Sunday 1 March | 1-9pm | Toynbee Studios, East London | £30/20/18 | BUY TICKETS
Slow Sunday is a day-long festival of performance showcasing artists working within and across multiple disciplines including performance art, theatre, visual art, cabaret, dance, drag and participatory performance.
The aim of Slow Sunday is to provide artists from all stages of their career a space to take risks and try something new in front of a friendly and supportive audience.
More info on Slow Sunday event | Slow Sunday Timetable (pdf)
PROGRAMME
1-7pm | Fire Room
Rubiane Maia: At Times we Need to Come Back Home
The notion of resilience has always been an important concept in my artistic practice. In this perspective, I have used memory as an investigative device that involves remembering and reframing the numerous traumas and scars inherited by colonialism, which, generation after generation, are perpetuating themselves through naturalisation, silence and shame.
This performance is part of this trajectory, and through it I affirm the vital importance of returning – destroying, rebuilding, dismantling the house, the structure. With house, I don’t mean simply the buildings where we live, but the past, and the History that defines our place in the world.
How can we determine what should remain and what should be discarded? We cannot. However, any action in this direction is a exercise of demolition to escape suffocation.
1-3pm | Studio 3
Joseph Funnel: Brown paintings for renaissance masters
Paint this picture. you watching me watch myself for your contemplation, let me be at your service, I live to serve. she’s always serving. SERVE henny. ‘Brown paintings for renaissance masters’ considers the political economics of representation, and the how black and queer subjectivities are appropriated to generate cultural capital.
Uncomfortable tableaus from forgotten art history. pathos in the absence of grandeur. These bodies are still your luxury fetish, like a little boy accessory in an old master portrait. Caress the paper with some brown and I’ll watch. A sensual movement score questions how value, authenticity and privilege are produced in the shared practice of image construction, asking how marginalized bodies might claim agency in spaces of historic negation.
1:30-4:30pm | Theatre
Léann Herlihy: STUNTMAN (2020)
A motorbike differs greatly from a car. It carries a sole individual, disregards all forms of protection and must be straddled to ride. The greatest chunk of my time with the motorbike was spent straddling it; pressing my thighs down with as much force as they would allow; my inner legs speckled with bruising.
Even in its most banal description, the phallic undertones cannot be overlooked. Enclosed within four walls, I would straddle the motorbike as it faced a dead-end ramp. Without turning the key in the ignition, the narrative was clear; if I drive, I crash.
Once the engine was running, a deeper understanding of the motorbikes masculine undertones became present; the sweet purr; the rattling roar; the engine cuts; the spectre remains. Fatal fumes refuse to disperse, sight becomes hazed and bodies form a homogenous whole.
Toxic masculinity penetrates. Both before and after this action, I was faced with a haunting conundrum: why did I want to emulate toxic masculinity? It was not until recently when a friend gifted me with a text by Del LaGrace Volcano that I felt some form of clarity, even if only fleetingly.
“The feeling of comfort and relief I experienced when being perceived as male came as quite a shock to me because I was raised to believe in the power and glory of womanhood. There are some who accuse me of betraying “womanity” by inhabiting what looks and sounds like a male body. BOLLOCKS to that I say! I’m a Gender Terrorist, a walking, talking bomb in The Boys Club. Tick Tock. Tick Tock.” (Del LaGrace Volcano)
This work is presented in collaboration with ]performance s p a c e [
2-4pm | Court Room
Vivian Chinasa Ezugha: Performing DNA
Carrot. Ginger. Apple. Beetroot. Turmeric. Kale. Spinach. Butternut squash. Fennel. Grapefruit. Orange. Lemon. Cucumber. Blueberry. Raspberry. Pineapple. Water. Coriander.
I have to cleanse
I have to run
I have to medicate
I have to get through this day
2-4pm | Steve Whitson Room
Sung Im Her & Husk Husk: Time in Between Time
In modern society, each day is partitioned rather strictly into different segments, each of which comes with its own behavioural script defining ‘when to do what how’: e.g. (how to) wake up, (how to) eat, (how to) go to work, (who to) come home again, (how to) relax, (how to) go to bed, etc.
The influence of these scripts, however, goes far beyond sheer behaviour, as the scripted behaviour also determines how we perceive ourselves and how others interpret us during different phases of the day.
‘Time In Between Time’ deconstructs the scripted segmentation of one period of 24 hours in order to explore the tension between the scripts and our full personalities, the transitions between the different segments, as well as how the disruption of the segmentation might allow for new, less restricted senses of self.
2.30-3pm & 5.30-6pm | Studio 5
Harun Morrison: Nothing Special
A text work comprised of 365 statements outlining everyday scenarios.
This iteration is read by Amsterdam-based artist Risa Horn.
3.30-4.30pm |Outside Courtyard
Samuel Lyon Spice: The Sock Drop
The Sock Drop will explore the role and history of white socks within the LGBTQ+ community. From fetish to functional, what is it about white socks that make them so desired and worshiped?
This work is presented in collaboration with Home Live Art
3:30-7:30pm | Studio 3
Antonio Branco & Riccardo T: POST APOCRINE
Produced inside apocrine glands, milky, oily, it seems like that its journey will be infinite. If I lift my arms over my head, I can feel it running down my ribcage, convex and concave turns, breaking the symmetry of my body. It is a stream of pleasure, but also fear, worries, segregation, but also content, relaxation, calmness.
