San Mei Gallery presents PAGE/STAGE/SPACE, an exhibition curated by motor dance journal foregrounding contemporary artists working within and around the field of dance, including works by Zinzi Minott, Rowland Hill and Mary Hurrell.

Dance as an art form has permeated myriad fields – film, social media, printed matter, gallery and social spaces. These sites and stagings in turn invite new understandings of how and what dance can be. PAGE/STAGE/SPACE challenges the idea that dance must be ‘live’ and foregrounds different choreographic registers existing simultaneously. The group of artists featured in this exhibition share a commitment to an expanded understanding of dance as it mutates across media and temporalities. Brought in dialogue, their practices create an asynchronous overlapping of forms and approaches, with the gallery populated by material traces and interdisciplinary transformations of dance. 

Mary Hurrell works with expanded forms of choreography to explore physical and psychological experience. Throughout live and installation-based work, she centres presence and the felt experience as a poetic and perceptual choreography. Hurrell’s textual scores are choreographic explorations with both the language of movement and the movements of language, openings for multiplicities of meaning and action.

Rowland Hill presents a fictional club through her mix-media collage poster, drawing from the aesthetics of club ephemera and fairground tableaux. Across two screens Hill’s video work explores the tropes of eurodance within the world of touring fairgrounds that visited her hometown of Loughborough. 

Zinzi Minott has been commissioned to make a new series of ceramic sculptures, inspired by the idea of ‘rent-a-tile’, a patois term referring to a style of dancing where couples dance very close to one another on a single floor tile. These sculptural works think through the relationship of dance to space and place, in particular the spaces Minott has encountered in her own life, including floorplans of her family home and her first dance class. Through these works, Minott draws attention to ways in which Black people use public and private spaces to dance, and in turn cultivate intimacy and safety.

Alongside the exhibition, there will also be a corresponding live programme, activating new encounters with and between artist, work and viewer. Situated within San Mei Gallery, a space with a rich history of dance in the building’s previous iterations as a dancehall, PAGE/STAGE/SPACE invites propositions into dance’s pasts and futures.

Live programme

Rowland Hill, ‘Fluchtpunkt’, Thursday 20 June 2024

Rowland Hill will present ‘Fluchtpunkt’ (vanishing point, place of refuge), an immersive performance-installation invoking the fantasy world of 1990s Eurotrance music and its disquieting, portentous rhetoric of utopia and disaster. The work is a suspenseful choreography of animated stagecraft including smoke machines, strobe lighting and a dramatic audio landscape of extreme weather sounds – a recurring metaphor for conflict and resolution in 1990s dance music. The site-specific work has been adapted to San Mei Gallery.

Mary Hurrell Performance, Thursday 27 June 2024, 7pm

Mary Hurrell will present a live performance blending elements from her performance scores exhibited in PAGE/STAGE/SPACE; Movement Study 4 (Dorsal/Breast), EROTIC MECHANICS and FORMATIONS. Mary and her long time collaborator Kitty Fedorec will perform a new and unique hybrid iteration that incorporates live improvisations of sound, movement and spoken word.

Accessibility

San Mei Gallery is located on the ground floor with step-free access. Our building has one gender-neutral toilet with step-free access, however, we regret that it is currently not fully accessible.

Please note that Rowland Hill’s performance Fluchtpunkt taking place at the private view on Thursday 20 June contains strobe lighting and loud noises.

If you have any specific access requirements, please contact us at info@sanmeigallery.co.uk.

Support

This exhibition and its associated programme of events has been supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by Puck Studio. Drinks at the opening preview are kindly provided by Brixton Brewery.