2021 ADRIAN HOWELLS AWARD RECIPIENT
NWANDO EBIZIE:

EXTREME UNCTION VOL.2: AN AUDIO JOURNEY

AUDIO WORK FOLLOWED BY ZOOM EVENT
Sun 23 May 2021
7pm (60-90 mins)
Please note this event is for BIPOC only - please see details below.
This will be a limited capacity event, and requires booking a space in advance.

This performance is highly sounbd-based

ACCESS: The work is predominantly sound-based with minimal visuals. Assistance is available if Zoom is an inaccessible platform for you.

An hour-long exploration of radical care, pleasure and transformation for BIPOC bodies – a binaural audio journey, for headphones in a darkened room – followed by a 30-minute cinematic coming-together to regroup, where you will feel heard, supported and held.

We invite you to join us in recognising the urgency of care, of pleasure, of transformation, for BIPOC bodies. We present a revolutionary journey into the psyche, a washing away of our supposed shared reality, a gathering together of the fragments of which we’re comprised, transmuting into something rich and strange and new. Diving deep into our unconscious desires, our buried joys, the top/bottom of our collective to-do lists. This is a cleansing, a preparation, an opening for the new cycle: the universal cycle of life-death-life. Decide what your transformation will be. Prepare for the liberation of pleasure, for viridity, for new life.

Nwando and Jennifer draw on performance art backgrounds, multidisciplinary sensory practices, neurodivergent perspectives and visions of Afro futures across time and space to delve into the radically sensual world of the 12th-century Benedictine abbess, composer, artist, writer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The death-and-rebirth Anchorite rituals of Hildegard’s childhood, through modern eyes, offer a profound connection to the elements, to the natural world and our bodies’ place in it. In these rituals we feel light flowing into light, water into water, and our bodies as vessels through which all things flow. We journey to a magical place – a quiet, dark place of self-care and love – through to an infinite roaring ocean. An opening out of the individual to the collective, where we begin to perceive the eternity of infinity. And a return to ourselves, transformed. 

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: Read before booking.

This event is only open to Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC.) We understand that not everybody will use this term to describe themselves, please see further detail below: 

Please only attend this event if you are a person who is racialized with experience of racism, which may include People of African or Caribbean heritage, People of Asian Heritage (South, East, Southeast, Central) People of Middle Eastern, South American, Islander or Indigenous heritage.

It is important that you do not attend or book this event if the above does not apply to you. You will be asked to confirm this during and after booking the event.

You might also like to watch this preparation video before attending:

Multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie creates Afrofuturist speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installations. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for radical change and radical transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, electronic music, and her own neurodiversity and Nigerian heritage.

Her work has been commissioned by and shown across the UK and internationally, including the Barbican, Brighton Festival, Science Gallery Melbourne, Institute of Contemporary Arts, BALTIC, Site Gallery, Humber Street Gallery, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, London Sinfonietta, Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro) and Blok (Zurich).

Later this year, her debut album The Swan – a genre-bending work of sonic fiction mythologising an imagined matriarchal community – will be released on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records, with the single ‘I Seduce’ out in May 2021.

Nwando Ebizie is the recipient of the 2021 Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance.

https://www.nwandoebizie.com/

Jennifer Muteteli aka Wennefer
Performer, deviser and director, creating movement centred Live Art and Theatre. Now based in southern Portugal where she co-created and built the multifunctional site of the Beekeepers, applying Biophilic design to create a space for artists to work in nature. Her work centres on transformation, inspiring people to have a more vivid experience of life. Muteteli absorbs and harnesses nature's rhythms and bridges them with current thought and future visions, applying her animal instincts and intelligent intuition to create art that affects change internally and externally. She is a qualified hypnotherapist and somatic teacher.

Christopher Bangs: Cello

Supported by Something to Aim For, Buzzcut, Take Me Somewhere, BAC with further support from LADA and University of Glasgow.

Photo: Claire Shovelton