Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings
Text, publication, performance, video, sound piece
EMILIA GALOTTI’S COLOURING BOOK OF FEELINGS is a queer conceptual closet drama that stages imagined tête-a-têtes with Enlightenment thinkers, writers, and pseudo-scientists using poetic text, dialogue, choreography, installation, recordings, and projections. Challenging the Enlightenment’s opposition of sentiment and rationality, the piece harnesses the experimental spirit of things that don’t quite work and are thus exactly right and fizzingly oblique, toying with our assumptions about seriousness, hospitality, domesticity, difficulty, form, and fun.
The great thing about language is that you can always be misunderstood
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More is always more
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And so the magic lantern which surrounds them, among which they move, of which they are the substance (shadows), swirls around them, dazzlingly
Performances:
Art Night London (2018), with Erin Robinsong, Nisha Ramayya, Jocelyn Spaar
Torn Page (NYC, 2018), with Corina Copp, Bridget Talone, Jocelyn Spaar, Sophia Le Fraga (audio recording)
Emergency Eyewash (NYC, 2018), with Jocelyn Spaar
Parasol Unit (London, 2017), with Erin Robinsong
Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2017), with Jocelyn Spaar
Kunsthalle (Darmstadt, 2019), solo performance
Costumes: Ciara Phillips (London and Darmstadt) and Kat Addis (London and NYC)
Set and props (for NYC performance): Simone Kearney
Photos: Sam Tierney; Deniz Guzel
Installation:
Bargehouse, Oxo Tower, London (2018)
[ SPACE ] Mare Street, London (2019)
Heong Gallery, Cambridge, part of We Are Here group show (2020)
Video piece:
A video work by Sophie Seita
Performers: Sophie Seita, Emma Attwood, Nisha Ramayya, Erin Robinsong, Celine Lowenthal
Cinematography: Lanny Jordan Jackson
Sampling: Lanny Jordan Jackson, including music by Rhodri Karim, singing by Sophie Seita (Rose-Red’s Monologue); alongside found materials
Costumes: Kat Addis
Duration: 13:43 min
A Tremulous Triadic Ballet (2018)
A sound piece by Sophie Seita
Music and editing: Lanny Jordan Jackson, Rhodri Karim
Voices: Emma Attwood, Nisha Ramayya, Celine Lowenthal, Erin Robinsong, Sophie Seita
The sound piece is embedded in a muslin-and-reed sculpture made by Kat Addis for the installation of Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings at the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower, Art Night, July 2018
Duration: 15:22 min
Publication:
Feminist Temporalities (2018), excerpted