Steps
6 to 8pm
NOW Gallery
Come and meet Raw Edges the designers of our smooth, white concrete armchairs designed for two to nest, which invite all to dwell, play, lean and relax on Peninsula Square. Have a drink and enjoy Pepa Ubera‘s celebration of the seating with a new site specific performance during the evening. She is using this opportunity to explore how dance can highlight a particular space and it’s levels of attention. The choreography discloses itself as visual poetic moments and as situations for the audience to interact with the space and dream of new possibilities for public spaces in London.
Pepa Ubera is a dance artist and choreographer based in London since 2013. Her work challenges social structures, questioning how the body behaves in the current context. She examines the tension that unites opposite ideas with the purpose of highlighting the spaces in between. In her interdisciplinary practice she has been exploring other medias as choreographic tools working with sound, video, light and curating contemporary performance. Currently Pepa is one of the Sadlers Wells Summer University artists and has twice been awarded a Dance Web Scholarship at the Impulstanz Festival Vienna. From 2013-2015 she was a TripSpace associate artist and curator where she initiated The Palest Light a night of contemporary performance and curated Limen festival in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery. She has presented work in the UK, Europe and Chile and performed in venues such as The Place, ICA, Barbican Botanic Gardens and the Hayward Gallery. She regularly collaborates with choreographer Josefina Camus (CH/UK) and their performance Ellipsis Land has been presented at TripSpace (2015) Sadler’s Wells (2016) and the Tate modern (2017).
Raw Edges on their inspiration for the project
“When walking in the nature we can take a break comfortably and sit on a rock or a log, a cut tree trunk or simply on a grassy mound. In the city as well, we can find relaxing spots that were not designed to become seats like stairs, pavements’ edge or low brick walls. We looked into this behaviour; this hunter’s eye that looks for the ideal resting position, like a student during a lunch break, a group of builders having coffee on site or bunch of pupils sitting on the pavement, and came up with this small urban landscape that is made from a clutter of concrete units. Each unit is like a scaled up domestic armchair, and when arranged together with their different heights, ‘these armchairs’ create an urban texture that invites people to step on, and relax.”