The Puppets of Freedom

This program, The Puppets of Freedom drew the project to a close at Gertrude Contemporary and featured new performances by exhibiting artists Jacqui Shelton, Makiko Yamamoto and Ceri Hann.

Of her work 'Crush', Jacqui Shelton writes: Last year, I commissioned Alice Heyward and Megan Payne to produce a movement work for a project related to the viral spread of interior emotions via crowds, Crush. Given the implication of the body in both instances of crushing—to be crushed, to have a crush—I needed a language of physical movement, but was not trained or physically fluent in this myself. We discussed how movement spreads virally between “bodies”, and many forms bodies and movements take, and collaborated on actions directed towards crowd control and disorder. Each instance and context of the performance re-evaluates these relations anew. In this final performance, Megan, Alice and I will rework the score for an audience, rather than a crowd, and explore how proximity and distance operates in the production of bodied relations.

Live presentations by Japanese conceptual artist Makiko Yamamoto are rare and always beguiling listening experiences. Her performance here drew the artist into dialogue with her installed video work, 'Echo as Ego' to produce a new work exploring the ownership of the voice - 'Echoes of the artistic ego in conversation".

Finally, we asked the ever-mercurial Ceri Hann what he'd be doing and he replied that it will be a "de-formance" entitled ‘The nurture of reality’, in which the artist would extract, through demonstrable means, the teething problems of said technology.