Florence Peake
RITE : ON THIS PLIANT BODY WE SLIP OUR WOW!
Exhibition open Saturday 12 May – Sunday 2 September 2018
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
On Sunday 6 May, the De La Warr Pavilion presented the premiere of RITE: on this pliant body we slip our wow!, a performance created by Florence Peake with a cast of five dancers in a bed of six tonnes of clay.
The performance and exhibition forms an expanded body of work reinterpreting a pivotal moment in modernism’s history: Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. This notorious production provoked riots when it opened in 1913.
The mound of clay that remains in the gallery from the performance will now be the centrepiece of a new exhibition featuring a painted frieze encircling the gallery walls, with sound by Beatrice Dillon.
Drawing on the The Rite Of Spring’s rich legacy, RITE reclaims triumphant physicality as political statement– presenting the primal body as a powerful force in the struggle for change.
Supported by Arts Council England and De La Warr Pavilion.
Initial research for RITE was supported by the Jerwood Choreographic Research Project 2016-17 with partners Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Cambridge Junction, Dance4, Greenwich Dance, LIFT, London College of Fashion, Sadler’s Wells, Site Gallery, Tintype Gallery and by public funding through Arts Council England. It was developed through residencies at Somerset House Studios, Site Gallery and Cass Sculpture Foundation in partnership with West Dean College and through a solo show at Studio Leigh.
