WRINGING METAMORPHOSIS
WRINGING METAMORPHOSIS is a dance-theatre collective created and lead by Blue Pieta and Charis Taplin with music design and vocals from Elinor Arden and Jessica Raja Brown with Kath Gifford as a kahon player Ynes Barnard Masterson as a flamenco guitarist.
Charis Taplin
Charis Taplin is the creative director of Wringing Metamorphosis alongside Blue Pieta.
Charis is a writer and dancer who has collaborated with interdisciplinary artists from cellists to fashion designers, She was professionally trained in dance and theatre under the teaching of Antonella Boccadamo (Ultima Vez) and Brigel Gjoka (William Forsythe Company) in Bologna, Italy, as part of Art Factory International, where she worked with companies and artists including Peeping Tom, Ultima Vez, Carlo Massari and Parvaneh Scharafali. She has been involved in collaboratively devised performances at Siobhan Davies Studio as part of the Next Choreography festival, intergenerational projects with Cecilia Mcfarlane and in collaboration with Struan Leslie in an adaptation of Medea. She has also completed work experience with Theatre du Soleil, Hofesh Shechter Company and Centre for Theatre Practises GARDZIENICE.
Charis is also a writer, and endeavours in every artistic medium to delve into the personal stories, histories and languages contained inside our bodies- seeing the thread that connects us to the divine in art as same thread that connects us to one another; letting these languages coexist and evolve in an integrated fabric of the muscle memory of the individual and those we meet as we navigate and experience the world through our physicality.
Blue Pieta
Blue Pieta is the creative director of Wringing Metamorphosis alongside Charis Taplin, as well as producer. .
Blue is a writer, dancer, director, actor and visual artist. Blue wrote a play called Primal Instinct which debuted at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Hamish Pirie (Associate director of Royal Court) and was adapted into a play called VOID directed and produced by Malakai Sargaent (former Associate Director of Theatre Peckham) which toured London venues such as: Arcola Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre, Camden People’s Theatre, Hackney Showroom. They have completed acting training at the National Youth Theatre and have also achieved a Fine Art Diploma from Central Saint Martins specialising in performance and live art. They have worked alongside the movement theatre company Frantic Assembly. They have worked as a performer/deviser/dancer in ‘Really Real Teenz’ at the Yard Theatre directed by Lauren Barri-Holstein. They have received an ATLAS scholarship at Impulstanz Vienna and trained with Damien Jalet and Wim Vanderkybus. They have also completed the Sadler’s Wells Young Associate Choreographic school. They have also worked with performance artists SCOTEE and Nando Messias. Additionally, they have worked with refugees at the North East London Migrant Action centre accompanying refugees when in states of destitution and homeless which greatly informs the emotional and political lexicon of their artistic work.
Blue's practice is oriented around the mythopoetic stories and dance buried in the human body’s material composition: carbon, water, blood. They use movement as a form of ritual ancestral communication with stardust, blood ancestors and sacred water bodies. They contextualise their artistic practice within the history of liturgy: understanding how Byzantine, Mesopotamian, Ancient Greek and Zoroastrian civilisations used the body as a material to venerate the sacred. In this sense, Blue uses the body to access celestial states of consciousness that impregnate the audience with a hybrid human-sacred state of being - a prophetic madness devoted to the cause of LOVE.
Jessica Raja Brown
Jessica is a singer in OMPHALOS who has trained in singing arabic and farsi song. She has worked in classical, choral and Jazz. She is also a visual artist and painter
Elinor Arden
Elinor is an artist and musician currently working in sound and performance. She is particularly interested in the relationship between AI and the body, and whether memory or trauma can be held in the body -- how might we use music to embody the hyperspace of AI memory? Her practice is wide-ranging but at the moment she is involved in designing sound for dance-theatre company ‘Wringing Metamorphosis’. She created an ancestral web of sound to accompany the dancers, drawing inspiration from the folk music of each performer’s heritage. She has also researched and developed Ladino songs, which are becoming obsolete, in an exploration of her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. She has worked with a guitarist, cajon player and another singer to create an hour-long sonic experience, blending recorded soundscapes and live music.