GABRIELA BERNABEU gives an experiential account of a night at Somerset House Studios, looking back on three standout features.
It is desolate in a poorly-illuminated street somewhere off Strand. Turning a corner, I am swallowed by the 8 pm October sky, pitch black if not for the incidental full moon. Finally, a towering three-walled building comes into view, strikingly lit against the surrounding dark. I’d come to Somerset House Studios for their annual AGM evening; spanning movement, music, installation, and poetry, the event’s contents remained somewhat obscured, with resident artists and featured collaborators just ungoogleable enough. Outside the New Wing, a queue is forming. I make my way to the front only to realise nobody actually has tickets. ‘“I’m on the guest list,” they repeat one after another, “with the artist [xxx]?”. I start to get the deal.
Inside, maze-like hallways give way to unlabelled, closed doors—I check my program discreetly to try and figure out what lies behind each. I settle for room G30, housing filmmaker and artist Noah Bador and dancer Violet Savage in collaborative performance re:TR/EAD. Shut and guarded, as though sacramental, a confused group lingers outside: the space is too small and already full, we’re told, so I miss the first fifteen minutes. Eventually, I’m let into a dark, confined room, audience standing en masse from end to end—I wonder where the artists are. Catching the tail-end of a black-and-white projection, featuring a girl dancing in mesmerising (albeit rather creepy) movement, I begin to feel I really have walked into some kind of a ritual. The feeling remains for the duration of the performance. Sound, light, and space are deftly wielded as Bador appears from one end holding a flashlight to his face, and reciting an emotionally-charged poem, bird sounds emanating from a speaker.
“Not preaching to the choir just holding things in place…I know I’m preaching to the choir”
As he manoeuvres around the audience, a girl is plucked out by a spotlight. I recognise her from the projection. Savage begins her dance again, this time amid the forest of upright torsos—spatially fluid, yet without once merely brushing a limb. A succession of scenes unfold: at one end, the couple sit by a windowsill, newspaper and writing pad in hand; at another, Bador faces a mirror on the wall, backdropped by the sea of heads behind. These are interrupted by entrancing sequences of movement and spoken word, as the two seamlessly tread between spaces.
The forty-minute-long performance concludes with another projection: here, empty streets dissolve into shifting images of amorphous, coloured pixels, scored to ambient noise and faint echoes of unintelligible conversation and laughter. I leave the room absolved.
Intimate spaces seem to recur through the night, as I am streamed along the current of visitors down into the River Rooms, where the crowd pools along three interconnected chambers. Multidisciplinary artists Florence Peake and Eve Stainton are set to perform their long-anticipated Practice 1—though there’s nothing here besides the rising hum of voices. Soon, clad head to toe in black, Peake pushes through and begins taping the floor: empty space is carved into the room, the audience shaped around the precipice of an unsteadily-defined stage. Stainton soon joins, catalysing a series of interwoven, indeterminate movements, which are both enticing and uncomfortable to watch. Practice 1 is built on earlier performance Slug Horizons (2017), to which nudity and audience participation were central. Now fully clothed, Peake and Stainton paradoxically strip the act “down to its formal conventions”: what was formerly an exposé of the explicit lesbian body remains here a comment on human connection, physically reliant on a careful negotiation between weight and balance. A twofold play on this negotiation is manifest: the body as point of communication, the audience as symbiotic, mediative vessel—both fragile, both erodible.
It is this threat of erosion which precedes me as I sneak into Imran Perretta’s A Riot in Three Acts, alluring for its lacking crowd. Entering what appears to be a desolate clearing, I tentatively opt for the less intimidating, off-side room first. In a vitrine sits a copy of the Daily Mirror dated August 09, 2011, with the headline “YOB RULE” superimposed onto an image of a woman leaping out of a burning building; adjacent to it, a miniature model of a nondescript site; and to its far right, a collage of negative film, amidst which is an orange-tinted screenshot of King George I’s Riot Act (1714), typed on a MacBook computer. This all begins to feel slightly absurd as I pivot to find a similarly glass-encased BlackBerry, playing a video of what I presume to be the same fire, its flames blazing so hot against the tiny, low-resolution screen they view almost infrared.
In search of answers, I walk back into the large space to realise it’s the full-scale installation of the miniature model I’ve just skimmed over, and in fact not a forgotten back-room of Somerset—though it certainly seems like one. Perretta’s third act is an ostensibly abandoned film set: two concrete benches and two planters—unnaturally large for mere withering snags—over gravel, bound by a white picket fence; a muted oil painting of a building with “House of Reeves” lettered on its front, flattened by the visible artifice of the wooden scaffolding that sustains it, and the three-dimensional reconstruction foregrounding it. Complete with ceiling stage lights and surround-sound speakers transmitting some sort of requiem, I am reminded of the feeling of walking through a ghost town in the north of Spain or passing an abandoned circus on the side of a Californian freeway—someone, or something, lingers here. I am reminded too that a requiem is played for the repose of dead souls, and learn later that a string quartet had been performing Perretta’s composition of the score, though I think the way I encountered it—spatially inconclusive, artificially reproduced—left a more bitter after-taste.
Yet, the site’s deadness is interrupted by the reminders of life strewn across its gravel: Lucozade bottle caps, bic lighters, cardboard scraps, crisp packets. And somewhere in Croydon, on Reeves corner, sits a similar derelict wasteland. Eroded and impotent, though not quite dead, it remains haunted by the past: the arson of the historic House of Reeves furniture shop, the sweeping London riots of 2011. But a liminal suburban purgatory, disorienting on its own, turns even more surrealist in this setting, Somerset’s imperial past haunting its plasticky imitation, too.
I leave with the uneasy feeling that any of the spaces I’ve encountered can just as easily wear away, and find myself back in the night’s dark, left only with my passing refuge.
Featured image: Imran Peretta, A Riot in Three Acts. Courtesy of Somerset House Studios.
