Whitstable Biennale Performance Curator Keira Greene met with artist Florence Peake to discuss Florence’s practice in situ at her studio. The conversation moved fluidly between Florence’s collaboration with dance artists and her relationship to scoring and improvisation. View a transcript of parts of the conversation, written by Keira, with the text annotated and drawn into by Florence.
Commissioned for Whitstable Biennale 2018, Prose Brut was a performance work by artist Jude Crilly made for Whitstable Harbour. It was composed of interwoven choreographies, a seagull swarm, and a site-specific sculpture in collaboration with artist Morgan Courtois.
Jude is joined in conversation by artist and Whitstable Biennale 2018 performance curator Keira Greene to discuss scores, choreography, the texts that inspired the piece and its title; and the joining of performers and audiences in public space. The interview includes extracts from the quadrophonic soundtrack made for the performance.
As a part of Whitstable Biennale 2018, on 10 June, between 4:17pm and 5:17pm The Creaking Breeze Trio performed their new composition Slack Fulcrum Twelfths (Green Vitriol) on The Street, a spit of shingle projecting into the sea at Whitstable. Here the trio are joined in conversation by Whitstable Biennale 2018 performance curator Keira Greene to discuss the composition, which was guided by a series of letters about an imaginary band described in Nathaniel Mackey’s ongoing experimental fiction project From A Broken Bottle Traces Of Perfume Still Emanate.
A New Career In A New Town (2019) is a creative writing manual, a diary and a selection of experimental texts that respond to the context of a new town being built on the banks of the Thames in North Kent.
On the afternoon of 4 August 2018, as part of a partnership between Whitstable Biennale and Contra Pop Festival, Dave Kane (double bass, Leeds), Alex Neilson (drums, Glasgow), Chris Sharkey (electric guitar, Leeds) and Alex Ward (clarinet/electric guitar, London) performed as an improvisational quartet for the first time. Their 45-minute set took place in a marquee on Ramsgate beach in front of a captivated audience of around 250 people.
Listen to the set here, and read a transcript of the group interview conducted immediately after the performance by Adam Coney, an improvisational guitarist and music scholar based in Ramsgate.
This video documents Conference (After Attar), a multi-channel performance which premiered at Whitstable Biennale 2018. Drawing from Attar’s medieval poem The Conference Of The Birds, Caroline Bergvall leads a conversation between six conversants, who each share their thoughts on journeys they’ve engineered with their work, and the ways they each experience how languages and species move across places and through time. As the conversation progresses, voice frequencies and other elements start to affect it asking other forms of listening from the audience. (7m 48s)
Read about the 2018 Whitstable Biennale, Swimming Home.
This video, shot by Reynir Hutber, documents Leslie Deere’s performance Modern Conjuring for Amateurs, which takes its title from the book by J.C. Cannell, a popular guide to learning tricks, conjuring and ventriloquism. Deere’s performance combined her performing arts dance background with her sonic arts training, as she created a shared experience, conjuring up sound and visuals with gesture.
This video documents Hear What You Eat, a very special kind of symposium/dinner party held for Whitstable Biennale 2016 by musician Matthew Herbert and chef Rosie Sykes. (50m23s)
This video, filmed by Reynir Hutber, documents Richard Layzell’s performance Softly Softly, an elemental journey exploring suspension, elasticity, anthropomorphism and flight.Taking place in a then undisclosed location in Whitstable, it invited participants to uncover the universal in the everyday, the endangered in the familiar, function and form, expectation and humility, success and failure, tension and release, pathos and play. (23m31s)
This video documents The iScreamers, the performance which opened Whitstable Biennale 2016: a consideration of ‘the cool confection’ in song and dance. Artist Marcia Farquhar draws on the dark side of ice cream’s history in a semi-autobiographical, psycho-geographical, socio-economical lecture accompanied by action painting and live music. (45m18s)
This video, shot by Bernard G Mills, documents Vast as the Dark of Night and as the Light of Day, a performance for Whitstable Biennale 2014 by Ben Judd. The work was informed by his research into collectivity and ritual in Whitstable, such as the Blessing of the Waters, an annual thanksgiving traditionally associated with St James, patron saint of oystermen. (35m14s)
