Th / 28.11.19 / 19.30
Performance
«Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings»
Mit Sophie Seita

On the occasion of ‹Bauhaus and Photography›, Sophie Seita will present a shorter version of her performance ‹Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings›, inspired in part by Oskar Schlemmer's ‹Triadic Ballet› and the abstract costumes and interdisciplinary dialogues characteristic of Bauhaus.

Seita’s conceptual closet drama is the third piece in My Little Enlightenment Plays, her ongoing queer-feminist project that re-writes and responds to various Enlightenment source materials in the form of collaborative multi-media performances and installations that include poetry, choreography, sound recordings, sculptural objects, projections, and videos. Translating and challenging the Enlightenment’s opposition between sentiment and rationality, the piece harnesses the experimental spirit of things that don’t quite work and are thus exactly right and fizzingly oblique, toying with current assumptions about seriousness, sexual identity, formal difficulty, and fun. It tickles whimsy out of grandeur, opulence out of bathos, and the magical out of melodrama, showing that deliberate artifice can be an affective space and vivid presence in which to dwell and be held. In the spirit of things that don’t quite work and are thus exactly aligned or fizzingly oblique, the performance presents humorous and moving encounters and projections on the threshold of pet names, politics, and poetry.

Sophie Seita (* 1987 in Germany) lives and works in Cambridge and New York.

Emilia Galotti's Colouring Book of Feelings, Art Night, Oxo Tower, London, 2018
Photo: Guzel Photography Services

Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers, Bold Tendencies, London, 2017
Photo: Natalia Jaeger

Emilia Galotti's Colouring Book of Feelings (video work, ongoing)
Video still: Lanny Jordan Jackson