04 October 2019
Platform Theatre
Central Saint Martins
1 Handyside St
Kings Cross
London
HQ: (I feel so Mezzaniney) (2018) is a collaboration between artist & musician Steven Warwick and dance artist/choreographer Carlos María Romero, developed initially at the FUGA residency in Zaragoza and later presented also in Volksbühne in Berlin, Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh, Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich and at the co-working space Second Home for London Contemporary Music Festival.
This performance is a mutation of Warwick’s ‘Mezzanine’ performance series, each of which responds to the architecture in which it happens, in conjunction here and previously with María Romero’s interest in go-go as a form of work linked to performative economies and social spectacle.
As per Velazquez’s painting “Las Meninas”, dancers (Las Mezzaninas) are maids-in-waiting, performing labour and acting out the conflicts found in, and on, platform-capitalism, where self-care routines and community-building are monetised and gaslighting fragments trust. Sound is dissected and reduced to the minimal rhythms found on runways and in club spaces.
If go-go is a dance form that often objectifies the body into a spectacle to be gazed at by the voyeur, in this fictive HQ the body’s pose becomes ambient; less to be experienced, more part of the structure. Warwick and María Romero deliberately inhabit the Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins, UAL, as an ecology where bodies and sound are temporal sculptures. Reflecting upon contemporary feelings of isolation and community building, they posit questions of agency and conspicuous displays of social interactions in an age of unsettling populism.
For “Constructing the Mezzaniney”, Warwick & María Romero will present a new live performance piece, which is a result of a five-day workshop with a group of students studying various programmes at Central Saint Martins, UAL. This project will involve new scenes being developed in collaboration with the students of CSM, which extend the Mezzaniney project and repositions the site of the fictive Mezzaniney to another new location, involving new collaborations across disciplines.