COLLISION
Created by Melissa Gordon
Performers Rita Pulga and Julieta Kilgelmann
In 1916, the British artist, playwright and actress Mina Loy wrote a one-page play entitled Collision—an innovative piece of writing, composed mainly of stage directions, describing the transformation of an interior by a machine and a single character known simply as “Man". The play is significant as it is, as academic Julie Schmid writes in her essay Mina Loy’s Futurist Theatre (1996), “one of the only feminist responses to and re-workings of the futurist dramatic aesthetic”. However, while Loy enjoyed relative recognition in her lifetime, she has largely been overlooked by the mainstream artistic canon until recently.
Melissa Gordon’s enactments of Collision are the first known stagings of Loy’s play. The first performance was during the exhibition Fallible Space, at the Bluecoat, Liverpool in 2016 on Collision’s centenary. At the Swiss Church, Gordon will work with the same group of corporeal mimes to manipulate a set she has designed, built and painted, which assembles itself into a large abstract painting. The mimes physically construct the painting with their own gestures, pulling, lifting and pushing to arrange prop-like gestural forms Gordon has fabricated. For Gordon, Loy’s play is a feminist imagining of modern space from 1916: a kinetic zone where bodies and objects are props in an unstable architecture, offering up endless possibilities to this day. The mimes will be activated by sound made by Morten Norbye Halvorsen and Chris Evans.
Gordon’s practice is primarily paintings and silkscreens that deal with the relation of a body to paint, and is focused on the language and politics of gesture. Her work has often confronted and challenged the canonical view of Modern art. This performance is no exception, attempting to introduce a lesser known work by a female artist to contemporary audiences and highlighting corporeal mime as a forgotten modernist language—a discipline which greatly influenced modern dance and theatre.
Photographs by Sam Nightingale
Thursday 4 October 2018
The Swiss Church in London
