Welcome! This blog is about choreographic performance work by Nikki Tomlinson.
Her work also involves curating, dramaturgy, producing and advising other artists. She works with Artsadmin in London part-time, where she co-runs projects supporting artistic development, including 'Balloon' with MIchael Atavar, the commissioning scheme for Bethnal Green Town Hall with Manick Govinda, the Weekenders programme and the advisory and bursary schemes. She also works closely with Chris Goode, Stacy Makishi, Mamoru Iriguchi and Katherina Radeva. (for Artsadmin-related work see www.artsadmin.co.uk)
Recent choreographic works include Plainsong (2009), a duet with the cellist Hannah Marshall, Folk Dance (2007-8), a performance installation made during a residency at La Caldera in Barcelona, and Bird (2006-7) made and performed with Lucy Cash. She is a member of the Critical Pathways group mentored by Rosemary Butcher at Siobhan Davies Studios and has shown in the UK and in San Francisco, Barcelona and Gran Canaria. She also performs in other artists' work and in recent years has appeared in pieces by Gerry Pilgrim, Jo Dyer, and Jennet Thomas and collaborated with Athina Vahla and the band Lark as cellist.
Contact : nikki.tom@virgin.net
Sunday
Thursday
Plainsong (2009- )
Plainsong is a live duet between performer Nikki Tomlinson and cellist Hannah Marshall. It is a structured improvisation, with each performance building on the memory of the last while responding to its new site. Versions of it have been shown in black-box theatres, studio/gallery spaces and outdoors.
The movement in Plainsong is almost entirely in profile to the audience, shunting backwards and forwards as though the body is scanning the space, never quite stopping, but looping like a swimmer from wall to wall. Similarly the sound is based on the simple lines of plainchant, but with occasional syncopated sections - the sound is improvised live along with the movement, within a structure that allows us to be more or less influenced by each other, or deliberately counter each other.
Plainsong draws on the structure and sense of timing in Juan Uslé's abstract grid-like painting, Soñé que revelabas (Inquieto) (2006), I dreamed that you were revealed. 'Inquieto' means restless, also passionate. Uslé painted this work while wired up to a pulse-counter, and literally painted in time to his own heartbeat.
Plainsong shifts between earthiness, joy, sensuality, atonement and buoyancy and explores the sculptural potential of simple movement, and the material resonance and tension between the bodies of the dancer, musician and cello.
"a beautiful performance... time disappeared" Mildred Rimbaud
"such mesmerising time and attention, the resonance between the strings and your body, resonance through the space and light but also across time and memory. I was absorbed and moved" Theron Schmidt
Plainsong was developed at La Caldera (Barcelona), and through mentoring with Rosemary Butcher on Independent Dance's Critical Pathways project.
Recent performances at :
Clarence Mews' Moving Architecture weekend, London (July 2009)
Arcola Theatre, London : triple bill with Heni Hale and Karin Fisher-Potisk (June 2009)
Siobhan Davies Studios, London (June 2009)
The movement in Plainsong is almost entirely in profile to the audience, shunting backwards and forwards as though the body is scanning the space, never quite stopping, but looping like a swimmer from wall to wall. Similarly the sound is based on the simple lines of plainchant, but with occasional syncopated sections - the sound is improvised live along with the movement, within a structure that allows us to be more or less influenced by each other, or deliberately counter each other.
Plainsong draws on the structure and sense of timing in Juan Uslé's abstract grid-like painting, Soñé que revelabas (Inquieto) (2006), I dreamed that you were revealed. 'Inquieto' means restless, also passionate. Uslé painted this work while wired up to a pulse-counter, and literally painted in time to his own heartbeat.
Plainsong shifts between earthiness, joy, sensuality, atonement and buoyancy and explores the sculptural potential of simple movement, and the material resonance and tension between the bodies of the dancer, musician and cello.
