Friday 29th of March
19.00 – approximately 22.00
BASICTENSION by Last Yearz Interesting Negro / Jamila Johnson-Small
BALANCE by Rowdy SS
After talk with the artists about their work and the residency
Free admission, no booking required

the double solo mirror practice has been developed following a desire to create spaces with structured support for open ended processes without conditioning the artistic outcome.
It is a curatorial concept, as well as a toolbox, facilitating new formats for artistic exchange and reflection in relation to choreographic solo practices. The project takes place as a series of double residencies where one invited solo artist is asked to invite another solo artist to join the residency.
The residency is focussed on working with the toolbox, a set of instructions proposing ways in which to share, contaminate, reflect, surprise or challenge each others practices. A process allowing for an experimental environment that might not lead up to anything ”successful” in a conventional sense, but brings value to the work of reflexion itself.
The period ends with public performances of both artists solos followed by a discussion about the process.
For 2019 we have invited the artists Rani Nair, Jamila Johnson-Small/Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Sonja Jokiniemi.
This is our first event in a series of three, and presents the work of the artists Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Rowdy SS from London.

Photo: Christa Holka
BASICTENSION by Last Yearz Interesting Negro
Dances between control and abandon, a meditation on, and exit from, the cannon of ‘contemporary’ dance in an age of collapse, a search for refuge in a climate of total exposure.
Working with fragments of commissioned music and shattered injunctions for movement gathered from disparate observers, and set within ruins and blackness, the work embodies deep pessimism about existence in the current order whilst also searching for a way through and out.
“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.“
BALANCE by Rowdy SS
A solo dance/sound/visual improvisation, an on going work in research of uses of space; How are we using space? How is space using us?
Balance is Rowdy SS initiating live happenings, performance and installations as interjections to tour, entangle and/or simplify how we are using and have used spaces, the ‘things’ that do and do not exist in said spaces, the other ways, new, ways we can use ourselves, technologies and our physicality to communicate, in and outside of these/those spaces.
“The intention behind these happenings; use expected and unexpected spaces for sharing, exploring and furthering conversations that give life to new and old concepts, processes, traditions and techniques. Doing more with the constant dualities, healing, distruction, connections/disconnections, the ways of ‘being’ in and during the performance and allowing for the unearthing of the somewhat conditioned approaches to sharing/expressing ourselves to each other and with one another…”
Biographies
Last Yearz Interesting Negro is the performance project of London based artist and dancer, Jamila Johnson-Small. Regular collaborators include Phoebe Collings-James, Alexandrina Hemsley (Project O), Fernanda Munoz-Newsome and Shelley Parker.
Last Yearz Interesting Negro makes shows, choreographies that are stage/dreamspace/battleground, atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Compositions of small dances, sculpture, electronic music, poems, video, texture and a public. The work is always a kind of world building that deals in intensities and harnesses these forces to open up or to close spaces, to understand, expose, complicate or sidestep covert structures that seek to organise our bodies and our living. Their relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice gathers and transmits information through working in various constellations under different names, with different artists and in different roles to build spaces for dancing, performance, listening and conversation, spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable. All of their work is informed by their dance practice that acts as a tool for divination, decoding messages from an oracular body that are read on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic levels. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement.
Rowdy SS is a London born and based artist. Often working at the intersection of sound/music, dance/movement and live performance alongside making videos; arriving at works that have delved into love, explored the societal implications of being, first a black boy then man and mined life to share the vision of said life. Current works includes sound/music compositions, video, dance and movement as tools for performance to create other spaces, dream/meditative states, exploring repetition and surprise movement, and counter movement. variations of a theme, motifs. moments of definition defined by the previous, reliant or relating to predecession and that, which follows. Rowdy was previously a member of Atari Teenage Riot, a Berlin based noise band and has worked closely with numerous artists and makers such as legendary dub creator Lee Scratch Perry, Ron Arad, musicians Eska, Zero 7, Matthew Herbert, acid house pioneer Adamski and has put on successful club nights ‘SOAP’ a no photos allowed subversive bass heavy alt trap/post-grime night space and ‘SONIC’ a club night space of inter-active sound/performance art and DJin at VFD, London. Current collaborations include works with dancer/choreographer/artist Jamila Johnson-Small (48hours, Fury1), sound compositions/performances for artist Rebecca Bellantoni (Spiral, DHQ Niquita) and a performance work with Alex Mirutiziu. http://www.rowdy-ss.com