Andrew Graham

PARADE is a realist ballet. The 18 performers of the company L’Autre Maison parade through fabricated scenic dimensions, in which situations of disability, migration, gender and identity are upset. With references to Music hall, cabaret reviews, circus and Queer ballrooms, the 18 performers from L’Autre Maison company perform a futuristic parade in a very Marseille style.

Readaptation of the surrealist ballet, PARADE by Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine for the Ballets Russes is a repertoire work, key in the initiation of the avant-garde art movements. A strange paradox that has sparked for the choreographer Andrew Graham the desire to reclaim this ballet in a parade that imagines futur modernities. The dancers set themselves out on stage on frictions of bodies, sounds, words, objects, propelled by the musician Martin Poncet, visual artist Mounir Ayache, dramaturg Béatrice Pédraza and choreographer Andrew Graham. A historic ballet as a pretext for the emergence of new forms and values, where differences between dancers entwine, generating connections bolstered by the richness and complexity those differences provoke.

The artists of L’AUTRE MAISON are developing a new communication technology, where the body is an interface, in all its sensitivity and its difference. As an extension of the play Sublime.é, presented in October 2020 at the Théâtre National de la Criée, this creation explores everyone's tremendous capacity to transform.

Production : Festival de Marseille in the context of the European project BEPART.

Co-production : KLAP European dance house & Company L’autre Maison.

Supported by Concert Hall Le Moulin & L’atelier de Mars

Dancers: Elise Argaud, Noé Argaud, David Aubert, André Bernaert, Agnès Cavin, Maëlle Cavin, Jean Codo, Alia Coisman, Mathilde Hannoun, Ramzya Katuf-Hasan, Inès Kerkeni, Muriel Mifsud, Julie Nedelec-Andrade, Petronille Poirot-Bourdain, Jérôme Poncet, Greta Sandon, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot, Erwan Tran Van Ngoc.

AOZIZ is a collaboration between two live performance companies based in Marseille, L’Autre Maison and Arthalie, as well as a humanities research organization, the CALEM Institute.

With a particular capacity to work with mixed groups of disabled and non-disabled people, discriminated minorities or migrant people, body, arts and intersectionality practices are at the heart of the AOZIZ project. Our aim is to stimulate new intercultural encounters, and thus, create a meeting point for diversity and the creation of alternative ways of being together. To do so, AOZIZ will hosted a varied program of workshops, conferences and performance, inviting artists and audiences to deepen their research and exchange their ideas during the Biennial Manifesta13 in 2020.

AOZIZ was present at Manifesta 13 biennial in Marseille, which wished to highlight this local initiative, opened to all. This project takes the language of inclusion and makes it exist in bodies. It is a place centered on a practice focused on the bonds between people. It makes no judgment on what ideal bodies should be, but rather cultivates the aesthetic based on relationships.

How to make beauty a playground? They have fun deconstructing the codes of representation out of physical necessity or for the pure pleasure of the game.

The actors of L'atelier de Mars, the dancers of the company L’autre Maison and the musicians of the Bokolo Collective, invite themselves to make an anthology of beauty through a collection of living tableaux . These disabled and non-disabled artists question the representations of bodies in their diversity and singularity.

A single leitmotif: to make oneself beautiful, to live oneself as beauty and to give beauty. They take the time needed to leave images, traces, sensations and voices, on a bare stage, lit by flashes, supported by microphones and propelled by live music, to capture as closely as possible the sounds, the breaths, the bodies, the words that are spoken and experienced differently. In a suspended time, they upset, disturb, revive and mobilize questions about our states between animality and humanity. They create a moment of sublimation as if to take off from states of survival, hunger, thirst, care, almost clinical manners of functioning. Eventually everyone sets off on the adventure of making, of the imagining… on the adventure of evolution, of surpassing oneself to invent sublime ways of being together.

We no longer talk about disability and inclusion. We talk about how to make something called us!

Allow oneself

To see beyond our field of vision, and maybe,

Then, imagine,

Something else,

Of oneself, of us.

As part of Manifesta 13 Marseille - European Biennale of Contemporary Creation with the support of La Criée - Théâtre national de Marseille and the Festival of Marseille in the context of the European Project BEPART.

Single-channel video with sound.

