Live Art Commissions

30 March 2022
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An evening showcase of brand new performances by Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Harriet Middleton Baker, Lloyd Corporation, SERAFINE1369 and Sriwhana Spong on Wednesday 30 March, 6pm–late, at Studio Spaces in Wapping, East London.

In April 2020 as the pandemic took hold, we responded by creating a commissioning and development programme for six artists whose practices include live work.

As performance relies on social engagement and people coming together, we prioritised support for artists working in this field at a time when so many other projects, fees and residencies had been cancelled or postponed. We have since spent almost two years working closely together with the artists, developing the performances in response to the changing context of the pandemic and showing them safely.

The premiere of these performances was always intended as a live event whenever it was possible for audiences to gather in significant numbers and experience work together.

Roberts Institute of Art

Before: Compliment is a sound–based performance that challenges the idea that live performance involves seeing the performer’s body. Appau Jnr Boayke-Yiadom has invited a string trio from Apartment House to play an improvised musical arrangement. The musicians respond to the movement of the audience as they enter the room, creating a heightened relationship between audience and performers.

Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art

In GO, GO, GO BEYOND Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome conjures a collaborative space where audiences are invited to engage with ceramic figures in practices of reading and divination. The ceramic figures are influenced by the trump cards of the tarot deck and have been made in collaboration with artist Nissa Nishikawa.

The work has a new live sound score, using samples of the ceramics composed by Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, made in collaboration with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome. The costume, based on The Fool trump card, is designed by Jawara Alleyne, jewellery by Amy Rodriguez and light design by Charlie Hope.

Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art

Harriet Middleton Baker's work looks at the dynamics of leadership and control that are played out in performative displays of global power. In The Conference, the artist brings together four performers acting as delegates at an annual summit. A keynote speaker reads an opening address, while the delegates perform a duet concerned with leadership, surrender, emotion and connection.

The work is choreographed and performed by Lydia Buckler and Madison Capel-Bird, with actress and singer Siân Roseanna and cello by Gamaliel Rendle Traynor.

Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art

Lloyd Corporation’s New Normal asks to what extent genuine political dialogue is possible in our current times. Influenced by Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theatre, in which distinctions between actors and audience are blurred, the performance involves the duo staging situations that generate dialogue.

The work explores the rise in polarised public debate around the politics and ethics of social interaction and communication. New Normal references traditional spaces like Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and online social media, where clashing ideologies, ethical conflicts, (dis)information and conspiracies are scrutinised and contested.

New Normal is written and produced by Nicholas A. Newman and performed by Simon Anthony, Jacob Meadows, Macadie Amoroso and Johnny Mindlin.

Roberts Institute of Art

(unarticulated architectures of) AMBIVALENT LONGING is a dance by SERAFINE1369 performed with Stephanie McMann, with an original sound score by the artist’s frequent collaborator Josh Anio Grigg.

Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art

The Poem is a Temple by Sriwhana Spong re-enacts and vocalises sections from the twelfth-century Javanese poem the Bhomāntaka. This epic mythological tale is described by its unknown author as a caṇḍi (temple)—a temple which is built with language.

Developed in close collaboration with the Javanese dhalang (puppeteer) and throat singer, Ki Sujarwo Joko Prehatin, Sriwhana Spong and dhalang Aris Daryono perform fragments from the epic, exploring the shifting boundaries of bodies and spaces and the relationship between personal narratives and mythological figures.

Roberts Institute of Art

Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom

Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom works with sound, performance and multimedia installation. He lives and works in London.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome's practice involves dancing/voicing as political gestures. She is interested in creating work which shifts perspectives, crafting spaces of potential and choice, where care and consent, ritual and divination promote exploration and agency.

Harriet Middleton Baker

Harriet Middleton Baker is a performance and visual artist based in London.

Lloyd Corporation

Lloyd Corporation is a collaborative project between artists Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees. Their practice uses sculpture, installation, performance and text, often taking inspiration from informal and local economies. Processes typically involve close dialogue, site-specific research and collection of material culture from which their work takes shape.

SERAFINE1369

SERAFINE1369 was previously working under the name Last Yearz Interesting Negro (2016–2020) and is the artist, dancer and writer Jamila Johnson-Small.

Their practice is relational, cumulative and often collaborative. They frequently work with darkness, bass, dancing, text, video and sculptural objects to build atmospheric landscapes.

Sriwhana Spong

Sriwhana Spong is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, living in London. She works across different mediums, including sculpture, film and performance to create works where experiential knowledge, autobiography and fiction are entangled with systematically researched materials and forms that reflect their particular contexts and sources. Here, Spong draws on the writings of women mystics, to produce scripts of her body that document in various mediums the oscillations of distance and intimacy produced by her approach toward another — most recently, a rat nesting outside her window, a newly discovered species of snake, a painting by her grandfather I Gusti Made Rundu and a twelfth-century Javanese poem.

Credits

All photos by Anne Tetzlaff. © Anne Tetzlaff.

Harriet Middleton Baker, The Conference
at Site Gallery, Sheffield

Roberts Institute of Art

On Performance: SERAFINE1369 and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

Roberts Institute of Art

Live with Harriet Middleton Baker and Sriwhana Spong

Roberts Institute of Art

Live with Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Lloyd Corporation

Roberts Institute of Art