Performance Grace Schwindt – Opera and Steel at Frascati

Artist Grace Schwindt is able like no other to capture big themes in crystal-clear, poetic performances. For Opera and Steel, she spoke to a man who has spent 37 years on a remote beach, mapping oil pollution and its effects on seabirds. In doing so, he has involuntarily supplied the oil industry with figures it can use to demonstrate its efficiency. Schwindt sketches the man’s experiences using two dancers, an acrobat, an opera singer, text, video, live music, light and sculpture. Performers become objects, objects become costumes and video and dance merge – as man, bird and oil become irretrievably entangled, generating an impression of individual life within global capitalism.

Grace Schwindt creates performances and films that reduce big historical events or social themes to human proportions. She is able to expose underlying social mechanisms using performers, text, objects and sound as pieces of equal value. Placing the body simply as an object among other objects raises issues of age, class, origin and gender. In recent years, she has created the performance The Signal and the films Tenant and Only A Free Individual Can Create A Free Society. Schwindt’s work is shown in galleries, arts centres, at fairs and theatres throughout and outside of Europe.

direction Grace Schwindt performers Yumiko Funaya, Gerard Bell text Gerard Bell singing Lisa Cassidy music Tristan Renfrow, Iose Ravera Acrobatics Claire Hermans dramaturgy advice Esther Severi commissioned by Kaaitheater supported by Argos Centre for Art | Media & Instituto Italiano di Cultura Bruxelles | AFK | Mondriaan Fonds | Stichting Stokroos sponsored by Terpstra Muziek Drumland | Muziekvereniging Juliana Marken produced by Rozenstraat- a rose is a rose is a rose and Frascati