Artworks

Storm Tides (act i)

Storm Tides (act i)

Shakespeare’s The Tempest begins with a great magical storm. This piece reimagines the storm as the work of Sycorax and other women whose absences on land is because they live in the tides of the sea.  The work draws on reflections from reading Sylvia Wynter. This is act i of the full ballet.  

Act i, Storm Tides was created with dancers at Texas Christian University, as part of a Spring residency I had there. Performances took place in April 2024. The Dancers and department were a pleasure to work with. I am so grateful to have begun the ballet at TCU.

Music by Danny Clarke 

Costumes: Adesola Akinleye and Heather McCreless

Lighting: Chad R. Jung

Posted by Adesola in Artworks

Archiving with Bare Feet: Truth & Transparency (2024 digital archive)

Archiving with Bare Feet: Truth & Transparency (2024 digital archive)

Archiving with Bare Feet

This is a digital archive that documents the choreographic process, Climbing with Bare Feet, and the 2007 performance that came from it: Truth & Transparency. Commissioned by Siobhan Davies Studios.

Truth & Transparency is a choreography for two performers and one dancer who manipulates an image projected onto the stage using a mirror. The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Adesola’s reflections on bringing-up their own children as two Black youth. The piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms, and foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

Archiving with Bare Feet takes up the challenge of archiving artistic process, from Adesola’s perspective as a Black, female presenting, choreographer – a perspective which placed them outside the British dance mainstream in 2007. Collating various materials – footage, reflections, restagings – the archive reflects on what happens to the work of a dancer or a choreographer when it is/they are archived. Instead of presenting choreographic work as something that lives outside of a particular time; this archive understands it as living, existing through ongoing processes and the artistic knowledge it generates.

Posted by Adesola in Artworks, Dance and the Digital

SPLASH!

SPLASH!

SPLASH! is a 40 minute immersive interactive performance for young audiences and their families. It incorporates live dance and music with original artwork pieces both hung and projected as part of the immersive nature of the show. The audience follows the course of a small stream, to a river running through a city to, the wide ocean.

The work includes an extensive gallery exhibition of artwork generated from the collaboration of dancer and visual artists. 

Workshops that accompany the performance include family drawing workshops and story telling. 

 

SPLASH! has be developed out of the research of Concrete, Water, Flesh and is an interactive, immersive performance work for galleries and community spaces.

The show explore our human relationship with water for young audiences and their community while taking audiences on a journey of movement through artwork, sound, and dance. 

R&D funded by Arts Council England with support from Irie! Dance Theatre and Texas Woman’s University

Posted by Adesola in Artworks

This place you shared with us (solo) Our grandmothers call the mountain, ‘the mountain with the ocean inside’ (trio)

This place you shared with us (solo) Our grandmothers call the mountain, ‘the mountain with the ocean inside’ (trio)

Premieres at Texas Woman’s University, Dance Division Black Box Theatre. This work emerged from the research project ‘Water Sources as Embodied Archives: ecosomatic dances and traditional knowledges (Teotihuacan, Mexico City and Denton)’ with Danza Chikawa and TWU IDC company. Supported by TWU Creative Arts and Humanities Grant 

These pieces emerged from a shared concern about the effect building and mining have had on water tables and water quality globally (with a focus on Teotihuacan, Mexico City and Denton). Mining the mountains around Mexico City and the Teotihuacan area has had s detrimental impact on rainfall. The mountains attract and gather rainfall, creating natural reservoirs and filtering water. In recent years many of these mountains have been mined out of existence, as a result, water has become scarce, and natural cycles are disrupted. Member of Danza Chikawa had been dancing and lobbying for legislation to protect the mountains around the pyramids at Teotihuacan. This initial research was a collaboration between myself, Elisa De La Rosa, and Danza Chikawa particularly dancer Yoezer Flores and family.

This place you shared with us

Choreographed, images and performed by Adesola Akinleye

This work is an installation to be danced in. It comprises a solo in earth following which the audiences are invited to explore the installation, to experience seeing it from inside the stage. Part of my exploration in this work is about how I can make ‘the data’ accessible in dance practice -based ethnographic research. 

Our Grandmothers call the mountain, “the mountain with the ocean inside’

Choreographer: Adesola Akinleye

Dancers: Juliana Azoubel, Cadence Banks, Holly Griffin

Music: Brittany Padilla – using sound samples collected during Akinleye and De La Rosa’s research trip to Teotihuacan and Mexico City 2022,; featuring a sample of Myerde la Tiena by Abnela Malinalli

Costumes: Chris Flores

Those women I may not know by name, but I know them by their essence in the stones that once were mountains. 

