Performance Fatta in Casa - Homemade Performance

Up to now, three artists have brought a piece of their life and work to our home. They all chose to create their short piece based on something from their home, which was not in any planned, but I found it worked great with the concept of a homemade performance.
Many many thanks to all artists, to a great audience always, also surprisingly coming in the right numbers. Somehow, things work great at home!
Home sweet home

June 15th
Alessandra Fabbri 
Gallus Domesticus

Photo di Denise Ania


July 6th
Alessandro Tagliati
Equilibri Temporanei

Photo di Matteo Migliazzi


August 31st
Zoe Tsavdarides
Hosts and Guests

A new performance

Last Thursday, 25th of July, I had the pleasure of creating a one-off performance for body, guitar and voice (project by Alessandra Fabbri) with Alessandra Fabbri and Giacomo Marighelli. At Meridiana, Lido di Spina.
Got to recite in Bulgarian as well (super rare) and really enjoyed collaborating with the artists! Special thanks to the organiser, Alessandra Zerbinati, and for the photos to Daniele Mantovani.

Homemade performance. Performance fatta in Casa

Recently having moved to a beautiful new apartment in the centre of Ferrara with a spacious living room, that's currently a very flexible space given the very little, essential furniture we have. What's the best way to use it? Well, performance of course!

Here's more details, follow us on facebook.

--Scroll down for English textUn piccolo festival di performance presentate nel salotto di casa. Per un breve tempo. Per un piccolo pubblico.Invitiamo autori di live performance interessati a sviluppare nuove idee a contattarci all'indirizzo:performancefattaincasa@gmail.comLe performance saranno presentate di sabato pomeriggio. Durata: massimo 15 minutiPubblico: massimo 15 persone
A small festival of homemade performances, presented in the living room. For a brief period of time. For a small audience.We invite artists who work with live performance, interested to develop new ideas to contact us on:performanceincasa@gmail.comThe performances will be presented on Saturdays in the afternoon.Duration: 15 mins maxAudience: 15 people max

The Institute of Kentish Town

Kentish Town Story Tellers

(an audio archive of stories created by visitors)

Tuesday 14^th of December, 13:00-17:00

Concept/Development: Milka Panayotova

Marketing/Design: Blanca Garay and Inês Silva

Visitors are invited to write a short story of three things or places they like about Kentish Town and share why they have an impact on them. Their stories get recited by other visitors so that each participant gets to write their own story and read somebody else's for the voice recording. An audio archive of short stories about Kentish Town is created, which will be used for a sound installation within the exhibition space for the duration of the show.

Come and tell us your story!


For more info click here.

Hemline at Somerset House

Recently I danced for a video that was to become part of an interactive installation  at the Somerset House, produced by Jason Bruges Studio (London). The work took inspiration from Loie Fuller and her skirt dances, so I enjoyed moving in a butterfly costume for a day. 
Apart from the fun, the new experience and all the package that comes with new collaborations and meeting new people, I find the piece of subtle elegance and a careful study of light and space. 
You can see it at the Somerset House by the 12th of December.

Top Secret

Recently I contacted the creators of You Me Bum Bum Train and have volunteered to participate in creating the project that is to be presented throughout July. I am currently helping out with building sets and will be one of the two hundred performers. It is fun to be involved in a project of this size, so I am looking forward to the final results (all tickets have been sold already by the Barbican).
Till then I can say no more, it's top secret.

Plans for June

As June is getting nearer, it was important to make sure I have a space for the showing outside college. Various places I checked out have already been booked, while another had some strange requirements, including the fact that my audience had to take their shoes off. Also, most places are quite expensive, so the best option was to hire a place with a group of people, which not only has the advantage of sharing costs, but also presenting different work within one space, thus bringing in more audience.

A few of us went to check out the Rag Factory in Brick Lane, where I had performed a few months ago. It seems we have just managed to book two spaces for a day at the end of June. 

I will present What you see is what you get, taking advantage of the fact that this piece requires a closed space. The idea I dropped was presenting 'Organic Self' in a park, as the weather is not looking good and I don't want to take risks at this point. I wouldn't want to freeze outside and put another performer through the suffering, along with all the participants involved!