"a beautiful performance... time disappeared" Mildred Rimbaud
"such mesmerising time and attention, the resonance between the strings and your body, resonance through the space and light but also across time and memory. I was absorbed and moved" Theron Schmidt
Plainsong was developed at La Caldera (Barcelona), and through mentoring with Rosemary Butcher on Independent Dance's Critical Pathways project.
Recent performances at :
Clarence Mews' Moving Architecture weekend, London (July 2009)
Arcola Theatre, London : triple bill with Heni Hale and Karin Fisher-Potisk (June 2009)
Siobhan Davies Studios, London (June 2009)
Monday
Folk Dance (2007-8, 40mins)
Folk Dance is a performance installation for an audience of between two and six, influenced by the circularity, harmony, simplicity and ritual often associated with folk traditions. It is a mix of live and recorded dances, a series of super8 films featuring friends dancing to Lie to Me by Tom Waits, a video projection of sheep on the South Downs and a live performance threading between these images and influences. Much of the movement happens within arms' reach of the audience, who sit within the gallery or studio space.
Developed at La Caldera (Barcelona), Pen Pynfarch (Wales) and Clarence Mews (London) and with the participation of Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Liz Drown and Frances Scott.
Video stills below by Roger Lapuente, super8 stills by Nikki Tomlinson
Developed at La Caldera (Barcelona), Pen Pynfarch (Wales) and Clarence Mews (London) and with the participation of Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Liz Drown and Frances Scott.
Video stills below by Roger Lapuente, super8 stills by Nikki Tomlinson
Thursday
Staithe (2007, 6mins)
Staithe is a video distillation of a 3-year performance project, saw/sore/soar, looking at memory, habits and the nature of change. Filmed on Burnham Overy beach in Norfolk in 2005, here it is re-cut by artist Lucy Cash as a single-screen video. Earlier versions involved a performance operating as a duet between live and pre-recorded material. The original version was a 25min solo performed live with no film, and with sound by The Magnetic Fields and Blondie.
saw/sore/soar was shown in London at: The Place, Hoxton Hall, Hackney Empire, and at Sensitive Skin (Nottingham); Spring Collection at The Point (Eastleigh); San Francisco Fringe Festival; Masdanza (Gran Canaria).
Staithe has previously been shown in London at the Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance symposium at Goldsmiths; Falling Wide's Outsider Dancing programme at Toynbee Studios; the Chisenhale Biennale curated by Richard Layzell and Alana Jelinek at Chisenhale Studios.
Tuesday
Bird (2006-7, 25mins)
A site-specific piece choreographed and performed with Lucy Cash, Bird was made in response to the tactile architecture of Clarence Mews studio in London, with its unusual overhead view onto the floorspace. Bird used simple abstract movements drawn from disparate sources including aerial photography, ballet, geometry and Josef Albers' Cables. It was also influenced by some of Rebecca Horn’s work, her notion of futile machines for example, with the performers attracting and repelling each other, drawn like magnets to each other and to the audience looking down on the space from above. For InsideOutside, curated by choregrapher Caroline Salem and architect Ed Frith for Architecture Week 2007, Bird took the form of a moving installation, with each audience experiencing a different version of the piece.
"There was an irrational desire to jump down to you..very powerful on a dreamlike level." (Emily Young, filmmaker)
Photography below by Ole Birkeland.
"There was an irrational desire to jump down to you..very powerful on a dreamlike level." (Emily Young, filmmaker)
Photography below by Ole Birkeland.
Saturday
Selected other work
Friday Night is Music Night (2005, 45mins)
A one-to-one performance made for a friend inspired by his love of the long-running radio show Friday Night is Music Night, using songs from his collection - Bond themes by James Barry, Nick Cave's Into My Arms, Grandaddy's Now it's On, The Who's Baba O'Reilly. A roundabout way of giving him a record player.
Cast (2004, 25mins)
Improvisation at Chisenhale around simple score of playing with changes in light and shadow in the space at dusk.
