Ophelia's Last Supper - exploring embodiment in film & performance

About

PROGRAMME INCLUDES

A PREMIERE of a short film Ophelia’s Last Supper, 2018
Short film by Tereza Stehlikova
"The film inspired by Millais famous painting and explores a reoccurring theme in my work: transformation of the act of eating into a kind of internal journey, where the fluid boundaries between our interior and exterior worlds, which our senses mediate between, become dissolved. Another source of inspiration is the Futurist Cookbook by FT Marinetti. Ever since reading it I became intrigued by the potential of using food and ingestion as a medium of subversion and play, fuelled by imagination. In this film Ophelia slowly merges with the element of water, ingesting the landscape that will later ingest her. The act of beautification, by definition surface is, through ingestion, internalised, while the interior becomes exposed." Tereza Stehlikova

Performance by actress Tereza Kamenicka 
A live, interactive performance, building on the themes explored in Ophelia's Last Supper 

Screening of Sweet Muscle Flexing, 2018 
Short film by Tereza Stehlikova, from an ongoing collaboration with performer Tereza Kamenicka and artist Nuala Clooney.

Performance by artist Nuala Clooney: 
An edible interaction seeking to playfully examine the sensual and fluid boundaries between object, food and body, through engaging with all the senses. During the evening the audience will come across a table setting. A table consisting of edible flesh and artefacts. The audience will be invited to indulge their own senses and to be seduced themselves by the promise of sweet mouthfuls of pleasure. This sensuous interchange will open up a dialogue about ingestion and how our mouths turn transient consumables into flesh, the flesh of our own bodies, internalising an aspect of the ‘other’ and connecting the external world with the internal landscape of the body. A fluid landscape.

Performance by artist Amy Neilson Smith 
“The poem inspired by Millais famous painting explores a recurring theme in my work, that of water; its ability to both submerge us and let us flow free. What in this world causes women to drown and what keeps us afloat? Are our internal parts left to rot if they don’t nurture “the swelling of a verdant womb” with “little eyelashes sprouting, little bellies to be watered”? The subversion of lust lending a destructive hand is ever present here, it ripples under the landscape’s surface, turns loose its damp fodder - Ophelia as human loam.” Classical music composed and improvised by William Summers, ‘Millais’ Ophelia’ poem, written and performed by Amy Neilson Smith.