Thursday 28 October 2010

Clip of "Her Chambre Bleue", Performed at The Hospital Club









A performance of two discrete but simultaneous parts by Ilona Dorota Sagar with text and spoken word by me, whic you can see in full here over on TextBin. Dancers dressed in blue moved around the space (a bar and socialising space in a relatively exclusive members club in Covent Garden, London) blocking people's paths, dividing the crowd, slipping between and under people, and splaying themselves along the walls, bar and carpet; at the same time four actors dressed anonymously approached people as if they were acquainted, and eagerly told them a strange tale (which was my contribution to the performance) about the dancers, the room they were in, and how, in some way, its sagging velour walls and velvet ropes were all lit in the critical blue light of the Salons of old, of the bright and refined conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, its cashmere and marble fittings, and its sparkling wits.
The video is a short snippet (all that my camera's CF card could hold) of one moment of the performance when the dancers were weaving their way through the crowd, after just having just divided the room in two. The actor, whose conversation piece I caught a second of in the film, started talking to a person behind me just as this was going on.

Monday 11 October 2010

Graceful Gets Martyred

Episode III.
Following encounters with Incubus & Succubus, Graceful learns to find ecstasy in his own pain. Angelic guardians and devilish Corbels assist him in his journey to the stake.

Corbels to the right and left, and Guardians (actually a rather effete Neptune, and a very well proportioned Demeter) in the centre.

Saturday 2 October 2010

Digital Ceramics


Madam will be teaching two courses of Digital Ceramics at the AA this coming academic year, where students will embark on a rather messy path of experimentation in plaster, clay and glazes.


Term 1 will be pushing the limits of what can be done working with press and 1-part moulds, with the following term breaking out into objects more fully three dimensional, and using 2, 3 or more part moulds.


After designing in the computer, we will have free access to the school's smaller cnc milling suite, and will test what the limits and idiosyncracies of the machine can bring to the clay-forming process.


Before the start of the course, we ran through a few tests with these two Madam tile-types.



Restraining ourselves to an unusually monochrome sheen, so that we could test the fundamental procedure from milling machine to kiln, the series that we produced came out looking rather techno-hokey.





So there will be a good 6 months period during which the aa will be seeing lots of painted clay, tiles and proliferating ceramic forms and architectural elements, as well as Marco and I hanging around quite a bit as assistants to Diploma 9.