Video Artist & Artistic Direction Vera Martynov

Choreographer Andrew Graham

Sound Alexey Kokhanov

Performers: Albina Vahitova, Alena Smirnitskaya, Kristina Isaikina, Dmitry Matveev, Andrey Andrianov, Meta Chelkaev

Camera Alexey Shemyatovsky

For the project Sounds of the Perfect Past, Hanoi Historical Museum, Vietnam. Commissioned by the Hermitage Foundation, Russia.

Curator Liza Savina

Producer Valery Shafirov

December 2019

Mixability is a performance group that was created in 2019 by the choreographer Andrew Graham, the producer Marion Di Majo and the Festival of Marseille. The group was created for the others, the ones who do not have access to a dance education because, they are disabled, they have particular religious convictions, they are LGBTQIA+ or because of their age, socio-economic condition, or simply because they are part of a minority group. All together, they have created an inclusive space to dance, and therefore, a space for new interactions to arise. In this space each individual can explore, exist and evolve through movement.

The group was invited by the Festival of Marseille to create an interpretation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the XXL performance conceptualized by Alain Platel. The performance was presented at the Borély Park in Marseille for the Festival’s 2019 edition.

Mixability est un groupe de performance qui inclus des danseurs amateurs et professionnels Marseillais. Ce groupe a été créé pour les autres, ceux qui n’ont pas accès à la danse, parce qu’ils sont en situation de handicap, ou sont issues de la communauté LGBTQIA+, ou qu’ils ne se sentent pas accueillit de par leurs confessions religieuses, ou simplement parce qu’ils se sentent restreints par leur âge. Ensemble, nous avons créé un nouvel espace de danse. Un espace dans lequel chaque singularité de mouvement existe et évolue.

Le chorégraphe Andrew Graham a réuni ce groupe en Février 2019 sur l’invitation du festival de Marseille pour créer une interprétation dansée de la musique du Sacre du Printemps pour le spectacle du Sacre XXL conçu par Alain Platel et présenté au Parc Borély le 15 et le 16 Juin 2019.

Choregraphy / Performance Andrew Graham

Costumes Consultation Elise Py

Texts Milène Tournier & Andrew Graham

Thanks to Milène Tournier, Lina Errida, Anyssa Kapelusz, Clément Papachristou, Marion Di Majo, Alice Leclerc, Elise Py.

Partnerships & Résidences: ‘Dans les parages’ La Zouze cie Christophe Haleb, FAI-AR, AMU Université Aix-Marseille (Master Arts & Scènes d’aujourd’hui), Festival de Marseille.

In this solo, Andrew embodies a stranded creature with erected feet, hidden under shaggy hair. He embodies this body birthed from his imagination.

The stage space.

Like eyes closed.

Throbbing behind a curtain of skin.

It’s a black box. 

Sheer emptiness,

from which everything can appear. 

An apparition box. 

We'll wait for the other one. 

The one who doesn't exist with open eyes. 

The inexistent even with the eyes wide open. 

Terrible imaginary. 

Torn from everyday life. 

The eyelids are too heavy to open them again,

Two cases. 

Keeping them closed to make the other exist. 

Glimpse the other,

as you wink, you cracks apart the real. The other.

You, me, us, them ...

I want to spend a moment behind my eyelids. 

Behind eyelids,

body now unknown. 

He does is own kinda genre, kinda gender.

Kinda like your mom when she catches you in her closet.

Eyes closed.

Naked.

Soft silk that slides between the ears.

And it stays with you. The feeling of hooves on feet. 

The trace of the hoof remains on your nerves. 

Clenched feet,

shaggy hair. 

On stage. Throw there. Body once more unknown.

We are currently looking for partners and supporters to help produce the full performance. Please express your interests by contacting Andrew Graham via email.

In September 2017 I led a 2 week research and development to establish the core conceptual, design, and movement ideas of a 50min dance and music performance. The R&D project was supported by Arts Council England, Sadler’s Wells, Candoco, TrinityLaban and Independent Dance.

I will choreograph a dance and music performance piece. Through this work I wish to normalise an inclusive approach to dancing, with a piece that is conceptually and technically sophisticated. Five international dancers will perform movement and song entirely, celebrating the body’s dexterity and virtuosity.

The music and dance styles will draw influences from both popular genres and abstract movements in the arts. Lyrics and movement will be written in collaboration with consultants in audio description and British Sign Language, for visually and hearing impaired audiences, to outlay the intentions of the performance for all audiences.