Posted by Adesola in Artworks

Belonging (in The Hop)

Belonging (in The Hop)

Belonging (in The Hop) was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery, Southbank as a response to Jyll Bradley’s The Hop, Summer 2022.

Dancers: Adesola Akinleye, Ofelia Balogun, Aaliyah Dawkins,  Aisha Sanyang-Meek & Cheniece Warner. (DancingStrong Movement Lab.) performed to live synthesized feedback from a hop plant. 

Choreographer Adesola Akinleye has created a series of dance performances in response to the Hayward Gallery’s new interactive pavilion, Jyll Bradley’s The Hop.

You’re invited to stand and sit at marked places in and around the pavilion to view the performance.

Belonging (in The Hop) explores The Hop pavilion as a threshold space that is both an entrance and an exit. ‘Going on the hop’ from London to Kent was to share the experience of simultaneously arriving and leaving: leaving the city while arriving in Kent. In this dance, The Hop becomes a prolonged act of passage that shapes multiple ways of belonging to the city and the fields.

Created by artist Jyll Bradley, The Hop takes its inspiration from the thousands of working class families from Lambeth who travelled away from the pollution of London for a working holiday in the Kentish hop fields. Bringing in the hop harvest – or ‘hopping’ – was hard manual labour, but it was also a transformative time away from city life, and a space for new experiences and new relationships.

Bradley’s commission echoes the geometry of Kent’s unique hop growing structures, designed to expose the crop to the maximum amount of sunlight.

Dr Adesola Akinleye is a choreographer and artist-scholar. Across her career she has created works ranging from live performance that is often site-specific and involving a cross-section of the community, to the creation of films, installations and texts.

The performers are part of DancingStrong Movement Lab, London.

Belonging (in The Hop) has been realised with the generous support of David Maclean.

Posted by Adesola in Artworks

Concrete-Water-Flesh

Concrete-Water-Flesh

Link to web-site 

Concrete-Water-Flesh is a collaborative project with Helen Kindred which places bodily experiences as central to our understanding and Being-in-Place. The project combines the research interests of Adesola and Helen in the development of new physical site-specific  and web-based choreographic work. Stimulated by the Place of the city and Place of the shore.

charcoal drawing bY Andrew Hinton

DSML Global Water Dances June 2021

Posted by Adesola in Artworks

Choreographing the City: Choreographing the Campus

Choreographing the City: Choreographing the Campus

As a 2020-22 Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and Research Affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology program, Akinleye investigates how dance-based research and creative collaboration across disciplines can create new techniques, lexicons, and conversations within urban design.

With a particular interest in how the city shapes our bodies, and how, in turn, we shape the city, Akinleye invites the MIT community to observe and engage with the micro-city where we live, work, and learn.

Posted by Adesola in Artworks

Royal Institute of British Architects film commissions 2021

Royal Institute of British Architects film commissions 2021

Link to film on RIBA channel

 

How do we remember as a society: whispered memory.

How do we remember as a society: pieces of me (in you) 

How do we remember as a society: catching a memory  (published by RIBA on Instagram only)

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has commissioned the artist, scholar and choreographer Adesola Akinleye to create a series of new video artworks inspired by the work of Sir David Adjaye OBE as part of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal celebrations. The videos are now available to watch on the RIBA Youtube channel.

Akinleye’s pieces respond to a prevalent theme throughout Adjaye’s practice, that of memory, through videos that convey how memories of specific places keep us connected to the sites that we have been physically separated from during the pandemic. The videos invite viewers to be fully present in a cathartic experience that will temporarily take you outside of yourself to share in Akinleye’s multilayered assemblage of memories.

Akinleye recollects a number of sites that remain important to her and therefore form part of her identity despite their distance from the location of her home. She remembers the presence of her body in different places and conveys this through a layering of imagery, movement and sound that playfully celebrates the glitch in the Zoom background algorithm. Shot entirely at home, Akinleye reflects on the past year of isolation within the confines of our domestic interiors, and suggests recognising shared experiences of specific buildings can form a collective memory that holds us together as a society.

About the Royal Gold Medal
The Royal Gold Medal has been awarded annually since 1848 and is recognized as the UK’s highest honour for architecture. The award is approved personally by Her Majesty The Queen and is given to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence “either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture.” The 2021 recipient of the award is Sir David Adjaye OBE.

Posted by Adesola in Artworks, Dance and the Digital

The Future is a Common History, talk hosted by Central Saint Martins

The Future is a Common History, talk hosted by Central Saint Martins

The Future is a Common History Film and talk (Dec 10th 2020). Film by Jayden Ali with talk about the work in collaboration with Royal Academy of the Arts and hosted by Central Saint Martins.

