Artist Sharing - Akshay Sharma and Rayvenn D’Clark
Pavilion of Remembrance, Thames Barrier Park
Saturday 12 June 2021, 7-8:30pm
As a part of our project, This Grief Thing, we’d like to invite you to attend this one off event, where we’ll be sharing the exceptional performance work of our Commissioned Artists; Akshay Sharma and Rayvenn D’Clark.
The first performance of the evening is a live reading of Rayvenn’s urgent dialogue; ‘Grief Revisited’: Liquid Blackness. This will be followed by Akshay Sharma’s moving dance solo ‘Whom did the light touch?’ accompanied by cellist Nicole Robson. After these performances we invite you to join us for refreshments and an informal discussion about the work.
Fevered Sleep commissioned these artists in 2019 to create new works in response to the theme of grief, and this will be the first sharing of those pieces. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic Akshay and Rayvenn have also transformed their ideas in to digital works, which will premiere online on Saturday 5 June.
The evening will be hosted by Sam Butler and David Harradine, Fevered Sleep’s Artistic Directors. For anyone interested to talk more about grief, Sam and David will also host a mobile Grief Gathering before this event.
This event has been developed in partnership with Stratford Circus and presented with The Royal Docks Team.
Akshay Sharma is a choreographer, dancer and performer based in London who comes from India. His work as a dance artist is invested in languages that are emotional and dynamic. He believes dance can be an antidote and is invested in exploring its vital untamed labour through rigour, attention and joy. Akshay is currently inspired by the surface of the earth and rocks.
‘Whom did the light touch?’ - A short dance film
This film was commissioned by Fevered Sleep for their project This Grief Thing supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
“In this film a vast landscape pulls together spaces to live within and hold before the day disappears. The film weaves dance, landscape and sounds to create atmospheres of loss, hope and companionship.
Natural light was the starting point, providing a trajectory on which the film sits, exploring how it is held, captured and reflected on the water, cliffs and sand. The title comes from the idea that light falling on a body is reflected and bounces off to fall on another body, visible or invisible - this process of light traveling therefore connects both those present and absent.
Although the seaside brings joy and the warm feeling of a vacation, for Akshay it is also raw, harsh and bare. It is also where cycles of time interact with eroded histories of the elements. There were moments at the beach where the cliffs, the little patches of moss and warm British sun offered spaces of companionship. Big waves crashing offered a soundscape that melted into the melody of dusk.
Dance has its own significance for Akshay in the middle of a pandemic. He wonders what has accumulated in the body over this period. In its poetry, he believes, dance offers a natural ease in the language of loss.” - Akshay Sharma
Rayvenn D'Clark is a UK-based, digital sculptor, writer/researcher and curator, based in London. Rayvenn’s practice explores the nuances of identity. Her work chronicles black anatomy alongside the handmade aesthetic in the everyday, collective experience.
‘Grief Revisited’: Liquid Blackness
‘Grief’ is at the forefront of national - and global - headlines, as we continue to wage (war) through the Coronavirus pandemic. Now well over a year since the news broke across global headlines, why is it that we still find it so difficult to articulate what grief feels like? As we all move to better understand the modern body politic, we must not, however, neglect the factors that provide the necessary permissions to grieve in a landscape littered with just that; grief and loss in abundance. The dialogue that D'Clark has with herself explores the often inconsolable and incompressible state of black womxnhood.
This Grief Thing by Fevered Sleep
Supported by
Arts Council England
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Wellcome
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
We acknowledge the assistance of the 2018 Banff Playwrights Lab – a partnership between the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Canada Council for the Arts - in the development of This Grief Thing.
This Grief Thing Manchester 2019 photo by Richard Tymon