Pictures and Fingerprints (2003, 20mins)
Performer in Josephine Dyer's group work based on the autobiographical story of a Kosovan woman seeking asylum in London, shown at The Place's Resolution season in 2004.
House of Kurtz (2002, durational)
Performed as cellist in a site-specific piece by Athina Vahla, House of Kurtz at the Shipwright's Palace in Deptford, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
http://onesquareyard.com/localExamples/houseOfKurtz/#
Home (2001, 5mins)
A short solo made under the direction of Claire Whistler for the opening of Mile End Park Pavilion.
Solo 5.1(2001, 15mins)
Performed at the Barn Theatre, Rose Bruford College in an evening of short works curated by Daniel Vais
Solo 4.1 (2000, 5mins)
Performed at street festival Fetes de Lumiére in Paris
Review of Slow Moves Rich Tales, an evening at San Francisco Fringe of four solos made and performed by Florence Peake, Polly Hudson, Sally Dean, Nikki Tomlinson.
http://www.sffringe.org/fringe05/05reviews/sally.html
Review of Still, It Matters, an evening curated by Rajni Shah at Hoxton Hall, of work by Rotozaza, Rajni Shah, Nikki Tomlinson
A one-to-one performance made for a friend inspired by his love of the long-running radio show Friday Night is Music Night, using songs from his collection - Bond themes by James Barry, Nick Cave's Into My Arms, Grandaddy's Now it's On, The Who's Baba O'Reilly. A roundabout way of giving him a record player.
Cast (2004, 25mins)
Improvisation at Chisenhale around simple score of playing with changes in light and shadow in the space at dusk.
Pictures and Fingerprints (2003, 20mins)
Performer in Josephine Dyer's group work based on the autobiographical story of a Kosovan woman seeking asylum in London, shown at The Place's Resolution season in 2004.
House of Kurtz (2002, durational)
Performed as cellist in a site-specific piece by Athina Vahla, House of Kurtz at the Shipwright's Palace in Deptford, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
http://onesquareyard.com/localExamples/houseOfKurtz/#
Home (2001, 5mins)
A short solo made under the direction of Claire Whistler for the opening of Mile End Park Pavilion.
Solo 5.1(2001, 15mins)
Performed at the Barn Theatre, Rose Bruford College in an evening of short works curated by Daniel Vais
Solo 4.1 (2000, 5mins)
Performed at street festival Fetes de Lumiére in Paris
Review of Slow Moves Rich Tales, an evening at San Francisco Fringe of four solos made and performed by Florence Peake, Polly Hudson, Sally Dean, Nikki Tomlinson.
http://www.sffringe.org/fringe05/05reviews/sally.html
Review of Still, It Matters, an evening curated by Rajni Shah at Hoxton Hall, of work by Rotozaza, Rajni Shah, Nikki Tomlinson
MovingArchitecture weekend 17 - 19 July
Plainsong at MovingArchitecture 3
Images by Joe Green
MovingArchitecture 3 is curated by Caroline Salem and Ed Frith, at their live-work space 40 Clarence Mews in Hackney.
New works created for the architect-designed house, studio and garden by Jo Dyer, Katsura Isobe, Karin Fisher-Potisk, Caroline Salem, Ed Frith, Nikki Tomlinson
Heni Hale, Karin Fisher-Potisk, Nikki Tomlinson : new works at Arcola's Studio K on 9 July
Three distinctive pieces by choreographer-performers Henrietta Hale, Karin Fisher-Potisk and Nikki Tomlinson. The evening is an experiment in bringing together this work for the first time in the new context of Arcola’s Studio K.
Wednesday
Plainsong at Siobhan Davies Studios 5 June
Plainsong will be shown at Siobhan Davies Studios on Friday 5 June.
This evening is part of Critical Pathways, through which Independent Dance have provided a framework for choreographers and artists working with the body/movement; access to regular group critique and dialogue, shared studio space and on-going mentoring with Rosemary Butcher.
