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Performance Projects

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Vanessa's work usefully defies easy categorisation; as an artist, she works with movement, text, video and everyday materials in theatre and gallery spaces. Through her practice, she aims to continue developing critical and creative responses to the productivity of flesh for Black artists across the diaspora. Her practice relies on finding new ways of communicating lived experiences of marginalisation to provoke new imagined futures and ideas of liberation and safety.

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Enticement Machine 

Enticement Machine is a performance made for theatre spaces.

The format of the performance follows a 'how-to' tutorial.

The performance is a satirical rap video circus that distorts and negotiates the vision of the Black woman under the lens of pop culture and stereotypes. Drawing on music videos, make-up tutorials and twerking, Enticement Machine combines movement, spoken word and video to interrogate the hyper-sexualisation of the Black female body to the point of the absurd.

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Made Not Born

An autobiographical performance made for theatre spaces. The performance depicts mother / daughter relationship. Through text, movement and video, I try to find a common vocabulary of understanding in my mums bodybuilding practice and my ballet practice 

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8mins and 45 seconds 

A collection of portraits Influenced by the 2020 pandemic and the plea for breath 

The Architect

Conceived by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, and created with a collective of leading Black artists including Bola Agbaje, Dexter Flanders, Vanessa Macauley and XANA.

 

The Architect asks how we create a blueprint for the future, three decades after a seismic event in British history.  

 

This celebratory and stirring immersive theatrical experience, taking place on a London bus in September, explores the lives of Black Londoners, imagines the potential of uninterrupted Black lives, and the hopes, ambitions and dreams that accompany them through performance, sound design, music and spectacle.

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The Architect 

 

Conceived by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, and created with a collective of leading Black artists including Bola Agbaje, Dexter Flanders, Vanessa Macaulay and XANA.

The Architect asks how we create a blueprint for the future, three decades after a seismic event in British history.  

This celebratory and stirring immersive theatrical experience, taking place on a London bus in September, explores the lives of Black Londoners, imagines the potential of uninterrupted Black lives, and the hopes, ambitions and dreams that accompany them through performance, sound design, music and spectacle.

Between Stolen Breaths 

To breathe goes beyond a simple biological function of life; it articulates a desire to exist in this body. Stolen Breaths is a performative ritual where movement is pushing, and stillness is breathing space. To sigh, gasp or pant is to know in my body the cost of air.

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Becoming Water 2024

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