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.

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

Florence Peake's Remake at Chisenhale : November 2012

Florence Peake's Remake is part of Dance and the Homemade, with performances in Victoria Park and at Chisenhale Dance Space. Remake features two excerpts from a larger work titled MAKE - first presented at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (April 2012) - and involves continual acts of making sculpture that never quite resolve themselves. Choreographed by Florence Peake in collaboration with performers Katye Coe, Susanna Recchia, Iris Chan, Nikki Tomlinson.

Video of MAKE at Yorkshire Sculpture Park



Chisenhale Dance Space
64-84 Chisenhale Road E3 5QZ

1pm at Victoria Park (Free)
4pm at Chisenhale Dance Space (£3)

June - July 2012

Florence Peake's MAKE was performed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in April, with Choreographic Assistant Katye Coe and performers Iris Chan, Kathy Crick, Rachel Gildea, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, Amaara Raheem, Susanna Recchia, Nikki Tomlinson, Daliah Toure, Rosalie Wahlfrid. Here's a documentary on MAKE made with Andy Woods at YSP.

A new, durational version of this work - REMAKE - is showing this Saturday as part of Decoda's Performance Series

4pm-8:30pm
The Lanchester Gallery
Jordan Well
Coventry
£8 /£6


This month also sees the opening of Jennet Thomas' SCHOOL OF CHANGE at Matts Gallery

12noon - 6pm Wednesday - Sunday
20 June - 29 July
42–44 Copperfield Road
London
E3 4RR
FREE


And work begins with Mamoru Iriguchi on his One Man Show commissioned by the Place Prize, to be performed at The Place, London on Saturday 8 September.
Nikki Tomlinson and Selina Papoutseli: Dramaturgy
Nao Nagai: Technical Supervision
Maria Garcia: Costume



And Again by Rahel Vonmoos : May 2012


I'm happy to be performing in Rahel Vonmoos' work And Again for Spring Loaded at The Place, London on 19 May. And Again is designed for a large group of dancers and non-dancers moving through a film projection that is an abstracted rendering of a personal journey.

Rahel Vonmoos also presents her solo work, Shall I Sit Here, a layered presentation of recorded and live performance integrating film and text, light, reflection and shadow.

Both works have autobiographical elements and deal with the physicality of the body in performance. Both use projection to create texture in space in which ideas about distance, memory, repetition and change are played out.

Rahel Vonmoos is a Swiss/British dance artist who has been making her own work for many years, while performing with Rosemary Butcher, Charles Linehan, Philippe Gehmacher, Iztok Kovac and video artist Ruth Schlaepfer. Her collaborative project with Wally Cardona was shown in Dance Umbrella 2009.

19 May 2012
8pm
The Place
£15/£12

MAKE by Florence Peake : Yorkshire Sculpture Park and APT London

MAKE extends Peake's interests in the performative nature of making object-based artwork, particularly sculpture. It is also informed by a growing interest in Minimalism and Conceptual art movements and in the 'great' masculine heroes of these canons, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Carl Andre. MAKE will play with the traditional reverence towards and god-like status of the artist/sculptor as author, deconstructing its status while the actions and processes that accumulate and manifest within a sculpture are exposed and highlighted. Conceived and created by Florence Peake, MAKE has been commissioned by Yorkshire Sculpture Park with funding from Arts Council England and is co-produced by Dance Art Foundation. Assistant Choreographer Katye Coe, performers Iris Chan, Kathy Crick, Rachel Gildea, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, Amaara Raheem, Susanna Recchia, Nikki Tomlinson, Rosalie Wahlfrid will be joined by a wider cast at Yorkshire Sculpture Park on Easter Weekend, Saturday 7 April 2012.

A.P.T residency
7 – 11 February 2012
www.aptstudios.org

Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Longside Gallery
Performance : Saturday 7 April
www.ysp.co.uk

SCHOOL OF CHANGE : The Recruitment : Camden Arts Centre 17 December 2011

Artist Jennet Thomas and composer/performer Simon Bookish present a live show exploring a hybrid, cross-over space between art, film, music, speculative fiction and performance, including a recruitment presentation, songs, film clips, lessons, a quiz and prizes. Performers include Frances Scott, Catherine Thomas and Nikki Tomlinson alongside Jennet Thomas and Simon Bookish.

SCHOOL OF CHANGE is a new franchise of girls' schools, existing in a post-apocalyptic future, so radical it threatens the working of reason itself. SCHOOL OF CHANGE attempts to shore up against this breakdown, to educate a new generation to adapt, building an alternative ‘hive mind’ that has a new, stronger kind of logic.

Each student’s learning is bio-technically monitored and assessed through the Personal Circle lodged inside them. High-scoring pupils perform their learning through a rhythmic song and action practise: ‘the Production’. This trance-like group activity produces small solids - Units of Knowing – the currency through which the new economy tries to function.

The first SCHOOL OF CHANGE open day will take place at Camden Arts Centre on Saturday 17th December 2011. ENROL NOW! Booking here

Jennet Thomas' forthcoming exhibition SCHOOL OF CHANGE will be at Matts Gallery in London in spring 2012.

