FACTUAL ACTUAL (2021) at The National Gallery
Commissioned by The National Gallery, Factual Actual was created and presented by Florence Peake in December 2021.
Four large, exuberantly canvases, painted by Peake, are treated with a joyful irreverence - folded, dragged, and suspended by five dancers - moving between flat and sculptural forms and theatrical elements of concealment and revelation.
Unpicking the romantic representation of dance in classical painting and its idealised depiction of the body, the work subverts the static representation often found in museum collections, through chaotic shifts and ever-changing compositions. Peake looks at the idea of the collapse of the canon of white Western classical painting through the literal manipulation of the canvases. The dancers work with the idea of collapse and use it as a metaphor to address wider concerns of institutional power structures and the ways in which we can overcome them.
Factual Actual (2021) was part of Dance to the Music of Our Time: A Live Exhibition presenting the work of Hetain Patel, Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo as well as Florence Peake, to explore the relationship of storytelling and contemporary art through the use movement, dance and choreography. Taking its title from a painting by Nicolas Poussin and presented alongside the exhibition Poussin and the Dance, the performances and film programme looked at how artists use dance to understand narratives and mythical stories.
Factual Actual will tour in 2023 - 24 and shapeshift to different contexts as it does so.
Florence Peake is an artist who makes solo and group performance works intertwined with a visual art practice. Peake produces work across a broad range of formal and time-based media through an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Her painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites. Her work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; and the subjective and imagined body.
Credits:
Artistic Direction : Florence Peake
Paintings: Florence Peake in collaboration with Iris Chan and Rosalie Wahlfrid
Performers: Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Iris Chan, Katye Coe, Rosalie Wahlfrid, Natifah White
Producer: Nikki Tomlinson
Costumes: Clover Peake
Supported by Somerset House Studios, Richard Saltoun Gallery, Wainsgate Dances, La Becque Résidence d’artistes, and Sigrid and Stephen Kirk
Commissioned by The National Gallery, London
Images : Factual Actual by Florence Peake at The National Gallery (2021), photographer Anna Arca