On 5 June we'll be showing rough work and talking about ideas that have emerged during this lab. We are: Luisa D'Ambrosio, Janine Harrington, Karin Fisher-Potisk, Lizzy Le Quesne, Vangelis Legakis, Katie Keeble, Nikki Tomlinson.
Friday 5 June
7pm
FREE - not ticketed, all welcome.
Siobhan Davies Studios
St Georges Rd
SE1
This evening is part of Critical Pathways, through which Independent Dance have provided a framework for choreographers and artists working with the body/movement; access to regular group critique and dialogue, shared studio space and on-going mentoring with Rosemary Butcher.
On 5 June we'll be showing rough work and talking about ideas that have emerged during this lab. We are: Luisa D'Ambrosio, Janine Harrington, Karin Fisher-Potisk, Lizzy Le Quesne, Vangelis Legakis, Katie Keeble, Nikki Tomlinson.
Friday 5 June
7pm
FREE - not ticketed, all welcome.
Siobhan Davies Studios
St Georges Rd
SE1
Dance Like Nobody is Looking
Staithe (2007, 6mins) is being screened in Lucy Thane's Dance like Nobody is Looking programme, which includes work by Marina de Quay, Javier Ortega, Quintana Valero, Antonio Harris, Catherine Wheeler. There is more info on Staithe further down this page.
Thursday 5 March 2009
from 8pm
FREE
Unit 73a Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
off Broadway
London
E8 4QN
Thursday 5 March 2009
from 8pm
FREE
Unit 73a Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
off Broadway
London
E8 4QN
Monday
Critical Pathways
At the moment I am developing Plainsong at Caroline Salem's space at Clarence Mews in Hackney, and also at Siobhan Davies Studios within the context of 'Critical Pathways'. Led by Rosemary Butcher, this gives choreographers access to regular group critique, dialogue, and discussion around their own work and approach, as well as shared access to studio space to develop ideas.
The Critical Pathways group facilitated by Rosemary Butcher and Gill Clarke through Independent Dance are:
Temitope Ajose Cutting, Luisa D'Ambrosio, Charlotte Darbyshire, Augusto Corrieri, Karin Fisher-Potisk, Janine Harrington, Katie Keeble, Lizzy Le Quesne, Vangelis Legakis.
You can find out more about the Critical Pathways project on Janine Harrington's blog Common Things To Talk About.
The Critical Pathways group facilitated by Rosemary Butcher and Gill Clarke through Independent Dance are:
Temitope Ajose Cutting, Luisa D'Ambrosio, Charlotte Darbyshire, Augusto Corrieri, Karin Fisher-Potisk, Janine Harrington, Katie Keeble, Lizzy Le Quesne, Vangelis Legakis.
You can find out more about the Critical Pathways project on Janine Harrington's blog Common Things To Talk About.
Wednesday
22 Sandringham Road
All are very welcome to 22 Sandringham Road, an unthemed group show of work by: Ole Birkeland, Simone Boux, Lucy Cash, Frances Scott, Nikki Tomlinson, Amzie Viladot.
Drawing, film, installation, photography, performance to camera.
13 - 14 & 19 - 21 September 2008
Open midday - 6pm and outside of these times by appointment 22sandringham@googlemail.com
Venue:
22 Sandringham Road
Hackney
London
E8 2LP
Directions: Sandringham Road is opposite the Rio Cinema on Kingsland Rd
Travel: Buses 67, 149, 243, 76, 38, 30, 242. Train: Dalston Overground
Drawing, film, installation, photography, performance to camera.
13 - 14 & 19 - 21 September 2008
Open midday - 6pm and outside of these times by appointment 22sandringham@googlemail.com
Venue:
22 Sandringham Road
Hackney
London
E8 2LP
Directions: Sandringham Road is opposite the Rio Cinema on Kingsland Rd
Travel: Buses 67, 149, 243, 76, 38, 30, 242. Train: Dalston Overground
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