Rosemary Lee, Square Dances

8-9 October 2011, Dance Umbrella, London WC1

Square Dances is a new work commissioned and presented by Dance Umbrella performed across four squares in central London. Like migrating birds arriving as unexpectedly as they disperse, up to 200 dancers of all ages will fleetingly animate these quiet atmospheric spaces in an epic yet intimate way.

Audiences can choose to journey between the squares to see all four dances or enjoy a single one. Each distinctive event will be accompanied by the resonant sound of live bells ranging from a single toll to a specially commissioned score by Terry Mann.

Rosie Lee's Square Dances will be performed 6 times on Saturday 8 October and again on Sunday 9 October - beautiful squares near London Uni including Gordon, Woburn, Brunswick and Queen. It's free, no tickets, just turn up, but bring a brolly if it looks ominous as we will be dancing come what may.
Timings and locations vary, please follow the link to find out more.

Mamoru Iriguchi at Plateaux, Mousonturm

I am working as outside eye/dramaturg with Mamoru Iriguchi on his new performance Into the Skirt. Into the Skirt has been commissioned by Plateaux Festival at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt and will be shown there on 1 and 2 May 2010. This work is also supported by BAC and Camden Peoples Theatre, where early stages of the work were developed.

PLATEAUX is an international production festival for young artists in the field of experimental theatre, performance and live-art. Initiated by KÜNSTLERHAUS Mousonturm, the festival aims to promote new experimental forms of performance by providing them with a professional platform. The festival offers beside the production budgets, technical and artistic advice, rehearsal residencies and connections into international networks. PLATEAUX produces once a year up to seven new productions to be premiered in the 10 day festival.
http://www.iriguchi.co.uk/aboutme.html

From Morning : 27 May

From Morning is curated by Florence Peake and brings the work of six artists to Hawksmoor's Christ Church Spitalfields in London on Thursday 27 May. New and adapted works by Katye Coe, Joe Moran, Florence Peake and Sally Dean, and Nikki Tomlinson and Hannah Marshall, will inhabit distinct spaces in the church and find new resonances with its architecture. From Morning invites audiences to encounter work in the intimate altar and crypt, the vast nave, and aerially, from the heights of the upper gallery. Performances will be presented 3 times in one day; at 9am, 1pm and dusk, reflecting traditional prayer times while addressing questions of body, mind, time and space.

The full programme is available at frommorning.blogspot.com
From Morning is generously supported by Christ Church Spitalfields and its arts & events curator, Lisa Raine-Hunt.

Tickets:
£7, £5 concs : morning/midday performances
£10, £7 concs : evening performance (includes the only performance of Score for 30)
£15, £11 concs : day pass to all performances

Booking :
020 7426 5363 | arts@ccspitalfields.org

Venue :
Christ Church Spitalfields
Commercial Street
London E1 6LY

All Suffering SOON TO END!

Jennet Thomas' solo show at Matts Gallery in London opens 14 April and runs through to 6 June 2010.
It's a Pick of the Week in the Guardian this week.

"A comicbook hero-cum-evangelist named the Purple Preacher, blessed with the power of persuasion, works some unusual seduction techniques in Jennet Thomas's debut film installation at Matt's Gallery. Rubber Adam and Eve dolls, garage gigs and an outing to a model village are all part of his charm offensive. This blend of dream logic, bizarre shaggy-dog-story repetitions and anarchic fizz is typical territory for the London-based artist who co-founded the pioneering Exploding Cinema Collective in the early 90s. Her interests are grounded in regular human foibles and the everyday pitfalls of belief systems, so as much as a wild plunge into the absurd, Thomas shows just how bizarre ordinary life can be." Skye Sherwin, The Guardian Guide

Performers : John Wagland, Helena Goldwater, Tiago Gambogi, Pat Thomas, Alan Thomas, Nikki Tomlinson

Here nor There by Emma Leach

I will be performing in a new work by Emma Leach at Tate Britain as part of Shards of Utopia. Here Nor There is a flashing human news ticker which will appear, display and disappear back into the crowd throughout the evening. Taking as its source an absurd exchange between the United States and Cuba, Here Nor There pokes fun at diplomatic tit-for-tat and the meaningless words that are used when entrenched in conflict.

Curated by Cecilia Wee, Shards of Utopia explores how cultural remnants of a revolutionary and hopeful past interrupt our present. Utopian ideals are investigated by artists Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann, Klub Fiskulturnik, Counterproductions, Tom Badley, Emma Leach, Jon Hawken, They Are Here, Steven Ounanian and Resonance FM.

Friday 9 April
18.00 - 22.00
Free entry

in 2010 :

I am performing in :
Augusto Corrieri's Dance Company at The Place on 6 January, in a triple bill on Resolution's opening night : http://www.theplace.org.uk/3177/whats-on/resolution-programme-1.html

Jennet Thomas' show All Suffering Soon to End opens at Matts Gallery in April and runs to June 2010.
http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/thomas/exhibition-1.php

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

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.

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

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

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.

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