JA Projects in collaboration with Black Females in Architecture and Dr Adesola Akinleye, perform an alternative history that champions the making of a diverse public realm via an investigation of the Royal Academy of Arts and its setting. Join Jayden Ali and Dr Adesola Akinleye in conversation with Kate Goodwin (RA Head of Architecture and Drue Heinz Curator) to explore the history and context of these conversations.

A portrayal of a changing city through an exploration the Royal Academy of Arts and wider Mayfair.

CREDITS: Direction/Production: Jayden Ali, Cinematography: Jermaine Edwards, Movement: Adesola Akinleye, Sound: Jay Weathers, Casting: Neba Sere, Editing: Ricky Rose, Assistance: Rebecca Faulkner, Focus: Tim Potter, Performers: Nasra Abdullahi, Seyi Adelekun, Adesola Akinleye, Corrinne Aubee, Remi Connolly-Taylor, Sahar Ibrahim, Lois Innes, Joy Mulandi, Shamiso Oneka, Sedayah Simpson

Produced in Collaboration with: JA Projects Black Females In Architecture Royal Academy of Arts University of the Arts London ©JA Projects, 2021

Related events:

 

The Youtopia Series – Futurescapes with Neba Sere 

Youtopia series by Lauren-Lois

A mini-series exploring architecture at points of social change with a focus on the events of 2020 and how they provide scope for designing socially conscious architecture in the future.

Barbican Exhibit, London:  May 17th – Dec 23rd 2021 

How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative: A multi-layered project comprising an installation, publication and events programme exploring a series of important questions about our public spaces and designed environments.

photo of Piccadilly circus with pen marks indicating places to stand
Posted by Adesola in Artworks

Desire Lines (Choreographing the City)

Desire Lines (Choreographing the City)

Installation performance-paper at The Lowery, Salford (Re:generations Conference) – November 2019 

Desire Lines is an on-going live work. Research and develop of Desire Lines is discussed in my monograph Dance, Architecture and Engineering 

A Dance to be made: Desire Lines

My reflections on Lingering in Dwelling/Residing in Wandering form as choreography. My choreographic notes for making a piece call Desire lines, about Lingering in Dwelling Residing in Wandering are two poems and a technical performance structure. Choreographically, I think about the aim to create moments where the dancers and audience can wander new perspectives: join the current of one rhythm, then slip into another, experience simultaneous layers that complete each other through their incompleteness.

The technical structure for performance: This creates a performance space that reaches beyond itself to the audience. Four lights one in each corner (two blue two orange, where they spill onto each other they also create purple). Two projectors each attached to its own Isadora programme. When you step into this space your bodily presence creates multiple relationships through shadow, captured image, projected image, physical body. The choreography plays with the layering of relationships. In the centre of the performance space are three small piles of stones.  

The poems for choreography development:

 

Desire Lines 1 (poem to be danced)

My body is an archive of everything I’ve touched, every relationship made. The walls of this city are in my blood as I melt into them. Take my place as unknowable “Black woman in the crowd’.

My body is the archive of “Saartjie on display”, of the astonishing, stranger that crowds the streets. I dissolve into the heat of the city, complexly sweet and invisible as Tate and Lyle’s sugar.

My body is documented by a thousand cameras a day. City vigilance that controls my non-presence that makes sure I appear only where I can be captured.

My body fragments into a million gigabytes and my femininity is made real by the stare of the security guard, visibility in the light of the pixel. I am coded into acknowledgment: data that says my Blackness was there.

(page 74, Dance, Architecture and Engineering)  

 

 

Desire Lines 2 (poem for dance)

The way we walk through the streets leaks into the future of the cities we construct,

Foretelling the possibilities of who we can move into being. 

                                     

‘As the city limits’ the walls etch identities –  

Belonging becomes entangled with the privilege of Being.

Being becomes entangled with the privilege of Belonging 

 

The poetics of my body is a terrain of muscles, bone, sinew, resistance, and tolerance,

In community with the slices of ‘otherness’ we move through.

 

 

Navigations (poem for dance)

And she would make utterances that silently shook the buildings,

changed the sky,

pulled the air into the corners of her world.

Listen, Walk, Disappear.

Magic crisscrossed patterns of diasporic, classed, unspoken vulnerability

her heart beat into histories.

The empty spaces her absents left revealed more than they concealed.

 

(pages 97 -98, Dance Architecture and Engineering)  

Posted by Adesola in Artworks, Dance and the Digital