The Watermill Center continues its autumn programming with its year-round open studio series, In Process, allowing unique insight into the work of The Center’s rotating roster of Artists-in-Residence, on Friday, November 4, at 5:30 PM. The upcoming event will provide East End community members with unique insight into the studios of European dance company KOR’SIA, US-based English theatre scholar Matthew Randle-Bent, and Scottish-Norweigian multidisciplinary artist STUDIOTASSY.
For the KOR’SIA collective, the arts and specifically the arts of movement, as their competence, are the only representations that manage to transmit the human world, everything created by our societies: tradition, society, culture, etc, in a way that no other cognitive skill achieves. Surviving in time beyond the societies that produced them and managing to transcend what we call ideas, providing individuals with access to their most intimate and spiritual ways. Therefore, the objective of this collective is based on the creation of artistic devices whose epicenter is located in the body and that proposes a reflection on the possible gestation of individual and collective spaces, which can provide new access to ways of being and being, in the world through the living arts.
Currently, Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo are the directors and choreographers of the project, together with the Performing Arts researcher and co-founder, Giuseppe Dagostino, and the Professor of Performing Arts Agnès López-Río as artistic advisor, are the main architects of the KOR’SIA collective. KOR’SIA is a recipient of the 2022 Baroness Nina von Maltzahn Fellowship for the Performing Arts at The Watermill Center.
Matthew Randle-Bent is a theatre scholar and artist from the UK, based in Chicago. His work focuses on the cultivation of two particular subjectivities: the “critical attitude” described by Brecht, and the new subjectivities fostered by twentieth century “landscape” performance. Randle-Bent is currently working on two projects. One focuses on the relationship between landscape, the “spirit,” and performance — through practice and historical research. The other is a historical research project focusing on the International Theatre Institute’s Third World theatre committee — a body that hosted festivals in the Philippines, Iran, France, and the GDR during the 1970s. This work highlights unfinished histories of radical performance, as well as the transnational foundations of performance theory between what was known as the “Second” and “Third” worlds. He holds a BA from Warwick University, MA from Queen Mary, University of London, and is currently completing his PhD at Northwestern University.
STUDIOTASSY was established to encompass diverse creative collaborative practices outdoors; sculpture, performance, play, landscape design, community events, architectural artworks, and education projects since 1992. Tassy Ellen Thompson grew up in the mountains of Scotland learning from and making with the raw materials of large, wild spaces. They are inspired by expansive landscapes (physical and conceptual). STUDIOTASSY is committed to the challenges of co-creation which has delivered many original and multi-award-winning public realm works. Thompson is currently a Ph.D. Research Fellow, university lecturer, and a member of the Learning and Teaching for Sustainability Research Group researching landscape and sustainability in relation to play, performance, and ecology. Recent projects include a pro-ecological forest playground in Norway, a digital “scrollytelling” map of academic sustainability research, and Elvelangs i Kongsberg – a participatory grassroots environmental arts festival. The event attracts the participation of over 3500 local people creating a collaborative multi-arts living current of humans and “other than humans” – performing, making, and creating a dynamic community landscape and local ecology.
Matthew Randle-Bent and STUDIOTASSY’s residencies are supported through the Maria Bacardi Artist Scholarship, established by a generous gift from local East End artist Maria Pessino, in honor of her late grandmother.
In Process is the The Watermill Center’s ongoing series of studio visits that invite the community to gain insight into the creative process of our international Artists-in-Residence, cultivating an understanding of how artists from across the globe develop new work.