Eva Weaver

Eva Weaver is orginally from Germany and is now based in Brighton. She has been working in performance since 2000. Funny, dark and highly visual, her performances concern issues of cross-cultural identity and belonging, historical trauma and stereotyping. Her work has been shaped by her cultural heritage, experience as an Art Therapist, reasearch into theBurlesque, Grotesque and Shamanic and by mentoring and training support from Helen Paris, Rose English, Silke Mansholt, Lois Weaver, Stacy Makishi, Guillermo Gomez Pena and others.

Eva holds an MA in Performance from Queen Mary University.Artist Statement



Artist Statement

Born in Germany, I have been living and working in the UK since 1995. I have been involved in performance for the past eight years, creating challenging yet funny and poetic performances, which touch on a broad register of emotions.


My work is concerned with issues of cross-cultural identity, belonging, historical trauma and stereotyping and the resulting performances, both time-based and durational, are highly visual, richly layered and visceral with an emphasis on the body as site. Sometimes created for a particular site, my performances include elements of physical action, bilingual text, myth and autobiographical narrative, song, video, as well as sculpting of objects and costumes from materials such as bread, paper, bones and wool.





My work has been influenced and inspired by varies sources: Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body in exploring possibilities of transgression; research into the Burlesque; experimentation with ‘hybridisation’ as utilised by Guillermo Gomez-Pena; traditional myths and archetypes and the question of how they can be translated into a contemporary artistic language, as well as, importantly, my own shamanic practice.





I am interested in the traces left at the end of the performance, which contain a tangible essence of what has happened here - this ‘aftermess’, often visually striking and disturbing, invites the audience to further reflect on the piece in the absence of the performer.

Skeleton Woman- a Public Performance Ritual 2002‘SKELETON WOMAN’ is a solo-performance and installation concerning death, transformation and healing through the careful and compassionate attending to bones. It evokes questions about how we deal with the wounds of our personal, national and collective trauma and histories and whether it is possible to recover, reconcile, heal and create dialogue in the face of those wounds.


The performance touches on mythical, spiritual, shamanic, psychological and historical layers and the theme of death is considered in terms of corporeality and mortality, the cyclical nature of life and death, wounds left by historical trauma and the possibility for transformation. Resonance can be found in the Jewish Holocaust and the mass murder of women as witches during the European witch-hunts, as well as more recent atrocities.


Performed over five days at Fields Gallery,


Brick lane, London


Includes live action, sound, singing and poetry.









The five days resonate with themes of the tale 'Skeleton Woman', an Inuit story :


Day 1: EXCAVATION and CLEANSING


The bones of national and personal trauma are dug up from the earth. These scattered bones are fragments, which hold testimony and memories. They are cleaned and laid bare. Excavated their stories are remembered and grieved.





Day 2: REMEMBERING and RECREATING


Through the process of casting and recreating of the bones by taking plaster casts from the ‘original’ fibreglass bones, the process of remembering is deepened, the bones are attended to and are being re-created.





Day 3: DISENTANGLING, ASSEMBLING and RECOVERING


The bones are recovered, symbolically and literally by wrapping them with layers of words, ripped from my own writing. The bones give testimony of their stories. The bones are assembled , remembered and interwoven.





Day 4: SINGING BACK FLESH ONTO THE BONES


‘Flesh is sung back onto the bones’, as in the story of ‘Skeleton Woman’. The bones are further covered with several layers of clothing ripped from the dresses I am wearing, continuing the process of recovering.





Day 5: TRANSFORMATION


Roses carry the hope for healing and dialogue beyond the bones. Many roses are woven around the bones and fill the body of ‘Skeleton Woman’. The performance ends by myself resting with Skeleton Woman.

Eva Weaver 'Skeleton Woman - a public performance ritual'

What is Performance Art? Is this really how the general public see performance art?

Suffragettes "invented performance art!" A micro lecture by Leslie Hill which argues that suffragettes invented performance art. ...

What is the difference between ritual and performance?

