Evening with Dani d’Emilia and The Uhuruverse

LADA is pleased to collaborate with ]performance s p a c e[ on an Evening with Dani d’Emilia and The Uhuruverse as part of the artists’ residencies at ]performance s p a c e[,  Folkestone.

The evening at LADA will involve presentations by both artists, followed by a discussion chaired by  ]performance s p a c e[ and Joseph Morgan Schofield (LADA).

The individual performance practices of artists Dani d’Emilia (Portugal/Brazil) and The Uhuruverse (USA) represent sustained strategies of resistance. Engaged in decolonial, queer and anti-capitalist politics, d’Emilia and The Uhuruverse variously use body and action art, performance-pedagogy, experimental music and dance. Across mediums and forms, their practices expand and trouble the boundaries of the known, fiercely staking claim to the future.

Dani d’Emilia and The Uhuruverse will be in residence at ]performance s p a c e[ , throughout March. Their residency pairing is the third in a series of residential periods for ]ps[ ‘s PAUSE & AFFECT programme. During each residency period, two artists are invited to live and work at ]ps[, sharing time and space enabling them to tune in, recalibrate, experiment and grow.

About the Artists

Dani d’Emilia is a transfeminist artist and educator working internationally across performance art, devised theatre, visual arts and radical pedagogy projects.

Her work explores the co-production of critical knowledge and political imagination through languages that go beyond rational and discursive realms and she is also engaged in developing pedagogical tools through artistic and critical practices.

Using performance/art as an ’embodied mode of encounter’ she combines performance-pedagogy (performance practice as a pedagogical process of unlearning), radical tenderness (a mode of political-poetic resistance), transfeminist (intersectional and trans inclusive feminism) and decolonial (interrogating corporeal colonial legacies) approaches.

Working from the body she explores our ability to perceive others through multiple senses and modes of knowing, inhabiting the contradictions, incoherences and vulnerabilities that arise in this process.

Dani is co-founder of the immersive theatre company Living Structures (UK) and the artistic space Roundabout.lx (Lisbon, PT). Dani was core member of the transnational performance collective La Pocha Nostra (MX/US) between 2011-2016 and Proyecto Inmiscuir (ES/MX) between 2015-17.

www.danidemilia.com

The Uhuruverse is a Los Angeles-based PROTEST ARTIST who uses multiple mediums and performance styles to speak against oppression and demand and encourage liberation.

As a musician, The Uhuruverse can be best described as experimental. Best known as the electric guitarist for the band Fuck U Pay Us (a four piece Black femme punk band demanding land reparations for the African Holocaust and free self defence training for femmes), the Uhuruvese also raps and sings. The artist enjoys exploring other genres including but not limited to:  Hip Hop, Punk, Funk, Disco, Vogue, Blues, Jazz, and New Jack Swing.

The Uhuruverse spliced together their own, original dance style that combines Burlesque and Butoh. The dancer uses burlesque and nudity in protest for womxn’s sexual liberation and gender nonconformity. Butoh’s founder created the dance to mourn Japanese deaths in World War II. The Uhuruverse performs the “dance of death” to honor those slain during the African Holocaust.

The Uhuruverse performs drag and invokes interactive art and improvisation in their live performances.  The Uhuruverse is a producer and curator of live shows that include mixed media and live performers.  In 2016 The Uhuruverse directed the psychedelic film noir, “FIGHT IN HEELS”, a collaboration with the #SNATCHPOWER artist collective.  The Uhuruverse founded #SNATCHPOWER in 2014.

About ]performance s p a c e[

PAUSE & AFFECT is a nine month programme of curated and open call artist residencies at ]ps[ in Kent.

Exploring the necessity of reflection as a primary route to self development, PAUSE & AFFECT facilitates residential periods where artists are encouraged to embrace slowness as a creative methodology.

​Within accelerated capitalism, pause and affect become tools of resistance; strategies to take back time, make space & reconnect with what’s important.

]ps[ has always strived to act as a hub or home to national and international artists in transit; developing the performance art network and act as a place of research and development outside of mainstream education and gallery structures.

Currently based in Folkestone’s Creative Quarter (Kent), our organisation continues to cultivate time-based work that critically and physically pushes the boundaries of body, time and space.

We are commit­ted to supporting challenging and difficult work that embraces performance art as an ever-evolving medium.

]performance s p a c e [‘s mission is to facilitate the prime conditions for the production of performance art in the UK (and beyond).

www.performancespace.org