performingborders newsletter | April 2022

Our second newsletter of the year features the newly commissioned performance to camera ‘It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this‘, an original immersive work around live art and borders created by SERAFINE1369.

Read the full newsletter here. 

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SERAFINE1369 (previously Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist and choreographer, 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.

Recent commissions include ‘When we speak I feel myself, Opening’, Sadlers Wells, London, 2022; ‘A Continual Cry’, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2021; ‘(unarticulated architectures of) AMBIVALENT LONGING’, The Robert’s Institute of Art, London, 2022.

Image credits: Still from ‘It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this’, SERAFINE1369, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.