Saturday 3 September, 2 - 9.45pm

For the third and final event in our Summercamp series, artist Sonia Boyce has developed the day-long symposium and live music event Two steps to the Left… in collaboration with current artist-in-residence Evan Ifekoya. 

Find a podcast of this event here.

The symposium sits within Wysing’s over-arching programme for 2016 Wysing Poly, which explores the legacy of the Polytechnic as a site of radical art practice in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

In keeping with the theme of the radical art practice of the 1970s and 80s, Two steps to the Left… takes US artist Adrian Piper’s groundbreaking interactive performance Funk Lessons (1982-85) as a point of departure, to explore dance and movement as a political act; asking what role does dance and music play in the creation of momentary communities, of dissent and assent.

Two steps to the Left… will include presentations, workshops and discussions including contributions from artists and academics including Ain Bailey, Adelaide Bannerman, Sonia Boyce, Yassmin V Foster, Evan Ifekoya, Melika Ngombe Kolongo and Zinzi Minott and live music performances from Ain Bailey, ORETHA, and Nkisi.

This symposium is now full but you are welcome to join us from 8pm for DJ sets by Ain Bailey, ORETHA and Nkisi.

Wysing's cafe is open from 10am to 4pm serving a range of hot and cold food, teas and coffees.

2pm – Welcome from Wysing Director Donna Lynas. Introduction and overview from Sonia Boyce

2.30pm – Thinking enough to let it go, a guided movement improvisation devised and led by Zinzi Minott and Evan Ifekoya, followed by an in-conversation and discussion.

3.30pm – Yassmin V Foster's presentation will highlight and discuss the ability to recognise black dance, even when it is not being performed by a ‘black’ body, momentarily suspending the concept of blackness. To illuminate a better description of the form, enhance dance competence, and the value of the art. Ultimately questioning, not what we know, but how we know it? Followed by questions and discussion

4.30pm – Short break

4.45pm – Adelaide Bannerman gives a presentation on Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1982-85) with guided active listening and dancing. Followed by questions and discussion

5.30pm – Ain Bailey gives a presentation on spaces for collective gathering. Followed by questions and discussion

6.30pm – Melika Ngombe Kolongo gives a presentation on NON, a politically minded collective and record label dedicated to music being created by African artists and the diaspora.

7pm -– Wrap up with input from Leyla Reynolds from Gal-Dem who will be live blogging/illustrating throughout the day via the Wysing Instagram account

7.15pm – Nigerian food available at £5 per person, by Eko Kitchen, Cambridge

8pm – DJ set by Ain Bailey

8.30pm – DJ set by ORETHA

9pm – DJ set by Nkisi 

9.45pm – Taxis leave for Cambridge station

Ain Bailey is a sound artist and DJ. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, where she recently completed a Leverhulme Trust Artist-In-Residence. Her compositions encompass field recordings and found sounds and are inspired by ideas and reflections on silence and absence, architectural urban spaces, and feminist activism. Her electroacoustic compositions are created for a variety of forms, including multichannel and mixed media installations, moving image soundtracks, live performance and dance. Works include the soundtrack for the film Oh Adelaide!, a collaboration with Sonia Boyce. Between 2013 and 2015, Oh Adelaide exhibited at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, CCA-Glasgow, Tate Britain, The Kitchen, New York, and the  Whitechapel Gallery.  Bailey has created soundtracks for the award winning video Red She Said, 2011, by Kerstin Schroedinger and Mareike Bernien; Jimmy Robert's Abolibibelo performance at Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland, 2015 and Descendances du Nu performance and installation at CAC-Synagogue de Delme, Delme, France, 2016. Commissions have come from mouvoir: a Cologne-based dance company, to create sound works for inclusion in the productions Beautiful Me and Cactus Bar, which toured extensively throughout Europe. In 2014, Bailey collaborated with the MichaelDouglas Kollektiv and composed and performed a soundtrack for a new dance production Here Is You And Not Me, Cologne, Germany. Recent compositions include a suite entitled AGORA, 2015, which were presented in situ at the British Museum, St. George’s, Bloomsbury and The Rio cinema in Dalston.

Adelaide Bannerman has worked predominantly freelance as a project manager, curator and consultant for UK arts institutions working transnationally with critical and creative practitioners, for the past 18 years, including the International Curators Forum (ICF), Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), African and Asian Visual Artists Archive (AAVAA), Tate, Live Art Development Agency, and Arts Council England. She is currently the Archive Coordinator at Autograph ABP, working on the three-year photography research project, The Missing Chapter and her research interests are focused on valorising performative gestures and engagements with live and visual performance art, and privileging the process behind individual and group autonomic practices. Since 2010, Bannerman tentatively explored, noted and when possible, co-opted movement and improvisatory methods as part of her curatorial practice.

