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Heavy handed, we crush the moment

Heavy handed, we crush the moment is a new commission by Last Yearz Interesting Negro, the performance project of London-based artist and dancer Jamila Johnson-Small.

Heavy handed, we crush the moment is performance as event. A new work by Last Yearz Interesting Negro, performed with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, acts as the host each night for a changing combination of performances from invited guest artists (keyon gaskin or Antonija Livingstone & Mich Cota) and DJs (Elijah* or Planningtorock). Each night’s line-up is different and the work is always moving within the unknown.

Heavy handed, we crush the moment is an evening meditating on infection and the ways in which we are porous, always influenced and transformed by our environment. An attempt to think about ways of coexisting without assimilation and dominance, Last Yearz Interesting Negro’s work swells and subsides around the guest interventions as the audience shift orientation throughout the evening. 

Ideas and instances of decomposition – as necessary, as violent, as healing – run through the work. The soundtrack is created from commissioned music by seven different artists, all working from a poem by Last Yearz Interesting Negro. This poem features in all performances in their ongoing sequence of works known as FURY (including Fury1 and FuryZ). These performances are concerned with boundaries, seeking to question or re-locate the spectacle of the dancing body and intimacy in performance. The experience of being overwhelmed is used as a material and strategy for opening space and inviting movement – of thought, of body, of feeling, of space/time as frequency/vibration.

Here, the poem is ripped apart and rearranged, rearticulated and reimagined by the voices and minds of +TETRA+, ABENÇOADA, Rebecca Bellantoni, Andrew Kerton & Hannah Holland, David Panos, Verity Susman and Young Nettle. These tracks form a landscape and atmosphere, through the sound design by Josh Anio Grigg. The performance environment is created in collaboration with design collective Studio Augmenta and lighting designer Jackie Shemesh, with additional set and costume design by Agf HYDRA.

Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Muñoz-Newsome receive acupuncture at the beginning of each performance; the needles used during this practice stimulate the meridian pathways of the performers, offering a vision of interior space and facilitating movement with and from these internal lines of power.

Conceived as a work for now – navigating entanglement, complexity, emotionality and movements of power within bodies – Heavy handed, we crush the moment focuses on the sensory impact of the live encounter for performers and audience alike. This performance commission is a loose response to our current exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art.

You are welcome to sit or stand in the space, using the set as seating. Chairs are available on request.

Line-up

Thu 28 Nov, 10pm–1am
Last Yearz Interesting Negro with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
Antonija Livingstone & Mich Cota
Planningtorock

Fri 29 Nov, 10pm–1am
Last Yearz Interesting Negro with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
keyon gaskin
Planningtorock

Sat 30 Nov, 10pm–1am
Last Yearz Interesting Negro with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
Antonija Livingstone & Mich Cota
Elijah*

Sun 1 Dec, 4–7pm
Last Yearz Interesting Negro with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
keyon gaskin
Elijah*

Artists and Collaborators

Last Yearz Interesting Negro is the performance project of London-based artist Jamila Johnson-Small, whose practice is always relational, moving across spaces, contexts, roles and collaborations. Last Yearz Interesting Negro works with the dramaturgies of sculpture, electronic music, feelings of being overwhelmed, syncopation, internal narratives, texture, trance states and a public, to build atmospheric landscapes through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Resultant choreographies are stage-space/dreamscape/battleground, working through questions of entanglement, alienation and sensation. 

Thinking cumulatively, the work gathers and transmits information by inviting others in, crafting compositions in various constellations that build spaces for dancing, performance, conversation and reflection. These spaces might hold the multiple and contradictory, and consider movement and transformation as inevitable. All of their work is informed by their dance practice, which acts as a tool for divination, decoding messages from an oracular body that are read on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic levels. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement. 

The work is a kind of world-building that deals in intensities and harnesses these forces to open up or to close spaces, to understand, expose, complicate or sidestep covert structures that seek to organise bodies and our living. A big part of their research is towards making space to be together without having to assimilate. Choreographic space is considered as social situation in order to facilitate immersive, emergent spaces for performer/s and spectator/s. 

Planningtorock – aka Jam Rostron – is a Bolton-born Berlin-based singer-songwriter, composer, producer and director with three critically acclaimed studio albums of left-field dance to their name – not to mention various collaborations, operas, film scores and remixes. A self-taught, non-binary, working-class musician, they’ve spent a decade plus queering sound and vision as Planningtorock.

Credits

Commissioned Artist
Last Yearz Interesting Negro

Performance
Last Yearz Interesting Negro with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

The performance by Last Yearz Interesting Negro with Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome incorporates the following artwork:
Candice Lin and Patrick Staff
Hormonal Fog (Study), 2016-2019
Hacked fog machine, dried herbs, herbal tincture, wood, plastic, miscellaneous hardware. Dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Artists, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and Commonwealth and Council.

Barbican Staff
Lotte Johnson, Associate Curator
Jon Astbury, Assistant Curator
Bernie Whittle, Assistant Producer
Caroline Hall, Production Administrator

Many thanks to Rhoda Boateng, Eloi Guri, Joe Hornsby, Jake Manley at Void, Cuan Roche and Steve Snooks at SubPac, Phoebe Collings-James and Zinzi Buchanan.

Guests Artists 
keyon gaskin, Antonija Livingstone & Mich Cota

DJs
Elijah*, Planningtorock

Sound Design
Josh Anio Grigg

Sound Commissions 
+TETRA+, ABENÇOADA, Rebecca Bellantoni, Andrew Kerton & Hannah Holland, David Panos, Verity Susman, Young Nettle

Lighting Design
Jackie Shemesh

Set Design
Studio Augmenta

Costume Design and Hanging Structure
Agf HYDRA (HYDRA Sartorial Latex Uniform Offsprings)

Acupuncturist
Mary Feliciano

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