I worked on elements of creative marketing and production of Foley Explosion, an experimental theatre and sound art work by Julie Rose Bower in 2017/18.
Foley Explosion is an immersive storytelling show about Russia; an alternative spy thriller featuring live Foley sound effects and looping technology in sound worlds that conjure a movie in the mind. This solo show brings to life experiences of a year spent in Russia and features disinformation, fake news and cameos from the intelligence community past and present: Edward Snowden, Grigori Rasputin and Alexander Litvinenko.
Foley Explosion toured the UK 2017-18 including The Cameo Live programme in Edinburgh programmed by Deborah Pearson of Forest Fringe, The Cube in Bristol, Lancaster Arts and SPILL Festival. It was presented with support from Arts Council England, The Yard, Battersea Arts Centre and Hackney Showroom.
4 stars in The Herald:
"...While such a scenario resembles the labyrinthine twists and turns of a Cold War spy thriller, it is in the telling that makes Bower's show so special. Amplified heels, slamming doors and metronomic toys are looped in such a way as to create a found sound symphony that conjures up a very noisy world."
More here .
Eternal Return is a choreographed mixed reality exhibition exploring the future of memory. Created by acclaimed Swedish artist duo Lundahl and Seitl in collaboration with UK-based studio ScanLAB Projects. It was selected as part of the BFI Film Festival (expanded category) 2021 and shown at The Vaults, London.
The immersive performance unfolds within a visually striking exhibition space. The staging gives a fragmented impression of the hidden virtual space that appear inside the headset. With the visitors body and senses as active medium, triggered through VR, hyperconnected objects and the unseen touch of a performer, the artwork reveals how memory allows for a string of data to be passed through matter, across time. From Earths deep past through to its post-anthropocene future, the surface of the earth is tightly connected with the living, and life with conscious experience. In its entirety, this work explores the collective memory and experiences we pass on through generations: what to fear, what to value, how to live, how to care for the world of tomorrow. Each of which is more vital than ever.
Creators: ScanLAB Projects, Lundahl and Seitl
Script collaboration: Malin Zimm
Dramaturge: Rachel Alexander
Producer: Emma Ward
ScanLAB Projects: Matt Shaw, Max Čelar, Soma Sato, Manuela Mesrie, Reuben Carter, Jacques Pillet, Will Trossell, Dorka Makai, Emilia Clark
Pianist: Cassie Yukawa-McBurney
With Pia Nordin, Rachel Alexander, Sara Lindström, Lena Kimming, Helena Lambert, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Catherine Hoffmann, Christine Sollie
Joan Jonas
2018
Delay Delay (London Version) 2018 is a reconfiguration loosely based on a series of Joan Jonas’s outdoor pieces: Jones Beach Piece 1970, Nova Scotia Beach Dance 1971 and Delay Delay 1972. For Jones Beach Piece the spectators stood a quarter of a mile away from the performers. The performance explored how distance can affect our perception of action and sound. In Nova Scotia Beach Dance the spectators watched the performance from overhead, while in Delay Delay 1972 the spectators stood on the roof of a building overlooking a large area of empty lots in downtown New York. That performance incorporated ideas of seeing from a distance and seeing from overhead.
For Delay Delay (London Version) 2018, a group of local dancers and performers enact the basic elements of the earlier works restructured by Jonas to reflect the new site. The spectators stand on the side and watch the action taking place below as the same actions take place across the river on the bank opposite.
This version of the performance is about 13 minutes in length and repeated twice, making the entire performance 26 minutes long. The work is only performed at low tide when the banks of the river are exposed.
Credits:
Reconstruction Realised by: Joan Jonas & Nefeli Skarmea
Performed by: Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Monsur Ali, Luca Bakos, Anna Cabré-Verdiell, Natalie Corne, Dylan Spencer Davidson, Mary Feliciano, Annie Fox, Andrew Graham, Martin Hargreaves, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Emma Waltraud Howes, Maria da Luz Ghoumrassi, Francesco Migliaccio, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Danai Pappa, Daniel Jeremiah Persson, Malik Nashad Shape, Eleanor Sikorski
Exhibition History:
Ten Days Six nights2018
Banks of the River Thames
London, UK
Acknowledgements: All rights and contents of Delay Delay (London Version) by Joan Jonas, belong solely to the artist.
Photographer: Emma Waltraud Howes - Rehearsal view from South Bank, Tate Modern.
Joan Jonas
2018
In Jonas’s Mirror Piece II, performers carry out a series of carefully choreographed actions with mirrors and glass. The size and weight of the props mean the performers’ movements have to be slow and careful. The constant danger that the mirrors will break creates a sense of anxiety among the spectators.
First performed in 1970, Mirror Piece II was never recorded on film. Jonas has based the reconstruction on notes and photographs. She has built on the feeling and look of the original and invented new movements and configurations in the choreography. In between performances, visitors to the South Tank can hear a musical composition by Jonas and jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran.
