Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019)
Q&A with Florence Peake

Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019) is a year-long programme of interviews, podcasts and contributions from some of the artists who participated in the twelve editions of the celebrated Evening of Performances. Highlighting the evenings’ extraordinary legacies, we will be exploring what the next wave of contemporary performance can become with the artists who have shaped it so far.

What is the first memory that springs to mind when thinking back to your performance at Evening of Performances 2013?

Proximity to audience, rammed Frieze week. We had to physically push through the audience to move through the space. I remember the atmosphere only, because it is so distinctly different from what crowded spaces feel like now. Hot, stuffy, close — and without the feeling of threat there is now.

Then shaking — the shaking practice we were all doing was immersive and would take us into altered states, so the atmosphere and the audience felt like a mass substance to synchronize with and wade through.

Do you have a pre-performance ritual?

Many trips to the toilet, I feel exhausted, depressed up until 5 mins before — so anything to manage the anxiety — different performances require different preparations. For Voicings I had to do meditations and talk to the shaman I had worked with on the work. Other more physical works are more movement-oriented rituals.

Is there a performance that made you want to perform yourself?

When I was 16 I fell in love with dancing and making performance — obsessed with thinking about staging: set, dancers, bodies moving, costume, music. And Karole Armitage, Wild Thing, 1988.

How does your work turn imagined bodies into actual bodies?

I think of it the other way — the physical conjures up the imagination that prompts more sensations that move into movement/physicality, which then cultivates and stimulates more ways of altering perceptions/imagining around the body/environment/audience/witness/seeing/staging/materiality — maybe it's a symbiotic thing… feeding into each other. Multi-dimensional, multi-species, multi-directional.

What is your current obsession?

Rope, Clear Tar Gel by Golden, trying to get plaster to fix to surfaces. Desire to move/dance with others but not knowing what the context could be. Feeling alienated trying to belong. Injuries in the body, how to heal.