What is the difference between ritual and performance, or is there no difference>
NOTES AND IDEAS ABOUT RITUAL AND PERFORMANCE,

Anthropologists and artists have always been interested in ritual and ceremony for what they reveal about societies and cultures. As symbolic action, rituals can be explored not only for their meanings but also for the effects they have on the lives of the participants.
Rituals and ceremonies are social events which have the power to effect meaningful transformations, coming of age ceremonies, weddings, and birthdays are just some of the examples; however are these actions the same as performance art and when does the notion of ritual which includes the patterned interactions of everyday life, such as etiquette and the performance of ordinary daily roles, have the same meanings as performance art. Do these cultural performances, have the same role as the performance connected with art and the theatre. It seems in conventional history of the theatre there is a dominance of text over performance, and even in performance art there have been certain barriers such as the passive audience
Performance art is where an active process is confined to an audience within a structured environment, where the artist is communicating theory, understanding, and to continually try and shape a conversation in a way that provides the audience and the artist with the opportunities to grow and learn. It seems that the performance is an essentially interpretive activity whose meaning is depended on the artist and how they perceive the world.
The distinction I see between performance and ritual is that often ritual suppress risk by wrapping up the cultural performance of a ritual within the expectation that the ritual will be meaningful and conform to the society and that the meaning is derived from the history of the ritual. Where performance art uses the meaning of the piece to form the basis of the performance of it. Performance art is about an action which is shown as an expression of an idea or a world view in an art, which is rooted in human culture. I have observed that performance art may be made of several acts which unlike theatre can have real consequences (wounds, or even death). Bakhtin suggests that the artist lives through his or her personal myths in front of the audience. He said that it is the artist’s experience which counts. He sugests, that “performance” appears to be the continuation of semiotics by other means.
Ritual is usually an interactive experience where participants are both active and know what is involved within the roles allotted them. Most rituals but not all of them, are a collection of residual sacramental enthusiasm which society follow as a complicated cultural script which do included rituals of betrothals and other special events. These cultural scripts highlight the need of society to perform to cultural expectations. Enacting this script allows the person to derive meaning from the ritual itself. While making each occasion simultaneously traditional and unique. In other words, people attempt to follow the core script while adjusting peripheral aspects to their own tastes. These rituals entail ritualized social practices that mobilize domains of material objects, visual images and written text. They reinforce and result in a series of attitudes and structural features, ingrained in our modern culture.
Performance art usually is intended to illustrate or refer to something beyond the artist’s immediate control. A grander ideal, for instance, a struggle, and often explosive, dramatic gestures may be used to intend their symbolic significance.
Public ritual has traditionally been the province of religion and this is the reason why ritual leans itself to performance art as rituals are usefully timed, scripted and specially staged for all involved. Using ritual in the performance gives the art a symbolic meaning using rituals you are engaging the viewer with codes or triggers which they can connect with, but these rituals are being used as tactics to make a point, challenging or mimicking what occurs during a social ritual rather than continuing to express or reinforce a cultural meaning and tradition which is imbedded with society and has rules and indications for how society structures the lives of its people.
Ritualized moments consist of people moving in accord with cultural scripts. The study of rituals often reveals that these actions be directly linked to the social and cultural values that people implicitly and explicitly place on their country, ancestry, religion, and ability to perform and teach performance. In our society, knowledge is passed from a teacher to a student, mother/father to child, a transcendental exchange of wisdom and talent occurs, expressly at the will of the informer. This is how social interactions can be viewed as performance.
Ritual is a performance that is representative of the social interactions common to culture and society. Reinforcing the ideal that ritual serves as forms of communication that endorse group cohesion Performance relies on the emotional connection of the audience to create the conditions for projecting cultural meaning from performance to audience, the goals of performance art remains the same as the ambient of a ritual it stands or falls on the ability to produce psychological identification and cultural extension

Elisabeth Jappe in Performance, Ritual, Prozess states that, “Action as the expression of an idea or a world view in an act, is rooted in human culture. This act may be sacral like ritual or profane like the social critique of Diogenes who searched for a reasonable man with a lantern in his hands in Athens in broad daylight. Well then, performance art and performance in a narrow sense is ready to draw from ritual (the most prominent example to this might be Joseph Beuys) yet we should always be aware of the difference; while the form of ritual is essentially defined (it must be produced the same way every time), performance is never carried out as it was before. The notion of process has made its way into art through action painting and happening intending to attack the traditional idea which defined the aim of art as the creation of a product. Thus process is a method of art, a technique, which has become central with Expanded Performance. Process and ritual form two different aspects of Performance Art. On gaining new content, they are, from time to time, integrated into performance and enrich it with fresh meanings.”

Think i have gone round in circles, not sure if i am making sense what do you think?

Happy to Meet You: An Introduction to Relational Art

This is an interesting web site which is looking at a growing number of contemporary artists who use performative and interactive techniques that rely on the responses of others: pedestrians, shoppers, browsers—the casual observer-turned-participants.

It has a number of links to other webs which i have not had time to explore yet.



http://place.unm.edu/relational_art.html

Sorry but you will have to copy and paste the link as it will not let me link it