INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS LONDON
eye to eye (dreaming hyper in visibility) is a choreographic performance and installation by artist Jose Funnell that centres the gaze as a material as well as a mechanism of power. Underscored by the shifting dynamics of looking and being watched, eye to eye alchemises movement, sound, presence and moving image to conjure what is lost and what is opened in a world dominated by vision.
Grappling with the politics of looking, seeing and fantasizing: the struggle to visualise the new when saturated with phantom images of the past; the potential misalignment of personal and collective utopias; and the fact that increased visibility does not equate to power.
Using somatic practices, social dance, and various technologies of the gaze, the performance celebrates the radical potential of embodiment as a site of exchange in service of collective change. It asks what needs to be exorcised from the imaginative landscape, both from the technologies that reproduce it and the bodies that contain it. Binaries burn, and in the ashes, we rise to dream of a world unbound by the limits of the screen.
eye to eye has been created with and performed by Amani, Pierre and Wet Mess. With set design by Rose Moya which features a classical theatre drape and live projection surface remade in scaffolding mesh and drenched in a clay slip.
Costume design and styling by Justin Carlo Villamor and lighting design by Edward Saunders. Composed through a collaborative exchange, the work features an original soundscape scored and spatialised by Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones.
Costume design and styling by Justin Carlo Villamor and lighting design by Edward Saunders. Composed through a collaborative exchange, the work features an original soundscape scored and spatialised by Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones.
Credits-Performed by: Jose Funnell, Amani, Pierre & Wet Mess
Set Design: Rose Moya
Lighting Design: Edward Saunders
Costume Design: Justin Carlo Villamor
Sound Design: Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones