How can site-specific performance re-imagine the changing world around us, and create spaces for new dialogues?

About the Residency

In April 2016, five resident artists and companies used ONCA’s versatile arts space as a base to explore new performance-based projects that explored how society and individuals could cultivate diversity and resilience, whilst navigating through unprecedented ecological and cultural changes.

Curated by Dr. Wallace Heim, writer and philosopher, with ONCA’s co-director and Feral Theatre co-founder Persephone Pearl, the residencies offered space and mentoring for the artists, whose approaches range from cheerleading and photography to cartography, dance and dousing.

Wallace Heim works across disciplines to analyse the experience of performance, of art and of social practice arts, to consider how these events shape ecological and social understanding.

Residents in Performance/ Conversation: Sunday 17th April 2016, 5pm. Join the artists in conversation with Heim and Pearl about the residencies and the questions they explore.

About the Artists

Korina Biggs: Soma in the City – Tapping into ecopsychology, Biggs uses audio engagement to examine connection, presence and embodiment in a site-specific urban environment. Biggs combines a background in physical theatre performance with a training in the Alexander Technique and uses movement to explore communication beyond words.

Liam Geary Baulch: “I am the Sea/ You’re surrounded by me” – Discussing climate change, populist movements, gender theory and cheerleading, Geary Baulch looks to the sea for inspiration in this innovative investigation. Activist and artist Baulch’s developing practice encompasses movement, protest and community. He was selected for the Est-Nord-Est 2016 Artists Residency in Quebec.

Virginia Farman: Dances on Street Corners – Farman will re-imagines cartography and the way urban landscape frames movement to examine established patterns of flow with choreographed journeys, responding to terrain and pathways. Working with dance as a tool for negotiating a relationship between art, the social body and the environment, Farman’s projects have included working with trained and un-trained dancers, dancers with disabilities and dancers on bicycles.

Lydia Heath: Two Sides of the Strait – Following a residency in Spain working alongside local beekeepers and artists to create a human-sized skep, Heath will be developing her response to landscapes. Considering the city as an organism with each individual as a ‘worker’, Heath will trace the connections between place, work and environment.

Charlotte Still and Clare Whistler: How do we find WATER? – By walking, mapping, gathering, and discussing, artists Clare Whistler and Charlotte Still consider and follow how and where water takes them. Still & Whistler started their first collaboration, STREAM, a search for sources of the River Cuckmere, in 2012. This led to WATERWEEK 1 and 2, UNDERWATEREDGE, and most recently WATERWEEK 2016 which took the form of a pilgrimage following the route of Wallers Haven to the sea at Normans Bay, East Sussex.