Sonia Boyce (MBE, RA) emerged as an artist in the early 1980s as a key figure in the Black-British art scene, with artworks that spoke about race and gender. Since the 1990s out of the spontaneous performances of others she uses the documented process to make multi-media artworks. Recent exhibitions include: Speaking in Tongues, CCA-Glasgow (2014);S/N: Signal to Noise, Whitney Museum of Modern Art/The Kitchen, New York (2015);Liberties – 40 Years Since the Sex Discrimination Act, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2015); and, All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Boyce is Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, Chair of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London and is the Principal Investigator for a 3-year AHRC-funded project ‘Black Artists and Modernism’. In 2016, she was elected as a Royal Academician.

Yassmin V Foster is all things movement and dance. Her career spans practice, production and research. She is influenced by her heritage and experience of black culture, in particular the artistic expression of dance and music. Yassmin has contributed to the arts and cultural sector in the Britain since 1992, she is a champion for interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and multi art form collaborative journeys, and advocates for dance as intangible cultural heritage. She combines her artistic flare with sound knowledge and experience in finance, arts management and statistical analysis. Affording her upward mobility in producing work that is aesthetic, social and economic. Yassmin works in live arenas, for online media and outdoor events to develop artists and audiences. Since graduating from MA Choreomundus - International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage in 2015, Yassmin continues to present her research, which has featured as part of: Collegium for African Diaspora Dance conference - Duke University (North Carolina, US); Black Dance Research Project - Lyric Theatre Hammersmith (London), funded by Arts Council England; Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement conference - Bristol University (Bristol); and ADAD Open Stage event - Pegg Studio Theatre (Bristol).

Melika Ngombe Kolongo was raised in Belgium, but she’s now based in London, where she’s adopted the name Nkisi and serves as one-third of the international triumvirate piloting NON, a politically minded collective and record label dedicated to music being created by African artists and the diaspora. In comparison to the sounds being created by her partners Chino Amobi and Angel-Ho, Nkisi traffics in higher tempos, melding elements of techno and electro with African melodic sensibilities into energetic dancefloor weapons. Beyond her own music and DJing, her work with NON has quickly garnered plenty of attention, as the crew’s web-savvy approach, international membership and outspoken politics have found an audience, giving a voice to like-minded children of the diaspora around the globe.

Evan Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. Recent exhibitions include A Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town; Okun Song at StudioRCA, London, 2016; All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Embodied Spaces, FramerFramed, De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam – both curated by Christine Eyene, Studio Voltaire OPEN, London, all 2015; and 30 years of the Future, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2014. Recent performances and screenings include Sticky Black: A Broadcast at Jerwood Space and A Score, A Groove, A Phantom: The Extended Play at Whitstable Biennale 2016. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11. Ifekoya currently lives and works in London.

Shenece Oretha (ORETHA) is an artist, DJ and noisemaker from London. Her mixture of music and samples explore the ways in which DJing is a form of storytelling and lecturing, and allows a commune between the present and other space/time. Some recent events she has participated and collaborated on, in her converging capacities as artist and DJ, are Swaying Feels with Black Sirens (2016); Sounding the Great Hall at Goldsmiths (2016); Video Vexens at HUB16 (2016); SOUNDS LIKE at the ICA (2016) and Against the Theatre of Distance in the Winkelwiese Theatre, Zurich (2016).

Leyla Reynolds is the in house artist and fully time arty woman at gal-dem.com, a magazine written by over 50 women of colour for all to enjoy. She is also a recent Politics graduate from the University of Bristol and a freelance illustrator. Her visual work concerns the political and her written work also concerns the political and its impact on creating radical practices of art. She is currently research assistant to the upcoming book Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement.

Zinzi Minott is a Laban Graduate, a Random Dance intern and scholarship receiver. She has received choreographic commissions from immigrants and animals, Rokeya, Rich Mix, and The Iranian Arts Festival, and a recipient of ImpulsTanz danceWeb Scholarship -2015. Her work considers political themes of colonialism, race and the Black British identities, how dance is used as a mode of resistance and political protest as well as contemporary globalisation contributing to discourse of the body through the body. She is a co- founder along with Hamish MacPherson, and Jamila Johnson- Small of The Rebel Man Standard, which along with her creation “Movement for Queers” was described as “One of the best things in Dance” by Judith Mackrell in the Guardian Newspaper. In 2016 she was artist is Residence in at LADA (UK) Roehampton (UK) EMERGE (USA) and taught, and spoke at the Collegium of African Diasporic Dance (CADD) at Duke University (USA). As well as taking her work 30 skanks (and other revolutionary dances); a collaboration with Charlotte Cooper, on an American tour. She received choreographic commissions from Precipice Award, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Calligram Foundation/Allie Furlotti and Black Creative Collective: BrownHall -2016. She is an Artist in Residence on Tate schools workshop programme at Tate Modern and Britain 2016/17 and will be artist in Residence at Duke University 2018. She is currently working on a new work “What kind of Slave would I be? WKOSWIB?” investigating dance, race, the archive and her own slave narrative.