Current
Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz, a new performance being developed by
Karen Christopher, Tara Fatehi and Jemima Yong.
Always Already, an 8-hour performance installation by Karen Christopher & Tara Fatehi,
available for bookings.
Entanglements, informal hybrid events on art, ecology and collaboration
by Karen Christopher & David Overend.
THICK TIME RADIO STATION, a workshop and event series focussed on creative co-mentorship; available for bookings.
Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets, a book co-edited by Karen Christopher & Mary Paterson,
published by Intellect Books.
About
Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer, and teacher. Her company is called Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. She now lives in the UK, working to define a practice which continues in a collaborative and plural mode.
What crackles between the two women is something like love, or art, or morals. It is an emotional connection (like love), an abundance of meanings (like art), a shared cultural belief (like morals). It is a mutual understanding that means they know when to start and when to stop, when to stay silent and when to sing, when to be in unison and when to be in companionship.
. . . how rare it is to see a duet of women onstage; and how wonderful it is to engage with something that is so unhinged — for which you need to trace your own journey, without the necessity of unity. ‘miles & miles’ is falling; it is groundlessness. It is also friendship, and working something from the unknown, and gently excavating the collective and individual memories that make up a theatrical encounter. Christopher and Grodin always invite us to wander, then bring us back, and we enjoy watching them find their way back to us.
In unison, they step off the piece of wood that is balancing on a brick; eyes forward, as if they are not dependent on one another for the act of unbalancing, as if they are not tethered to one another while time trails messily behind them.
Through collaboration, separate minds who see differently find a way to draw connections between each other and the performance material. The better we become at collaborative methods, the more we bring the highest ideals and potential toward interaction with the world around us. We are paying attention as a practice of social cooperation.
excerpts from Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz — a performance by Karen Christopher, Tara Fatehi and Jemima Yong
video: Dan Canham