Materiality Will Be Rethought

Joe Moran

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    Materiality Will Be Rethought by Joe Moran presented in the exhibition Something Necessary and Useful by Carlos Bunga. Commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and produced by Dance Art Foundation. Dancers: Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes and Sean Murray. Photography: Camilla Greenwell.

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Past Event


This event was on Thu 3 Dec, 7pm

Performance

Artist and choreographer Joe Moran presents a new performance commission conceived in dialogue with Carlos Bunga’s exhibition Something Necessary and Useful (on display 21 Jan – 6 Sep 2020).

Conceived as a site-specific work, Materiality Will Be Rethought was developed as a live performance within the sculptural environment, now reimagined as a film.

The piece navigates dance’s potential to animate and disrupt architectural space, the physicality of the dancer’s voice and the moving body as a site of political unrest and complex subjectivities. Moran’s choreography offers new contextual frameworks within which Something Necessary and Useful can be experienced. In turn the sculptural environment created by Bunga creates a space of friction, interrogated by the present bodies of dancers with whom Moran works.

The film launches on Thursday 3 December at 7pm with a Q&A featuring Joe Moran and dancers Temi Ajose-Cutting, Sean Murray, Thomas Heyes and Eve Stainton.

Following the premiere, the film will be available to view until Thursday 20 December.

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Materiality Will Be Rethought by Joe Moran, presented in the exhibition Something Necessary and Useful by Carlos Bunga. Commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and produced by Dance Art Foundation with additional support from the Arts Council England Emergency Relief Fund and private patrons.

The commission drew upon research undertaken during residencies at Wysing Arts Centre, LaunchPad LaB, The Lowry and with postgraduate students at London Contemporary Dance School.

Texts excerpts are taken from The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee (2009) and Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993). Created with and performed by dancers Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes, Sean Murray and Eve Stainton. Photography by Camilla Greenwell.

Production Credits

Director and choreographer: Joe Moran. Dancers: Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes, Sean Murray and Eve Stainton. Editor: Sue Giovanni. Cinematography: Alana Mejia Gonzalez. Producers: Joe Moran and Rodrigo Peñalosa Pita. Curator: Jane Scarth. Costume design: Joe Moran. Sound recordist: Nick Olorenshaw. Sound editor: Pip Norton. Camera assistant: Guillem Zamora. Steady camera operator: Matteo Zenini Research dancers: Hannah Adams, Flavien Cornilleau, Greta Gauhe, Alicja Nauman, Lucie Palazot, Keity Pook, Fanny Pouillo and Elena Rocio Chacon Sampano. Carlos Bunga: Something Useful and Necessary: Artist: Carlos Bunga. Curator: Emily Butler. Curatorial Assistant: Ines Costa.

Developed with support from Arts Council England Emergency Response Fund and the Joe Moran Performance Patron circle: Frank Kirkhaar and those who wish to remain anonymous.

Thanks to Piers Quérée, Jérôme Monnot, Greg Barth, Robyn Cabaret, Martin Hargreaves, Hilary Stainsby, Martin Richard Coppell, Florence Peake and to the project dancers, crew and supporters.

About Joe Moran

Joe Moran is a British-Irish artist and choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating theatre and gallery performance, curatorial projects, lecture-performance, drawing and spray paint works. He is Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation through which his performance and curatorial work is produced, and worked internationally as a dancer with choreographers Deborah Hay (USA), Stina Nyberg (Sweden) and Siobhan Davies (UK) amongst others.

Recent commissions and performances include Sadler’s Wells (2019), NottDance at Nottingham Contemporary (2019), The Lowry (2019), London Contemporary Dance School (2019), Wysing Arts Centre (2018), Bluecoat (2018) coinciding with the Liverpool Biennial, Kettle’s Yard (2018), Sadler’s Wells (2017), Delfina Foundation (2016), Block Universe/ fig-2 at the ICA in collaboration with Eva Rothschild (2015) and David Roberts Art Foundation (Frieze 2014).

Joe contributed to the publication Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum and his essay On The Act of Dancing was published in a collection of commissioned texts coinciding with his first performances at Sadler’s Wells.

Access Information

The Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making all of our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please contact publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.  Further information about access at the Gallery is available here.

About This Event 

  • This event takes place online only 
  • You can access this event for free through this web page and also on the Whitechapel Gallery’s YouTube Channel, here. 
  • This event is suitable for those over the age of 16 
  • We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event 
  • The live content will be captioned, however this is provided by artificially intelligent software. As a result some of the captions may not be perfectly accurate. The captioning will be visible to all viewers during these parts.
  • Pre-recorded content will not be captioned, but a transcript will be available from this web page.
  • As the event is scheduled for a total of one hour, we will not take a rest break. 
  • As the event is being live streamed, you can access it from your home if you have access to an internet connection 
  • The film ‘Materiality Will Be Rethought’ will be available for two weeks following the event.
  • We cannot confirm if the Q&A part of the event will remain online after the event.

This information will be updated where required.

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Carlos Bunga Something Necessary and Useful

21 Jan – 6 Sep 2020

Carlos Bunga (b. 1976, Portugal) creates monumental structures out of everyday materials to propose architecture as transitory and corporeal in his first major UK commission.