The performance is a vehicle to ignite a conversation about the audience's relationship to abstraction in the mainstream and independent sectors of music and dance.

Dancers: Vincenzo d'Acquisto, Annie Hanauer, Saara Maria Hurme, Leah Marojevic, Christopher Owen.

Choreographer & Co-producer: Andrew Graham

Co-producer: Saphia Bishop

Composer: Mathieu Grenier

Music by Etta James - All I could do was cry.

British Sign Language Consultant: Chisato Minamimura.

In Quasi, gender is investigated as a systematic subject of fantasy. How do we reconcile the natural and the artificial skin when we face our wardrobes?

In this piece, Andrew is jostled between his constructed character and his personal history. He is frolicking with the tools we use to create gender, and desacralising gender roles.

In creating Quasi, Andrew aimed to make a metaphoric painting of his own sexual shock. Together, the artist and the character are manipulating fiction and reality in search of an inventive performance of gender.

Choreography and Performance: Andrew Graham

Sound Composition/Arrangement: Michele Panegrossi

A friend, a colleague and two brothers. For the first time they meet for a collaboration. They create impressions of their synergy. Sustained and fluid interactions take place, through dancing and filming. Changing the surface beneath them with and without water, they find reciprocity in this audacious series of abstractions.

Sam Lee

Mercury Prize nominated Folk singer, song collector, promoter (of BBC award winning Nest Collective) radio host, TV personality, teacher and animateur, Sam's two critically acclaimed albums place songs he has collected first hand from the Gypsy Traveller Community at their heart with inventive arrangements bringing these ancient songs to life for the 21st Century. The Live band 'Sam Lee & Friends' perform unconventional and contemporary interpretations challenging all preconceptions of what ‘traditional folk’ should sound like.

http://samleesong.co.uk

In 2011, Adam James and Andrew Graham were awarded the Gill Clark PAL-LAB Grant in order to pursue a research project on the Pueblo Clowns.

At the rise of spring, the clowns perform fertility rites. A clown will conceal his identity to make social commentaries through satirical acts. Their camouflage consists of paint and mud. These characters will commit acts of cruelty, as a way to reflect on society and express as a community. 

During the research project, they collected stories, images, and texts, and generated scores, sculptures and ideas for a potential composition.

Following on, Adam James invited Andrew Graham to choreograph The Mudhead Dance inspired by the clowns and our collection.

5X is a performance group formed by Efrosini Protopapa, Kathrin Felzmann, Joe Wild, Susanna Recchia and Andrew Graham.

The group was formed in 2011 at the occasion of FLAUSEN+, which is a residency for performance research projects, hosted and supported by Theater Wrede in Oldenburg, Germany.

The body of a diplomat

'Expertise, Ignorance... Place'

Each of the five artists came with an area of expertise in performance: choreology, performing, choreography, pedagogy and dramaturgy.  The group experimented with different collaborative structures by either experiencing or re-inventing existing structures . In doing so, 5X developed systems to compose collectively, through mapping individual and collective expertise. They were interested in challenging their notion of expertise by taking support on Jacques Rancière's book, The ignorant schoolmaster.

Jacques Rancière's approach on 'expertise', brought the group to experiment with the way one relates to 'space' and 'place'. The way in which an individual define oneself in an environment, and grows a relationship between its individuality and its surroundings.

They were interested in either a social, environmental, artistic or professional rapport to place. During their research project, the group created an extensive collection of maps, stories, interactive tasks and performative scores.

Since 2011, 5X developed a series of performance lectures, workshops and publications around Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Vlo is the Dutch word for 'flea'. This site specific performance was inspired by the life in Amsterdam's red light district. The curator Ali Macglip invited Adam and Andrew in residence at the W139 Gallery, to experience the life and the people in the neighbourhood. The two artists collected materials from the streets and the flea markets in the area. They collected actions and gestures, to create a master-score which set the rules for a precise improvisation.

Vlo inspired the two artists to embark on their research project Vloism. Adam and Andrew were awarded the Gill Clarke PAL-LAB Grant to pursue their research project.

Performance stills from 'Vlo', collaboration with Andrew Graham. 
Climb Like a Cucumber, Fall Like and Aubergine curated by Ali Macgilp @ W139 Gallery, Amsterdam - 2012