Back to Weighting Time

I was so absorbed by our first written assignment over Christmas that I missed posting some documentation of The Weighting Frame, which was a big group  project we presented at the theatre in Wimbledon College of Art right before breaking for winter holidays.

Now that I have started on planning my show for the Interim festival in the second half of April, which will take place at the theatre, I looked at the theatre plan for measurments and came across some images.

Almost all of us were performing or working on technical matters so we were unable to actually see the performance, but I think it was presented very professionally and was indeed a very useful and enjoyable experience (apart from painting white panels out in the snow!) 

This is the result of my personal development of the 'Insignificance' room:

Some  great pictures by Dun Yu of the whole set:

New Collaborations Opening Up

Some days ago I got contacted by a colleague and friend of mine, Filipe Canha, who was directing a show and was in need of a second performer. I had already accidentaly read an article on the project in question the previous day, the concept of which involved our senses besides seeing, so although a coincidence it turned out a great opportunity of collaboration for me both as a performer and concept creator researching on ways of (non)seeing.

Useless/Useful participatory fashion performance and exhibition is an ongoing project that involves both graduates and current students from UAL as well as other professionals. Episode one, which was presented yesterday at the Rag Factory in Brick Lane, was, as the name suggests, very much about fashion and audiences' participation. The costumes, created by Christina Tso, looked at the touch and hear aspect of fashion, rather than solely rely on the visual effect. The costume I performed in had sound sensors attached to it and therefore sounds were generated according to body movement. Even though the rigid parts of the costume along with its cables and little gadgets did restrict the fluidity of movement, it allowed me to perform a consistent and yet simple choreography that exhibited the garment and at the same time brought it to life. Dancer Marta Masiero wore an unsusual black tutu that unveiled thousands of tiny blue lights that somehow resembled colourful sea corals that moving under water.

Along with the performance director, sound technician, set designer, make up artist, graphic designer, film maker, cameramen, photographers,  and many more who were there for help and support it was possible to put up a great piece of work in a matter of weeks. I was not there from the very beginning, but working all day with the same people on the same thing makes you familiar with it all in no time. 

The end part of the performance was about audience. It aimed at showing spectators the costumes, letting them interact with the garments' qualities and possibilities. As we had two performances one after the other it was good to see how they changed according to the number of audeince. The sencond one proved to be the best and we even got a spectator who got so interested in exploring the costumes that by the end of the show she was believed to be one of the performers. Indeed she was, as  we all merged together to bring the piece to an end. The whole project was documented step by step, so I will update with links to material from the actual show.

I really enjoyed working on the project and got to meet lots of great people. I am looking forward to future collaborations and whatever future results may bring, I must say that this time the timing was perfect, given the performance I am presenting next Tuesday explores clothing and fashion in a way very close to the themes of senses and audience participation that Useless/Useful is working on. 

Physical Work

This week some of us spent a day at the wood workshop to construct some furniture for the rooms of the three hour piece we are doing on the 18th. It was indeed a very productive session and I think we did a great job.


Although I studied and practised Fine Art for so many years, at some point I realised it didn't fit my personality and was merely a tool for my work, rather than a final product that communicates my ideas. But what I most miss from painting and sculpture is the manuality that there is to it. Getting into theatre-dance and performance allows me to work within spaces, in different aspects, and although I do a lot of physical exercise for dance, I always miss the physical work that's involved in crafting. 


Last weekend I visited the Open Studios Art Show at Wimbledon: two warehouses turned into artis's studios, more than a hundred painters, sculptors and ceramicist.  It was nice to see so many artists together, exhibiting their work in their tiny studios that had turned into small galleries for the event. In a way, I wished I was like one of those artists, with my little studio, painting away for as long as i wish. But I also perfectly know that this just doesn't suit me, so I figured out that what I miss is the manuality of making something, even if the product is not the piece that would communicate with the audience.


So what better way to fix this dilemma by making my own props? 


We had fun and obtained good results. Can't wait till next time! (I don't mean 'Come to me if you need some fixtures and fittings')

Time Piece

Here is the video of the performance we created in occasion of David Gale's workshop in October.


You can find further info on the workshop here and here.

