Watch Both Teasers Of "MIASMA", A Live Installation By Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine @ Trauma Bar und Kino In Berlin

Drawing from Ligottian horror, MIASMA takes place in an unnamed seaside town in the artists’ home region of Northern England where a blackened volcanic hole opens below an abandoned car park. The work incorporates 3D design, neo-noir film, and the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh to unearth sensations of dread, mourning, and alienation.

MIASMA autopsies the corpse of post-industrial urbanity, carving out its wounds in unparalleled catharsis: an encounter with darkness that oscillates between the solemn and abrasive.

In Thomas Ligotti’s The Shadow at The Bottom of The World, a strange profusion surfaces and exhausts itself into the atmosphere, afflicting the air, vegetation, and people in a nearby town—ultimately turning a familiar place into an estranged version of itself. This duality becomes the subject of Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine’s (Tom Heyes) debut audio-visual installation, MIASMA.

These uncanny dispositions frequently appear throughout MIASMA, within crowds of twisted and curled faces, as characters and dancers stagger past illegible signs of defunct businesses—a gesture to Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: “You suppose that you could be in familiar territory … few landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them in any order. The point is to get lost.”

Live and recorded Butoh alchemize MIASMA’s provocations into a visceral, unnatural domain, forcing viewers to take part in the mutative rift that opens, not only across the towns, but also within the minds of its inhabitants and visitors.

Through the virtual and choreographic, MIASMA conducts its autopsy on the town’s post-industrial corpse, carving out its wounds in the act of unparalleled catharsis: an embrace and respondent transformation to darkness characterised by its balance of the intimate and abrasive.

Text by Matt Dell

MIASMA will be on view this Saturday, October 22 at 21:00 @ Trauma Bar und Kino Heidestraße 50, 10557 Berlin

Video by Hannah Rose Stewart
Graphic design by Jordi Theler
Ue5 development by Filip Setmanuk Soundtrack by Blackhaine, Croww, Rainy Miller

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Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic Is A Virtual Performance Space Of Embodied Liberation

In 2016, choreographer and educator, Suchi Branfman, began a five-year choreographic residency inside the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security state men’s prison in Norco, California. The project, dubbed “Dancing Through Prison Walls,” developed into a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. The dancing abruptly ended in March 2020, when the California state prison system shut down programming and visitation due to Covid-19. The work was rapidly revised, and the incarcerated dancers began sending out written choreographies from their bunks to the outside world. The resulting collection of deeply imagined choreographic pieces, written between March and May of 2020, became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic.

Guided by the written and choreographic direction from inside the prison walls, the performers effectively dance these works into the “free” world. Highlighting six of the dances written/choreographed inside the prison by Brandon Alexander, Richie Martinez, Landon Reynolds and Terry Sakamoto Jr., this event includes a film of the written work transformed into embodied dances in sites throughout the Santa Monica civic center area, drawing focus to the nation’s school to prison nexus (Meiners, 2007), followed by a conversation with the eleven artists involved.

With artistic direction by Suchi Branfman and cinematography by Tom Tsai, the dances are powerfully narrated by Marc Antoni Charcas, Ernst Fenelon Jr., Richie Martinez and Romarilyn Ralston (formerly incarcerated movers and organizers) and choreographically interpreted by a group of brilliant choreographers: Bernard Brown, Jay Carlon, Irvin Gonzalez, Kenji Igus, Brianna Mims and Tom Tsai (all of whom have joined Branfman dancing inside the Norco prison). Each team was entrusted with bringing one of the written dances to action. Between them, they are steeped in hip hop, tap, breaking, performance art, quebradita, spoken word, Butoh and contemporary dance forms. Released from prison during the summer of 2020, Richie Martinez joins the cast as he narrates and performs in “Richie’s Disappearing Acts” which he wrote while incarcerated at the Norco prison during the pandemic.

In December 2020, Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic was published by the inimitable Sming Sming Books. Benefiting the authors, Critical Resistance and California Coalition for Women Prisoners, the 2nd edition of the sold out book is forthcoming. This project was made possible by Art of Recovery, an initiative of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.

Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic is a free virtual event produced by 18th Street Arts Center that can be joined via Zoom April 16, 2021 6:30pm PDT (Spanish translation available)