Slow Sunday

Sunday 21 October | 11-9pm | Toynbee Studios, London | £18/16 | BUY TICKETS

For one day only, Steakhouse Live will take over the Toynbee Studios building with a programme of bold and compelling live performance ranging from fifteen minutes to eight hours in duration.

Featuring live work from Jade Montserrat, Forced Entertainment, Yeast London Cabaret, Eirini Kartsaki, Symoné, Rosie Gibbens and Eunjung Kim.

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 also be open throughout the day.

Audiences will be able to come and go as they please for most of the the work presented but please be aware that rooms will have a maximum capacity and we will have to do a one in, one out system if they get full.

DOWNLOAD PDF OF PROGRAMME 

Access

Toynbee Studios is accessible to wheelchair users. Fully accessible toilets are located on the ground, first and third floors. We will have a quiet space to chill out in if needed.

This particular Steakhouse Live event is unfunded so it is not as financially accessible as past events. We are however looking for volunteers for the event so if you want to donate your time instead of money then email Katy on contact@steakhouselive.co.uk and we can work something out.

PROGRAMME 

Jade Montserrat | No Need for Clothing | 11am-6pm

Transcribing individual texts into a temporary wall drawing, the prizewinning piece No Need for Clothing is a new durational performance that speaks of entanglement and commodity fetishism; a polemic engaged in combat between histories of colonialism and today’s realities, imposition and economies of trust, protection and survival.

Forced Entertainment | Quizoola! | 2 – 8pm

Quizoola! is an extraordinary improvised performance in which three performers in smeared clown make-up ask and answer questions for a continuous six hours. Dark, hilarious, absurd and intimate, it is a game that survives from moment to moment, a comical and sometimes brutal interrogation that soon gets out of hand. Set inside a circle of bare electric light bulbs, Quizoola! is a live negotiation of what is real and what is performed – of what to ask and how to answer.

Quizoola! explores the need people have for knowledge, certainty and definition through language. Sometimes whispered, sometimes yelled, an answer must always be attempted to an avalanche of questions from pop trivia through personal secrets, via pub-quiz and twisted philosophical search. Audiences are free to arrive, depart and return at any time throughout the performance

First performed in 1996 and improvised anew each time its presented, Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola! is an inspiring milestone piece in durational performance that’s been shown all over the world.

crazinisT artisT | strikedthrough | 7 – 8pm

“[sHe/it…]” is my bio-political pronoun” – Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi also known as crazinisT artisT is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist living and practicing in Ghana. [sHe/it…] was born in Ho, Volta Region of Ghana in September 1981.

Since 2012, [sHe/it…] began an endless journey of investigating and questioning social constructivism of human existence and its relationship with the “culturality” of gender stereotypes and sexual misrepresentation.

[sHe/it…]’s belief in unconditional love for humanity, regardless of one’s sense of belonging or identity, pushes [sHe/it…]’s works to investigate and question our quest for socio-cultural supremacy over marginalized people, political injustice, violence, vulnerabilities, human sense of mortality and objectification.

Yeast London Cabaret | The Reunion | 2.30-5.30pm

Five years ago The Yeast London Cabaret collective, spearheaded by Oozing Gloop, hosted their first draggy live art spectacle.

REPULSED by the increasing counter-cultural assimilation of East London into the commodity logic of cultural capitalism they took the art of failure to ecstatic and dizzying new heights of hellish depravity and proved punk’s pretty much only alive in queer transgression.

Since then a lot has changed! Join Oozing Gloop, Ellis D, Kevin Le Grand Bailor and Lewis G Burton for this special reunion to reconnect, reminisce and remember those sordid late nights in overcrowded, sticky floored basements when you could still by a drink in East London for £2.50!

Eirini Kartsaki | HERPES | 1-1.30pm & 6.30-7pm

Eirini Kartsaki presents an excerpt of a new piece of work about desire, STI’s, fantasising about the Duchess of Cambridge and not having babies.

HERPES plays with eroticism and humour to explore the ways we’re told we need to stop banging the whole world, because if we don’t we will of course get herpes.

It is a refusal to settle down or settle in. It says I want to live my life as if it is mine, because it is mine. Even when what you hear on repeat is: get a husband. Get a mortgage. Have a baby. Be sensible. Be sensible. Be sensible.

**LIMITED CAPACITY PERFORMANCE WITH NO LATECOMERS**

Symoné | Join the Family | 2.15-3.45pm

Join the Family uses dance and circus style performance including elements of hula hooping, acrobatics and dancehall movements to explore the personal experience of cult life and the idea of truth vs. manipulation. 

Symoné will present an entrancing and intentionally exhausting performance representing the psychological damage and psychic rape of the “casual distractions” that we constantly experience in this reality.

Referencing the common casual manipulations of sex, pop music, politics and money this physically intense performance will escalate in sensory detail from erratic sounds, music, projected images, and technical dancehall and circus tricks.

Eunjung Kim | Temporal Fragments | 4.15-5.15pm

Temporal Fragments presents a fragment of an unrecorded myth that is not affected by existing historical and social power structures. Over time the mythology fractures and decays leaving what is left from the body to form a new map of the world out of the limits of social reality.

Through subtle interventions and encounters, Eunjung Kim questions the relationship between the repression and the freedom that erupts within difference.

Rosie Gibbens | Auto Erotic Assimilation | 12.45-1.45pm

Part absurd product demonstration, part lacklustre burlesque show, Auto Erotic Assimilation presents an abstract orgy with everyday objects. The normal functions of items are rejected and mundane routine is fetishised.

The performance appropriates gestures used in advertising, customer service and pornography in attempt to both understand and undermine them.

Live Art Development Agency | Pop-up Study Room | 11-7pm

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 also be open throughout the day.

We are hoping that this will be a calm and informal area to read, relax and be able to take time out of the busy performance environment for a moment of space or reflection if needed.

The Study Room is the core resource of LADA and is a free, open access research facility located in Bethnal Green, London, which houses one of the largest publicly accessible libraries of Live Art related videos, DVDs and publications in the world.