Fiona James, The Incident, A Diagram For Whitstable, 2014. Photo: Bernard G Mills

Fiona James, The Incident, A Diagram For Whitstable, 2014. Photo: Bernard G Mills

Fiona James
The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable

Saturday 31 May 2014
13:00—13:45

The Beach

Fiona James works predominantly as a choreographer using performance to address how explicit social structuring might allow and support alternative methods of knowledge production. She works across gallery, theatre and education.

This event will take as its starting point the enacted simulations of disaster situations that beach lifeguards use as training exercises. It will examine how attention plays out in heightened conditions where individuals are expected to think for themselves and, at the same time, to respond to the situation as a team. Functioning somewhere between a live experiment and an embodied diagram, the work will approach the performative space as a piece of active research. The presence of the audience will subtly feed into the piece, affecting how it’s read and what’s learnt from its presentation. Using exercises influenced by theatre, dance and educational training, The Incident will also look at how liveness relates to the function of memory, intentionally courting humour and happenstance along the way.

The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable, is a co-commission by Whitstable Biennale and Collaborative Research Group.

The performance will last for approx 45 minutes.

Fiona James, The Incident, A Diagram For Whitstable, 2014. Photo: Bernard G Mills
Fiona James, The Incident, A Diagram For Whitstable, 2014. Photo: Bernard G Mills