Audio
25 Jul 2023
The Body
Soft Life: The Body
00:00 / 00:00
How can the soft body challenge social hierarchies?
We turn our gaze towards the soft life of the body and unpack new ways of thinking about embodiment in artistic practice with Somerset House studios artists Florence Peake on radical softness in somatics, choreographer and writer Dr Martin Hargreaves on the history of protest through softness in dance, Ilona Sagar on rendering bodies hard through architecture and disabled film maker Jameisha Prescod on the colonial history of black pain.
Featuring
Martin Hargreaves is a dramaturg and writer and his interests vacillate between boredom and hysteria. His research connects around performance and performativity and includes the recent histories of contemporary dance, queering practices and camp misunderstandings. He is Head of Choreographic School at Sadler's Wells in London
Somerset House Studios resident Florence Peake is a visual artist, choreographer and dancer using drawing, painting and sculpture materials with the moving body.
Ilona Sagar is a cross disciplinary artist, filmmaker and Somerset House Studios resident, working with a diverse range of media spanning moving-image, text, performance and assemblage.
Listen to the Soft Life series
In this four-part series we take the idea of ‘soft life’ as a launch off point to explore alternative ideas around work, time, the body and ecology emanating from Somerset House and beyond. We talk to radical thinkers, artists and writers, who are carving out these new ways of being in the body, centring the soft and the in-between, finding space for rest and looking at ways of expanding time beyond the clock.
Credits
Soft Life is produced by Alannah Chance and Axel Kacoutié
With sound by Axel Kacoutié and additional music by Ellen Zweig
Supported by
Rothschild Foundation