It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this | SERAFINE1369

This performance to camera by SERAFINE1369 was commissioned by performingborders in April 2022. Experience the full commission, including accompanying text and audio here.

Concept, choreography, performance SERAFINE1369

Camera Katarzyna Perlak

Edit SERAFINE1369

Sound Josh Anio Grigg

Voice SERAFINE1369

Featuring documentation from performance ‘I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless)’ commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and performed at The Bluecoat, 2021

Accompanying text edited by SERAFINE1369 featuring contributions from Alice MacKenzie, Anouk Thériault, Antonija Livingstone, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Harun Morrison, Jamila Johnson-Small, Nissa Nishikawa, Phoebe Collings-James, Zinzi Buchanan.

SERAFINE1369 (previously Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist, dancer, writer and facilitator, Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology.  This work brings an urgency around understandings of, and sensitivity to, connection, distinction, relation and context, SERAFINE1369’s approach is experiential, embodied and structural.

SERAFINE1369 works with darkness, voice, movement, overwhelm, vibration, inviting forms to emerge and mutate, interrupting the fiction of linear time; atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Their raw material is messages from an oracular body, on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic/psychic levels. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement – choreography becomes a ritual decomposition process for channelling, challenging and unsettling embodied (internalised or naturalised) concepts. 

SERAFINE1369 has a relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice, gathering and transmitting information through working in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles. SERAFINE1369 makes performance, installation, sound, video and text that elaborate on their research into bodies, systems, movement and dance as a tool for divination, towards making spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable. basictension.com

Commissioned by performingborders in April 2022.
Supported by Necessity Fund.