Satelliser: a dance for the gallery is an experimental, interactive performance work realised by an intergenerational group of co-working artists, devised and led by award-winning artist J Neve Harrington.
Harrington brings this compelling, distinctive performance work to Bristol’s Arnolfini across 29th and 30th July, following hugely successful previous showings at BALTIC CCA, Gateshead (October 2021), Turner Contemporary, Margate (November 2021) and Nottdance 2022, at FABRIC’s IC4c (October 2022) as part of the CONTINUOUS Touring Network Performances.
Satelliser is making a unique showing at Arnolfini as part of Threads, a major exhibition featuring 21 contemporary international artists and makers, who use textiles as their chosen medium. Celebrating material and making, these artists use the storytelling power of textiles to connect with past traditions, find commonalities between cultures, time and place, and to ‘breathe stories into materials’.Threads encompasses processes of weaving and spinning, rug-making, stitching and embroidery, print, knit, threading, mending and found materials, with materials and techniques handed down, reused and reinvented.
Co-curated by leading textile artist Alice Kettle, Threads weaves throughout Arnolfini’s three floors, to reveal how textiles ‘remember’, how memory is ‘embedded within the process of making’ and how new narratives are created.
Meaning ‘To put into orbit’, Satelliser refers to bodies moving in relation to each other, in concert, in and out of sync, like a planetary system of connected bodies, independent, yet motivated and responsive to each other. Satelliser sees coworkers cycle through the layered labours of moving, speaking, listening, crafting and resting as the day passes. They hold buoyant space for improvised conversation to emerge in the gallery space between each other and gallery visitors.
Satelliser: a dance for the gallery brings conversation, particularly conversation that we haven’t had before, into the gallery space and into dialogue with other exhibited works, workers and visitors. The collaborators and I are organised and organising space through an ongoing dance which is like a motor underneath the conversation. We are in different relationships to this dance work throughout the day, as well as in our broader professional and personal lives. This orientation towards doing – differently – something together gave rise to the title ‘co-worker’, which is what we call each other.
J Neve Harrington
Satelliser’s planetary poetics also suggests something of its make-up: its extensity, its encounter of ages, background and positionalities; the ‘play with orientation’ it allows….the dancers themselves enter into unison at the start of the day, tire, come off their staggered shifts, and then re-enter…when the dancers talk their speech goes out into orbit and, through the open invitation that the dance makes to its audience, with smiles and open gestures, we are brought in, either as listeners or respondents.
Dr Thomas Morgan Evans essay ‘On Platforms’
J Neve Harrington is joined by collaborating co-workers: Arabella Stranger, Bonni Bogya, Christine Bramwell, Iris Yi Po Chan, Jay Yule, Jia-Yu Corti, Katye Coe, Lorna Fox, Mia Quimpo Gourlay, Ngozi Oparah and Siobhan Davies, the founder of CONTINUOUS Network.
Satelliser: a dance for the gallery at Arnolfini will mark the last of the CONTINUOUS Touring Network Performances, which is an ambitious partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Siobhan Davies Studios, working alongside four galleries and two dance organisations around the UK.
Kat Bridge, Co-Artistic Director at Siobhan Davies Studios said
We’re delighted Satelliser: a dance for the gallery created by J Neve Harrington and co-workers will be our final live performance as part of the five-year CONTINUOUS Network Project. Harrington’s touring work holds a special place within the programme as a durational event that truly experiments with how dance can live within a gallery by inhabiting and relating to the current exhibition of each gallery it visits. This new collaboration with the Arnolfini for their Threads exhibition forges a meaningful connection which embodies the spirit of experiment and support for independent dance artists that has been central within CONTINUOUS.
Satelliser: a dance for the gallery, Free entry, 29th-30th July 2023 11:00-18:00, Arnolfini Gallery 16 Narrow Quay Bristol BS1 4QA arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/satelliser
