Pause: Alexis Blake
Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve
27–29 January 23

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Installation view of the Performance Alexis Blake – Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the performance Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve by the artist Alexis Blake (b. 1981, US, based in NL). Her multidisciplinary practice brings together visual art, dance, and performance. Blake perceives the body as an archive of embodied knowledge and investigates how women’s bodies are represented, which she critically examines, questions, disrupts, and renegotiates.

Blake conceived Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve in 2019 and will further develop the piece for this first presentation of her work in Germany. In it, Blake focuses on notions of transparency, resistance, resonance, and breaking in relation to norms, constraints and oppression. The meaning and act of breaking are explored using sound, the voice, and the body in an installation made of glass and steel. Glass as a material becomes a performer as well as a metaphor for the individual and collective body as both inherently fragile and strong, depending on the way it is handled or treated. It is constantly in an in-between state, shifting between visibility and invisibility, clarity and opaqueness.

The locally rooted crew consists of a percussionist, two sound artists and six performers from a variety of dance backgrounds—breakdance, hip hop, house, waving, Afro-fusion, contemporary, and ballet. They aim not to appropriate each other’s sonic and body language. Rather they use the glass as a tool to communicate, break patterns, and collectively give rise to a new vocabulary of sound and movement, albeit without losing their subjectivity.

Artist / Choreography / Direction: Alexis Blake
Sound Artists / Composers: Stefanie Egedy, mobilegirl
Percussionist / Composer: Sofia Borges
Garment Designer: Elisa van Joolen
Dancers / Choreographic Input: Viola Luise Barner, Alice De Maio, Aya Nakagawa, Luana Madikera, Willie Stark, Matilde Tommasini

Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial Assistant: Lara Scherrieble
Curatorial Fellow (CCS Bard Mentorship Work Placement): Katherine Adams

Please note that during the performance, loud low frequency sounds will be played which may affect pregnant people as well as people with epilepsy and heart conditions.

Part of project: Pause series

The Pause series of KW Institute for Contemporary Art allowed for an ephemeral yet deep engagement with a single artwork in order to draw and question relationships between the past, present, and future. A Pause acted as a punctuation of KW’s regular program by presenting an artwork for a short period of time in between exhibition cycles, working with this state of in-between. Pause projects were predominantly commissioned or reworked pieces that shifted between or even merged the disciplines of performance, installation, video, and sonic work.

Overview

2017–2024

Pause: Billy Bultheel & James Richards

Workers in Song

7–9 June 24

Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group
25/27 August 23

Pause: Lydia Ourahmane
sync
1–2 October 22

Pause: Tobias Spichtig
Die Matratzen
19–23 January 22

Pause: Michele Rizzo

REACHING

1–3 October 21

Pause: Archivio Conz Collection