This reconstruction of Mirror Piece II 1970 has been realised by Joan Jonas together with Nefeli Skarmea.
Credits:
Reconstruction Realised by: Joan Jonas & Nefeli Skarmea
Performed by: Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Monsur Ali, Luca Bakos, Anna Cabré-Verdiell, Natalie Corne, Dylan Spencer Davidson, Mary Feliciano, Annie Fox, Andrew Graham, Martin Hargreaves, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Emma Waltraud Howes, Maria da Luz Ghoumrassi, Francesco Migliaccio, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Danai Pappa, Daniel Jeremiah Persson, Malik Nashad Shape, Eleanor Sikorski
Exhibition History:
Ten Days Six Nights2018
Tate Tanks
London, UK
Acknowledgements: All rights and contents of Mirror Piece II by Joan Jonas
Photographer: Seraphina Neville - Performance view at Tate Tanks.
Art Night, 7 July 2018
Performance, 15 min
In a major new performative work, Sasha Pirogova explores the transformative effect of the garden. Penetrating the rigid and dissonant manmade space, the living world raises our consciousness of humans as part of it, and evokes a feeling of unity.
Curated by Dorothy Feaver
Oasis Farm, 18 Carlisle Ln, London SE1 7LG
Performers: Luis Amália, Chrysanthi Avloniti, Monika Blaszczak, Joe Boon, Jennie Boultbee, Jon Caruana, Mateo Dupleich, Willa Faulkner, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Emilia Kallioinen, Natalia Meksa, Magda Nordstrøm, Constanca Pimentão, Xristina Prompona, Katie Serridge, Paulína Šmatláková, Alida Stoman, Alice Watson, Patrick Webster
Acknowledgements: Pervilion at Art Night 2018 was supported by The Store X The Vinyl Factory with additional support from Oasis Farm Waterloo and Feilden Fowles
2018
13:90 two-channel video installation
The Stroker is a two-channel video installation based on Takala’s two week-long intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young entrepreneurs and startups. During the intervention Takala posed as a wellness consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel Touch who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services in the workplace. Nina strolled around Second Home being friendly to everyone, greeting and lightly touching people as she passed them by. It gets the office talking, workers gossip amongst themselves, visibly bonding over a common confusion – she was nicknamed ‘The Stroker’.
The responses of the ‘touches’ varied widely, most were polite, but there were those whose body language registered a visible discomfort. Perhaps simply due to the cultural context of this invasion of personal space, or perhaps as a result of the inner conflict that arises when one does not feel able to truthfully or openly react. When unable to assert oneself, this kind of embodied negotiation may take the place of words.
The nuances of movement demonstrate how people negotiate the dilemma of being mediated bodies under social pressure, and how such responses are controlled by the tacit conventions governing what is deemed to be ‘acceptable behaviour’. In the clear-walled, open-thinking space of The Stroker, we witness a physical negotiation of boundaries where there seemingly are none.
Director of Photography: Katharina Dießner
Sound Recording: Karl Laeufer, Luke David Harris
Editing: Elisa Purfürst
Sound Design: Christian Obermaier
Choreographer: Emma Waltraud Howes
Co-writer, Production Assistant: - Iona Roisin
Production Assistant: Amelie Befeldt
Curator: Teresa Calonje Trenor
Title Design: Ana Fernandes
Performers: Donna Celay, Hais Hassan, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Manos Koutsis, Matthew Moorhouse, Patricia Mories, Iona Roisin, Emma Waltraud Howes
This work has most recently been part of the 24/7 exhibition at Somerset House, 2020.
2016
Emily Perry’s practice is characteristically performative, focusing on gender, sexuality, feminism and female representation. Perry presented Woman with Salad (2016-ongoing) at A Performance Affair, Brussels. Woman with Salad is a work for a group of female performers who each concurrently enact a single gesture, repeated continuously for an hour. These gestures derive from images and animated GIFs found in commercial stock footage libraries that depict women engaged in actions such as laughing while holding food, looking into a mirror, brushing their hair or drinking a glass of wine. These commercially produced images, designed to be purchased and dispersed throughout the wider broadcast media, depict stereotypically female actions, while being aimed at the current advertising industry also echo the manual and domestic tasks that women perform in historical painting. Bath Sesh (2018) is a work that presents pairs of women in dialogue, and is accompanied by a number of audio recordings of conversation between mothers and daughters. About this work Perry simply states “Of course their conversations always pass the Bechdel Test”. In Women Looking Bored Holding Photos of Women Looking Bored, (2017) several women stand in a gallery space displaying photos of other women. As the hours pass by, the performers shuffle, drop their arms, lean on the wall, sit down and close their eyes, they remain silent.
