Online Premieres - Akshay Sharma and Rayvenn D’Clark
ONLINE
Saturday 5 June 2021, 8-9:30pm
As a part of our project, This Grief Thing, we’d like to invite you to join us on Zoom and experience the exceptional digital works made by our Commissioned Artists; Akshay Sharma and Rayvenn D’Clark.
The first sharing of the evening will be Akshay Sharma’s moving dance film ‘Whom did the light touch?’. This will be followed by an audio version of Rayvenn D’Clark's urgent dialogue; ‘Grief Revisited’: Liquid Blackness.
Fevered Sleep commissioned these artists in 2019 to create new works in response to the theme of grief. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic Akshay and Rayvenn have transformed their ideas in to digital works we’re excited to share with you, and which will also be performed live on Saturday 12 June.
The evening will be hosted by Sam Butler and David Harradine, Fevered Sleep’s Artistic Directors, who will facilitate a Q&A with the artists after each sharing.
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?’
Akshay was moved by stories people shared where they felt they could not express their grief. To him it felt like grief was ever present but not visible and he wanted to work with that sense to highlight this void. The work is a filmed dance solo and runs for 9 minutes.
Camilla Greenwell is a photographer with a Fine Art and performance background, who is based in London and works internationally. Over the past decade she has worked with numerous artists, dancers and performers to create imagery which stems from an interest in people and the stories they tell, and often tends to occupy a space between reality and performance.
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