ILONA SAGAR
THE CURL OF THEIR ACETONE TONGUE // PROSODIC BREAKERS
26 October 2016
The NiNES Peckham
On 26 October 2016, Ilona Sagar presented The Curl Of Their Acetone Tongue // Prosodic Breakers at The Performance Studio, bringing together a reworked existing piece and a new live work.
Working with live and recorded voice, Sagar drew on the mechanics of speech and consumption, and what the original programme described as the ambiguous fleshy boundary implied in the phonology of voice and language.
The Curl Of Their Acetone Tongue had originally been devised as part of a private dinner at STO Werkstatt, bringing together sound, architecture and food. For The Performance Studio, Sagar specially reworked the piece to accompany the new live work Prosodic Breakers.
Prosodic Breakers used the speech patterns, gestures and body movements of a group of performers as an interface through which to examine divergent ideologies surrounding health and personal wellbeing. Contact microphones positioned on the performers’ necks and chests were used as each performer mediated a narrative exploring the history, design and social context of health and welfare.
The work considered the relationship between collective ideas of the common good and individual wellbeing. It used Piers Anthony’s 1969 science fiction novel Macroscope as a point of reference, whose plot includes an extension of the Peckham Experiment.
The performance formed the second in a series of research events leading towards Sagar’s moving image installation Correspondence O, presented at South London Gallery in 2017 and funded by the Wellcome Trust. The wider project took as its starting point the history and social significance of the Pioneer Health Centre and the Peckham Experiment, established in the 1920s to investigate ideas around wellness and collective health.
ABOUT ILONA SAGAR
Ilona Sagar is an artist whose practice spans performance, film and assemblage, responding to the social, historical and cultural contexts of private and public space. Her work draws upon medical and neurological research alongside archival material relating to progressive medical, social and political experiments.
Her work has also explored the languages associated with spaces of care and emotional labour, using relationships between material, image, language and the body to examine the structures through which health, wellbeing and social experience are understood.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
Prosodic Breakers formed part of a wider body of research into the Pioneer Health Centre and the Peckham Experiment, a radical project established in Peckham in the 1920s around the study of health and collective wellbeing.
The performance was the second in a series of research events leading towards Correspondence O, a moving image installation presented at South London Gallery in 2017 with funding from the Wellcome Trust.
EVENT DETAILS
26 October 2016
Duration: 2 hours
The Nines
Copeland Estate
133 Copeland Road
Peckham, SE15 3SN
This event formed part of The Performance Studio’s 2016 programme, supported by Arts Council England, the Wellcome Trust and lead supporter Angela Nikolakopoulou.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Featured image: Sandra Johnston, ‘kosii’, solo performance as part of Tangible Live, EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland, 2015. Photograph by Ari Karttunen.
Performance documentation: Tinatin Shaburishvili