2017
KW Institute of Art
Related Primates was a 3-hour “directed experience” that took place in the Pogo Bar and surroundings, at Kunst-Werke in Berlin. The occasion ridiculed the bombardment of exploitative contemporary self-care promotion, while simultaneously encouraging a more visceral embodied experience. Participants were asked to commit to the entire duration of the experience, and give away any screen or mobile device, to take part.
The Related Primates 8-member cast guided the audience with exaggerated care – beginning with a grotesque meditation, then offering them copious amounts of soup, to lead them through an introspective body-fixated voyage. The Primates inundated the audience by performing ritualistic chanting with fierce concentration and in looping sequences, to press upon the viewer to make contact with their inner selves. An unavoidable tension between caregiver and receiver was created through a humorous infantilisation of the spectator through excessive actions. These embellished gestures included: performative vignettes, participatory exercises, sculptural interventions and sensory stimulations using edibles, peripheral scalp messaging devices, sound and movement. This seductive and intimate state was interrupted at times by the archaic character and paternal force “Daddy Ding Dong,” giving way to a sinister but humorous eruption.
The performative program of the evening was developed through a process of ensemble rehearsals, which followed an open call. 8 primates were chosen through a walk-in audition. The rehearsal sessions, each a small 3-hour workshop of their own, occurred bi-weekly over the spring of 2017. During these occasions experimentations with empathy-related exercises, play- methods, animalistic-choreographies, and movement practices evolved into a language of temporary-being-togetherness. Within this framework, Related Primates mimicked the structure of a community theatre or an ensemble, where the final performance was representative of only one chapter of the entire process, while the costumes, ensemble paraphernalia and props made-up an expanded collection of artefacts of their own.
Acknowledgments:
Rehearsals and performances were developed in collaboration with artist and choreographer Emma Waltraud Howes.
Costumes were made in collaboration with artist and designer Tea Palmelund
Edibles by chef and cultural producer Caique Tizzi
Related Primates was a co-production between Kunst-Werke’s Bob’s Pogo Bar and Agora Collective’s I’m Hungry initiative
The Related Primates event was curated by Maurin Dietrich and Cathrin Mayer
SITE Bob’s Pogo Bar Kunst-Werke, Berlin
Performers:
Related Primates Ensemble Members: Dan Allon, Tara Dominguez , Laura Hemming-Lowe, Jos McKain, Marie-Delphine Rauhut, Wissam Sader, Jorge Vega , Xinyue Zhang
Daddy Ding Dong: Dafna Maimon
Meditation Mama: Emma Waltraud-Howes
2009 - 2016
Symphony of a Missing Room is a guided museum tour where the visitors depart on both a collective and an extremely personal journey. Via wireless headphones, a voice takes visitors, led by performers, on an itinerary that traverses layers of physical and imaginary architecture of the museum and its curatorial space.By the use of multi-sensory illusions and binaural sound recordings the visitor's attention is steered away from the visible and tangible world and diverted into a new perception of the self, time and space.
The work gathers its narratives and histories from the institutional collections and architectures it inhabits and has previously inhabited. While Symphony is concerned by physical displays of history described and embodied by museums, it is also a learning machine, that absorbs and reconstitutes its own past, reciting the lessons of that past each time it is physically refashioned, and each time begins again.
”Symphony explores the idea of the museum as an observer and keeper of history. But history is proposed here as a kind of "backwards prophesying": as one must call into the imagination an event that someone tells you will happen, one must similarly imagine an event you are told once did happen. The art museum thus becomes a repository of disjunct visuals that project, prophesy and document both the past and the future” Lundahl & Seitl
Symphony of a Missing Room is since 2009 commissioned for a series of museums in Europe; it is an artwork in a constant state of becoming.
Laura has performed in the following versions:
2011: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Fierce Festival)
2014: Royal Academy of Art, London (LIFT Festival)
What am I looking at? An intervention in 3 Acts, series of performances commissioned for Late@Tate Spring Series 2015 (April, May, June) with Tate Collective, and the Roundhouse Experimental Choir, Tate Britain, London UK
Photograph by Harriet Hundertmark
Artistic Collaborator
Lundahl & Seitl create artworks as elegies to specific art forms and the architectural institutions where those forms are presented. In this new project they explore the future of film and the cinema.
An Elegy proposes the hypothesis that we carry so much film inside us that we need very little external stimuli to create a cinematic experience. Visitors enter a darkened room in which they experience projections that play not on the screen in front of them, but in their own consciousness. Mixing video projection with audio and choreographed touch, the visitor’s imagination is projected out into the cinema.
Laura worked with Lundahl and Seitl as a core member of their company, performer / artistic collaborator from 2011-2016.
Laura performed in the following versions:
2016- Gothenburg (Dans o Teater Festival)
2016 - Seoul (Wooran Foundation)
2015 - Groningen (Noorderzon)
2014 - Graz (Steirischer Herbst)
http://www.lundahl-seitl.com/work/an-elegy-to-the-medium-of-film