Show and Go

Our brief shows last Wednesday with David Gale went quite well. It was a great challenge to set up everything in a couple of hours, with the anxiety of taking it all down on time to return all the equipment we had borrowed.

I think all pieces had more or less the same duration, about five minutes. It's amazing how different all four performances were, and yet David really found that we had all worked very well as a team, and that all pieces had something in common.

What we could not have and so did not make use of is lighting. I am sure that our pieces would have been better with a more careful choice of lighting, but in that case we did not have the equipment required, as we were not using the theatre space and also had too little time to try things out. That of course made it easier to make up some creative, low cost techniques. I was happy to use the overhead projector once more, a great device that can be transformed into a very versatile light source. I had the pleasure of learning how to use those with  theatre director and visual artist Fabrizio Crisafulli, whose innovative work is   appreciated both in Italy and worldwide.

Another technical question in our piece was the video, and as in every performance, things started going wrong minutes before the presentation. But this is a must in theatre, so I guess it brings good luck. It all went smoothly in the end. David's remark about blindness regarding my part of the video (the moving images seen from a train window) reminded me of a patient described in Oliver Sacks' 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat'. A great book by the renowed neurologyst I read some years ago, it is a collection of some amazing short stories that deal with the complexity of our perceptions. The patient I recalled is Ingrid (and I remember the name because this is what I called my bicycle at the time), whose brain perceived images as frames, and although her eye sight was not damaged, she was unable to see continuous, moving images, but rather scattered fragments, like thousands of photograhs recording a singular movement.

Our performances were all recorded, and as soon as I get the chance to edit the videos I will put them up.

A One Week Project

Last Wednesday we had a workshop with Dave Gale in the filming studio space, and after a brief talk we were aked to individually write three different parts of three different stories. It was something I hadn't done before, but it was a challenge. I had two hours to create a beginning, a middle and an end for three different stories.

Mr. Gale talked about Jean Luc Goddard's idea of cinema: according to him, all stories had to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. I accidentaly saw a short film by Goddard the other day, and noticed that although the story was very simple and it didn't really lead anywhere, it was broken roughly into three parts. 

Before lunchtime we were split into groups by a random draw of names (which actually appeared  to be the most confusing part of the whole meeting) and we were asked to create a small play for next Wednesday (that is the day after tomorrow).

I happened to be working with Ilka and Marouso, and we have a beginning, a middle and an end. Any combination of the three could have come up (for example, two middles and an end, or a beginning and two ends). Our stories somehow conneceted, and although we seem to have quite a cinematic feeling for the whole thing, we hope to make a good multimedia performance.

We've been working on some video pieces and have the final storyboard for the whole performance. 

This is my middle of the story, it's about two men playing cards on a train. It took me the least time to construct and it's quite senseless. Well, it's only part of the story... If put in the right context it will work!

So happy together!

Performance is also about working as a team, and that is what we had been doing for the last two weeks, in collaboration with Douglas (our course leader). He had decided to involve us in his project for the Gradute School Festival, and that was really a great 'beginning of the year' opportunity for us to get to know each other better and work together.

As we all come form different backgorunds it has been interesting to see how everyone approaches a certain issue, be it a cenceptual or a techinical one. I feel that communication between us has become more effective, considering that we are a very international group, where a lot of languages mingle together, which is a great thing, but it may get in the way when one is trying to make a statement. I guess throughout this petite experience we have developed our unique language, after all the final piece came out quite well, considering the amount of time we had for preparation, the technical devices available, and the space we share with a lot of colleagues, who had other projects to work on. 

Of course we have had our moments of misunderstanding, disagreement and simply ignoring a situation when it all got too much. But at the end of the day you feel closer to someone if you had the courage to tell them off about something. We all know that when the clock is ticking and things need to be done one has to simply act.

The theme for the piece, which was mainly a video projection on the outside of the MA building of our college, with some shadow theatre play projected from teh inside, was climate change. That seems to be currently a very popular theme, however we believe that despite its exagerrated use we managed to put together some ideas that went beyond the main theme and so the piece was accessible to a wide audience. 

So thank you VLPs for the wonderful experience, and looking forward to working with you again... that shouldn't be long, so on second thought, let's concentrate on our projects for now!