mayfield brooks & Mary Pearson performing How To Be Afraid? at Improspekcije Festival (2019) at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. Photo by Tara Ivanisevic.
In partnership with Independent Dance (London) and The Bluecoat (Liverpool)
How to be Afraid? led by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson comes to Independent Dance for a week of practice, discussion, collaboration and performance.
PUBLIC RESEARCH SPACE
May 24-26, 2021 | 10AM-1PM EST / 3PM-6PM GMT
Online | £40
In-Person @ Siobhan Davies Studios (UK) | £50
Click here to book
TALK
May 27, 2021 | 1:30 PM EST / 6:30 PM GMT
Online | Free with registration
PERFORMANCE
May 28, 2021 | 1:30 PM EST / 6:30 PM GMT
Online | Free with registration
About the PERFORMANCE:
As bodies in exile, both outside and online, six dancers will simultaneously inhabit their only options for being together. Collaborators mayfield brooks, Akeim Toussaint Buck, Seke Chimutengwende, Mary Pearson, Anne-Gaëlle Thirot and Amy Voris and will perform a techno-site-specific ritual between London and New York. This performance will create layered video compositions in real time – using both pre-recorded material, and live streamed improvisations. Dancers will explore the tension of being in public in space in relation to the loss of intimacy and togetherness during Covid. We ask ourselves, do we want to perform or do we just want to be? Do we lean into the present fear of intimacy and its potential contagion? What exists now when we share space together? Also, how do we contend with the other pandemic of racial violence repeating itself and haunting our bodies in the present? Through this shared encounter dancers will investigate how these questions touch each other and the lives around them.
About How to be Afraid?
How to be Afraid? explores fear and trauma stemming from brooks and Pearson’s different but connected ancestral links to the transatlantic slave trade. Over the past four years, iterations of this project have manifested in research, workshops and performances in a range of international contexts, most recently through the transatlantic online performance Improvisations with interference: haunted by histories, guided by ghosts live streamed in February 2021.
Currently, How to be Afraid? explores pressurized somatic responses to the turbulent politics and pandemic conditions of this past year and how it has shifted perspectives. Living in a pandemic has also exposed harsh realities of already pressurized conditions: racial, gender- based and political violence, police brutality, and the increasing momentum of authoritarian governments in many parts of the world.
When a pressure valve is opened, releasing pressure exposes how much was already there. How do we navigate this time when pressure needs to be released? How do we recover from fear of intimacy, if we are afraid? What kind of life and society is this ‘new normal’ and was it ever normal in the first place? How can we duck and dodge the coercive aspects of normalcy?
This iteration of How to be Afraid? is co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with The Bluecoat (Liverpool) and CPR – Center for Performance Research (New York), supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust. Earlier iterations of How to be Afraid? were supported by Chisenhale Dance Space, Metal (Liverpool) and Improspections Festival at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Zagreb and the GPS/Global Practice Sharing program of Movement Research (NYC) with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
How to be Afraid? is supported, in part, by CPR’s Artist-in-Residence program, which is made possible, in part, by Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
More information and updates about How to Be Afraid? can be found at: https://www.independentdance.co.uk/programmepage/activities/how-to-be-afraid-mary-pearson-and-mayfield-brooks/