LUX » Events » Education » Masterclass: Performing Theory with Michelle Williams Gamaker

Masterclass: Performing Theory with Michelle Williams Gamaker

3 May, 2019

– 3 May, 2019

2pm-5pm

Birkbeck Cinema

43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Performing Theory is a series of masterclasses that aim to present a wide variety of approaches to the artistic production of ideas in audio-visual form. We are inviting performance artists and moving image makers whose work (written, performed, filmed) manifests theoretical innovation. The latter part of the 20th century produced body of Anglo-American writing and work that are recognised today as canonical as with Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren, Peter Gidal for example. With this series we want to produce a sample of this kind of interplay between ideas and creating that are underway today. In so doing, we hope to open the field of play between theory and works to create new conversations.
Please join us for a Master Class with Michelle Williams Gamaker who will be discussing her work as well as addressing issues around the making of work in the contemporary art world.
Performing Theory is conceived and convened by Prof. Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths) for CHASE in collaboration with BIMI and LUX.

Michelle Williams Gamaker is a moving image and performance artist. Her work explores the fiction-making machine of 20C British and Hollywood studio films by restaging sequences to reveal cinematic construction, and recasting characters to propose alternative endings that counter their often doom-laden plight.
Williams Gamaker’s key focus is the development of ‘fictional activism’: the restoration of marginalised brown characters as central figures, who return in her works as vocal brown protagonists challenging the fictional injustices to which they have been historically consigned. Scriptwriting, workshopping with actors, acquiring film paraphernalia and producing props for the intricate staging of her film sets are all vital elements in the re-enactment of the artificial landscapes that shaped Williams Gamaker’s love of cinema.
She recently completed Dissolution, a trilogy of films comprising House of Women (2017), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018), and The Eternal Return (2019) in which characters from Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus unravel as they become aware of their screen and staged realities.
Fictional activists are mutable subjects that can be played either by Williams Gamaker herself – such as her alter ego Violet Culbo – or by long-term collaborators who take on multiple personas including that of the Indian-born US film star Sabu – or characters such as Kanchi from Black Narcissus (1947), and O-Lan from The Good Earth (1937).
Collaboration is also a crucial element of Williams Gamaker’s work; since 2009 she has worked with American artist Julia Kouneski, revisiting the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s psychotherapeutic research as inspiration for interventions with the body, architecture and landscape.