SERAFINE1369

IV and II are part of a modular series of performances - II (2023), XII (2022), III (2021) set within the world of SERAFINE1369's current body of work that considers cycles, time, divination and decomposition. The works emerge through a desire to create shows that are not perpetuating cycles of stress and burn out, instead centring what is t/here now.

A series of tableaux, a speaking clock that announces each passing minute and the sounds of a breaking storm create the scene for the work to fracture and unfold from stillness into moments of blissed out dancing and the fleeting meaning that emerges through proximity and relational landscapes.

The performers connect with the sensual and energetic capacities of bodies to receive data through a detailed, meditative and expansive practice of constant movement, energetic awareness and impossible stillness.

"This is a work made in winter for the spring, listening in the darkness to the subterranean murmurs of things about to emerge that can't yet be seen or touched. They say that it's always darkest before the dawn.

The starting point (if there can be such a thing as a beginning) is a line from a poem I wrote at the invitation of another artist, the contemporary dance practice of making versions of 'Le Sacre du Printempts' or 'The Rite of Spring' and a work I made in 2019 just before the pandemic. Each of these speak to the reckonings and returns that cycles can bring.

A fragment of the poem loops through all three tracks that make up The Ways, The Fortune, The Fall. Each track is eleven minutes and eleven seconds in duration. The cycle will run three times."

This is a work that wants to acknowledge that bodies contain universes, objects are charged with memory and experience, everything moves, everything speaks and nothing ever really goes away. The impossibility of stillness, the counting of time, a body of water, a breaking storm and the rhythm of the planets in the solar system as we orbit the sun and respond to the moon, are the basis for the building of this world.

Azimuth Zenith Nadir is a modular and hybrid installation format stemming from SERAFINE1369’s work across automated multimedia installation, theatre spaces and their long term research into embodied performance and dancing. The work is a continuation of SERAFINE1369’s cumulative, cyclical research into non-linear time, unsettling internalised hierarchies and “oracular practice”. One of the methodologies and/or ethics of which is a continual re-synthesising of their own archive, recycling, reworking, reframing, fragmenting and elaborating on elements from previous works.