Among the performers at this year’s Independents Biennial Liverpool was Liverpool Hope’s Dr Silvia Battista.
The Theatre and Performance Studies Lecturer performed her piece Persephone (2018) in the George Henry Lee building in response to the installation The Jugglers (2018) realised by the artist Angelo Madonna.
Dr Battista said: “As a performance artist and researcher in the field, I was very excited to contribute to the Independents Biennial Liverpool and to engage with both the George Henry Lee building and the installation piece.
“The building was used to host one of the biggest home retailers in town, therefore it gave me the possibility to experiment with transforming a pathway devised for commercial purposes into a theatrical and ritualistic system.”
Art in Liverpool stated: “By employing repetition within a circular structure, the performance produces a presence which plays on the possibility and impossibility of a dis/embodied presence to inhabit a space. Eventually Persephone vanishes and her story will be narrated: a contemporary tale of loss and redemption, of myth and ordinary life, of jugglers and lost souls.”
Dr Battista was interviewed alongside Angelo Madonna, by Independents Biennial Writer-in-Residence Joanie Magill. Read the interview in full here.