyna Perlak, 2020 (left)
PERFORMANCES:
Loki, London (2024) / Maximillian William Gallery, London (2024) / Mosaic Rooms, London (2023) / Buffalo, MACRO, Rome (2021) / In Vitrum, Kaunas (2020) / Vooruit, Ghent (2020) / CCA, Paris (2020) / ICA Lower Gallery, London (2018) / Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018) / ICA Theatre, London, 2017 / GUSH, London (2017)
FEATURES:
Featured on The Wire
BASICTENSION is a collection of dances, writing, text and music forming a series of studies resonating in the tensions between social, professional, psychic, spiritual, physiological, healing and technological practices and processes. A play of multiple textures between multiple realities, shifting boundaries between what is allowed inside and what is let out; techno-meditations on states of being and coping with being and bodies and other people and all that mad energy. That is, some music, some words, some dancing to encourage, to ignore, to suggest, to convince, to seduce, to say a daily prayer that is a manifesto that is a fuck you that is whatever it needs to be.
a love letter/a break up note to Contemporary Dance
I started this project wanting to make meditation tapes to calm my rampant alienation and to slow my racing thoughts but what does calm look like when you embody countless contradictions, conflicts and traumas and language can’t stretch to hold you and it was never your language anyway and you look out at the city and it is like your beating heart, complicated, congested and broken. Some things need to break and I don’t want space or distance but to assume my hybrid form right here. I want to break this space open. I want to be broken open, like Leeloo in The Fifth Element.
CONDITIONS:
A flexible performance that can happen in any space for any duration and be performed by anyone. Only tech that is 100% necessary is a decent sound system.
i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere
(2017)
“in my hole in the basement, there are exactly 1,369 lights”
body as oracle, a trance, a rhythmic interface, an atmosphere, a landscape with the texture of my current mental state. a dance informed by everything and everyone i have ever encountered, seen, heard, felt, been beside that has become part of me, as i try to identify my own voice. and then see if i can stand it. nothing ever really goes away.
a choreography that prioritises density over going anywhere, noise over silence, now over yesterday and pleasure over doing it right.
a meditation on osmosis and internalisation, the responsibilities of blackness and queerness, the pressure to ‘take space’, the feeling of being possessed by other people’s fantasies and search for my own.
CREDITS:
CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY, DIRECTION, PERFORMANCE, TEXT: Last Yearz Interesting Negro / Jamila Johnson-Small
SOUND AND TECHNICAL DESIGN: Josh Anio Grigg
LIGHT DESIGN: Jackie Shemesh
MUSIC: Phoebe Collings-James, Josh Anio Grigg, Junior XL, Nkisi, Shelley Parker
VIDEO: Last Yearz Interesting Negro in collaboration with David Panos
SCULPTURE: Joey Addison
COMMISSION: Fierce Festival and the Marlborough
FUNDING: supported with funds from Arts Council England Grants for the Arts
IMAGE: Katarzyna Perlak and Carlos Jimenez (above left, above right) New Kids On The Block (above central)
PERFORMANCES:
Queer Performance Camp, La Chapelle, Montreal (2020) / Sophiensaele, Berlin (2020) / Stratford Circus Arts Centre, London (2019) / New Queers On The Block, Folkestone (2019) / kaaistudios, Performatik, Brussel (2019) / Nuit Blanche, Théâtre de la Ville, Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris (2018) / Baltic Triennial, Talinn (2018) / Take Me Somewhere, Tramway, Glasgow (2018) / Mousonturm, Frankfurt (2018) / Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018) / Kanneltalo, Baltic Circle, Helsinki (2017) / XS Festival, Kutomo, Turku (2017) / mac, Fierce festival, Birmingham (PREMIERE 2017)
CONDITIONS:
75 minute long work for the stage. Black box theatre setup required. Team of three travelling.
Contact for rider.