SOAK Live Art present: An evening of Deep Sea Performance
The House, (doors 7pm) performances 7.30pm-9pm, post-show talk 9pm-9.30pm
Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz (8pm)
Devised and performed by Karen Christopher, Tara Fatehi and Jemima Yong
Whale Fall (7.30pm)
Devised and performed by Sarah Blissett
Movement dramaturgy by Jane Mason
Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz is a live performance combining movement, text, song, sound and objects to explore flow, adaptation and ways of sensing the world, evoking ideas related to deep sea cultures and the environment.
Karen, Tara and Jemima have devised, directed and will perform the work. They have come together to wiggle, jump, dart, glide, cogitate and sing about our present condition as a way of thinking about what and who we live alongside. Murmurations, recitations, proclamations and evocations take the form of dance, song, disguise, protest and celebration, and woven throughout the piece is an extensive list of everyone the show is “for”.
Thinking through the lens of the deep dark sea, we are answering who and what performance is for and how we might foster generative thought about climate adaptation and living with difference among the vital forces of this planet. We are stardust but we are also fish.
Whale Fall is an unfolding dialogue with a whale bone through text, sound and movement. The piece explores how new bodies form in places of oceanic darkness.
In April 2025, Sarah found a whale bone at the Plymouth Fisheries. Over the past year, she has been tending to this object and considering bodily entanglements between humans and whales. This work-in-progress performance begins to tell the story of a conversation between bodies through cycles of decomposition and regeneration. It asks what happens when whale bodies come to rest at the bottom of the sea and what emerges from the depths.
Accompanying the performance night is a workshop led by the makers of Skywater...
SOAK LAB present: Other Eyes/Other Ears: a workshop in creative collaboration
Saturday April 18, 2026 (The House)
10am-4pm, including 1-2pm lunch break
Led by the makers of Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz, this workshop will activate strategies for working collaboratively to generate performance material and investigate creative forms of thought and presentation.
Complementing Skywater..., the workshop will also prompt thinking and making by contemplating the conditions of the deep sea. For example: uncertainty; waiting; living under pressure; elaborate disguise; regeneration; and other minds.
By following a series of instructions, participants will engage with different approaches to research, material generation, collaborative and generative methods, reflection and analysis, creative feedback and listening.
Collaboration will be central to the workshop. Connection is vital: this is why we collaborate. The practice of finding agreement within a group, of tolerating difference, and how we live up to the presence of others, measures everything we do. We aspire to pay attention as a practice of social cooperation.
Disciplines of performance, writing, movement, and creative response will be activated in different forms and combinations.
No prior performance experience is necessary.
More information:
https://karenchristopher.co.uk/project/teaching/
The House is a fully accessible venue. If you have any access requirements or questions please email: sarah.blissett@plymouth.ac.uk
Artist Bios:
Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. Her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is devoted to collaborative processes, listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet, paying attention as an act of social cooperation. Recent works engage with interconnectivity: the entanglement between people and of people with their environments, other living beings, and the vibrant matter with which we interact. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until they disbanded in 2009. Karen is based in Faversham, Kent. https://karenchristopher.co.uk/
Tara Fatehi is a performance maker, performer and writer. She creates poetic-political pieces playing with ambiguity, mistranslation, disjunction and unfinishedness. Tara has performed at the V&A Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, Nottdance, Chapter, Julidans, Montpellier Danse, Dansens Hus, Alkantara and Rosendal Teater among others. Her ongoing projects include Mishandled Archive (dispersing a family archive in public space through dance and photography) and From the Lips to the Moon (an unusual music and poetry night). Tara has recently performed with Hooman Sharifi (Norway) and Teatr O Bando (Portugal). In 2021, Tara was the first ever resident artist at the United Nations Archives at Geneva. Tara is based in London. www.tarafatehi.com
Jemima Yong is a performance maker and photographer. She is Sarawakian, born in Singapore, and has developed her artistic practice in London, UK, where she is based. Collaboration and experimentation are central to her work. Recent performances include Something in Your Voice with Emergency Chorus and Marathon with JAMS, which received the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2018 and was presented by the Barbican Centre. Jemima’s photography has been featured by the BBC, Time Out, The Guardian, Swazi Observer and The Straits Times. She is an associate artist at Forest Fringe and is one fifth of DARC (Documentation Action Research Collective). Jemima is an alumni of United World Colleges, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and The Curious School of Puppetry. https://jemimayong.format.com/
Sarah Blissett is an artist, researcher and performance maker. Her interdisciplinary practice explores how performance can remember and reimagine human-nonhuman entanglements at a time of climate crisis. Her work is rooted in site-based practice and includes performance, installations and workshops as different ways to think through material relationships between bodies and environments. Sarah is lecturer in Drama at the University of Plymouth where her current research investigates ways ways of working with ocean ecologies in performance. Sarah is also founder and co-director of SOAK Live Art, a platform for experimental performance by South West artists. Recent performances include Tidal Tongues with Art Inside Out (Sweden) and Marking Tidetime (Modern Art Oxford). https://www.sarahblissett.net/
This performance evening and workshop are part of a SOAK LAB research project funded by an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account supported by the University of Plymouth. The performances will be followed by a post-show discussion.
To find out more contact about this project email: sarah.blissett@plymouth.ac.uk
Skywater, Facewater, Underwater Waltz is supported by Queen Mary University Centre for Creative Collaboration (London), Arnolfini (Bristol) and Lancaster Arts.
Location
The House, PL4 8AA