Skip to main content

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF LEARNING | A Park Fête : picnic & performances

Thursday, 22 July '21   4pm – 8:30pm BST
Imperial War Museum Park, Lambeth Road, London, SE1 6HZ
Only 5 spaces left

Details

ID takes to the park to launch the International Festival of Learning with a picnic and free performances. Pack your sarnies and come join!

In the afternoon, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo presents TiLTING VERTICALITIES, an informal participatory performance which audiences are welcome to take part in and/or watch. After this there is a gathering in an orchard for the picnic, with a Beatmotion intervention by Akeim Toussaint Buck with June Yuen Ting and Alison Thomas. The evening concludes with a solo performance by Dinis Machado – a dance for a dress in the park.

a dance for a dress in the park | Dinis Machado
7.30-8.30pm

‘A dance for a dress in the Park is an attempt in motion to recover feminine absences in my body. What does it mean to be queer when you are alone, away from another’s gaze? What is queerness as a way to relate to oneself?

During the last year, while the world withdrew into isolation, I started spending long periods in the forest thinking, fantasizing about and experimenting with this dance. Spending time in the forest made me notice, and relate to, matter in transformation. The way the same matter assumes shapes as a tree, a bug, a mushroom, a bear or a berry. Also the way the berry becomes the bear when it is eaten, how the tree becomes a mushroom when occupied by the fungus, how the mushroom becomes part of my body when I eat it.

I feel how close our bodies are to becoming the tree and the mushroom, how matter re-configures itself. At the same time my mind is occupied with gender questions and things I was not expected to do, to feel, to wear, to become. Gender, like the forest, feels to me like a mutable constellation, where one thing can become another but can also decompose and rest in the space in between.

a dance for a dress in the park builds a fictional body searching for a relationship with a dress, while paradoxically dissolving in continuous metamorphoses. Impressions, flashes, vague memories, and emptied out narrative fragments. Moving through desire.’

Click here to read Dinis's biography

TiLTING VERTICALITIES | Margarita Zafrilla Olayo
Participatory performance
4pm – 6pm

TiLTING VERTICALITIES invites you to step inside and perform, encountering and exploring notions of equilibrium, trust and support. For those who want to take part actively, it involves a simple ‘score’, or instruction, which is to experiment with moving within a large loop of stretch fabric with another person. Held and supported by the fabric, it becomes about communicating through movement itself – how to stand, how to balance and how to play with structural tension, inclinations and orientations, moving and being moved in direct relation to each other and sharing ground. For those watching, the work offers sculptural and poignant images as the participants negotiate interdependence, cooperation, harmony, affect, change, anchoring and support.

Margarita Zafrilla Olayo and collaborators will guide participants in the score. No prior movement experience is necessary and people of all physicalities are warmly welcomed to join.

Click here to read Margarita's biography

Dinis Machado in A Dance for a Dress in the Forest, photo Dinis Machado

Instructions

We will be running this event at limited capacity. Advance booking is required, but you are welcome to arrive when you’d like from 4pm onwards. The picnic is a bring-your-own for safety reasons.

Details of the meeting point will be sent to you closer to the date.

The event is wheelchair accessible. A site map will be provided ahead of the event with more information on the paths and surfaces in use. If you would like to discuss any access requirements in advance, please contact us at info@independentdance.co.uk

Tickets

Cost

Event ticket

Location

Imperial War Museum Park
Lambeth Road
London
SE1 6HZ

Exact location of the meeting point will be sent to you closer to the date.

Amenities

  • Toilets