EMOTIONAL SWEATING
Physiology: Apocrine – relating to or denoting multicellular glands, which release some of their cytoplasm in their secretions, especially the sweat glands associated with hair follicles in the armpits and pubic regions.
Antonio and Riccardo use their personal experience as abject humans to reclaim the narrative that depicts LGBTQIA+ individuals as overtly sexual. Through a series of “meditative” actions they try to navigate those narratives within their own relationship and within the space and audience.
5-6pm | Steve Whitson Room
Liz Rosenfeld: I live in a house with a door
I Live in a house with a door, is a performance work in which Liz Rosenfeld explores the material of flesh through a narrative of cruising, erotic potential, environmental futures and discursive time. Rosenfeld explores her flesh as a collaborative material, which moves in it’s own time and space.
Through dancing with her breath and flesh, Rosenfeld culminates this experience with a science fiction text, where she implicates herself in an erotic cruising scene with an invisible gas, called the Shimmer. The Shimmer effects both the physicality and emotionality of her relationship to flesh as material, while also implicating bodies of flesh in questions of climate change, natural disasters and queer sexuality.
Through this work, Rosenfeld arrives at the realization of her non- binary identity through the materiality of her body, rather than through the marker of her gender.
The Shimmer effects both the physicality and emotionality of her relationship to flesh as material, while also implicating bodies of flesh in questions of climate change, natural disasters and queer sexuality. Through this work, Rosenfeld arrives at the realization of her non- binary identity through the materiality of her body, rather than through the marker of her gender.
6:30-7pm | Steve Whitson Room
Ceylan Öztrük: Oriental Demo
Ceylan Öztrük demonstrates the strong connection between heteronormativity and orientalism. Under the gaze of the audience, she learns how to bellydance with the guidance of a local oriental dance teacher.
In a spontaneous and generous approach, the artist merges actions and theoretical considerations in order to question the manner in which eurocentric patriarchal narratives determine the representation of and the gaze directed at women.
She takes this performance moment to experience the belly dance practice and, from there, to lecture on how the repertoire of stereotypical orientalist images structures sexuality and its politics.
Oriental Demo is presented in collaboration with Les Urbaines
7-9pm | Theatre
Rosana Cade with Sian Baxter: Drag Mother’s House of Love
Come sip on her ritualistic tits, raise your voices with gay abandon, and immerse yourself in Drag Mother’s House of Love. She’s here for you.
From high on her altar the Drag-Queen-cum-Preacher leads her disciples in labial group singing from the homosexual hymnbook, doling out holy breastmilk cocktails from her countless plastic nipples. Drawing from drag culture, queer kinship practices and religious iconography, Rosana Cade takes on “Mother”, troubling the archetypes with an irreverent, camp, grotesque representation.
All are invited to this interactive sermon for troubled times
7:30-8:30pm | Court Room
Tamara Alegre with Lydia Östberg Diakité, Nunu Flashdem, Marie Ursin and Célia Lutangu | FIEBRE
FIEBRE comes from a desire of creating an intimate, inceptive space where three dancers progressively explore the possibilities of a viscous and sentimental apparatus. Moving through trajectories of physical states, erotic togetherness, sexuality, sincereness and rawness.
FIEBRE intents to imagine other ways of being together for thresholding and transformation. Eroticism becomes a source of empowerment where desire, disgust and alienation are free to coexist and feed each other.
FIEBRE, is build on cooperation and care, the work relies essentially on the group. Re-framing the inherited hierarchies of the different parts of labor in such a work and their respective visibilities aiming to shake up structural ways of putting cheer to the singular author.
FIEBRE is presented in collaboration with Les Urbaines
1-2.30pm | 3-5.30pm | 6-8pm
Live Art Development Agency: Pop Up Study Room
A temporary Study Room with materials from the Live Art Development Agency’s library looking at specific themes related to the Slow Sunday event will be open throughout the day.
This will be a quiet space in which to take time out and reflect.
Help make Slow Sunday happen!
Steakhouse Live are looking for volunteers for the event. Volunteer shifts will be maximum 5 hours and you will receive a ticket to the whole event so should still be able to see a lot of the work. Email Tink on steakhousevolunteers@gmail.com for more details.
Access
Toynbee Studios is accessible to wheelchair users
Fully accessible toilets are located on the ground, first and third floors
Gender Neutral Toilets
The Study Room is a quiet space to reflect and relax
Slow Sunday is supported by Arts Council England, Pro Helvetia, Goethe Institute, ]performance s p a c e [ , Artsadmin, Home Live Art and Les Urbaines.
Image Credits: Léann Herlihy image courtesy of the artist, Harun Morrison image by Harun Morrison, Rubiane Maia image courtesy of the artist, Joseph Funnell image courtesy of the artist, Samuel Spice image by Alice Denny, Vivian Chinasa Ezugha image by Manuel Vason, Sung Im her image by Sang Hoon Ok, Antonio Branco & Riccardo T image courtesy of the artist; Liz Rosenfeld image courtesy of the artist, Rosana Cade image by Lyse Ishimwe, Ceylan Öztrük image courtesy of the artist, Tamara Alegre image courtesy of the artist.