Anna-Maria Nabirye and Annie Saunders

UP IN ARMS

Project Description

Up in Arms is a transmedia performance project that removes the boundaries between process and product, utilizing performance, visual art, and social practice. Created by Anna-Maria Nabirye and Annie Saunders, participants are invited, two at a time, to re-embody and re-create the iconic 1971 portrait of activists and friends Dorothy Pitman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem. In doing so, the artists create a space for meaningful dialogue around racism, feminism, and friendship.

The project consists of multiple engagement points: the intimate portrait and dialogue experience for two friends, colleagues, or family members, the documentation of that process (which is edited into a multimedia live performance by the artists as a part of the engagement), and the resulting “final products” – the footage, audio and portraits – which comprise a visual art installation. Using the materials generated through residency and installation, the artists are compiling a book project, the Up in Arms Handbook for Intersectional Collaboration.

The work is bespoke to each presentation and can be made for digital, live, timed, socially-distant audiences and participants or a combination of the above.

Up In Arms has been developed with residencies, performances and live events at The Showroom Gallery, Toynbee Studios, and no.w.here space, London, UK, MANA Contemporary, Jersey City, USA, The International Women's Film Festival, Dortmund, Germany, The Association of Austrian Women Artists, Vienna, and online for the WOW(Women of the World) Global 24 Festival.

"Bridging history, media, action, and introspection, the resulting alchemy is an artistic process which cracks you open, reflects your humanity back to you while encouraging you to feel the complexities of your racialized body in relationship to another. Or put more simply: this project promotes healing and repairing relationships that have been decimated by white supremacy." – Nicole Brewer, Founder, Conscientious Theatre Training, Yale School of Drama

THE EXPERIENCE

The artists invite two audience-participants - a black woman and a friend of her choice - to re-embody and re-create Dan Wynn’s iconic portrait of Dorothy Pitman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem. The participants pose for this photo, see the photo in real time, and talk to each other and the artists about female friendship, feminism, racism and things that are hard to talk about. The re-creation of this image acts as a ritual to open space for uncomfortable, challenging, transformative conversation. These experiences last about one hour and are video/audio documented.

THE LIVE PERFORMANCE

This is a multimedia performance for flexible spaces and larger audiences, created and performed by artists following a series of facilitated experiences as above. Using the documentation from the experiences, they edit audio and visuals separately and play them in ‘sync’ for the first time in front of the audience, while they appear onstage in front of the screen, creating shadows, silhouettes and both physically and verbally commenting on the film. This is followed by a talkback.

THE EXHIBITION

The resulting portraits and recordings from the experience and the live documentary will form an interactive visual exhibition comprising of photographs, audio and video.

THE BOOK

The artists are also working on a handbook for creative interracial collaboration.

ARTISTS

Anna-Maria Nabirye

Anna-Maria Nabirye is a multi-disciplinary artist who performs, collaborates and initiates projects across fiction, documentary, theatre, screen, visual arts and fashion. She is interested in amplifying the stories of marginalised peoples with an emphasis on Black Women in the western Diaspora.

As a collaborative artist /performer she has co-directed/devised Ruptures (London Film Festival/Home), Hold Your Ground- Film and Video Umbrella & The Paper Man (Improbable Theatre).
Her own projects include Motherhoody (with Jess Mabel Jones, Albany 2019), Up In Arms currently in development (with Annie Saunders),

No Word For A Pier In Lusoga (De La Warr Pavilion), Strong & Wrong (Brighton/Edinburgh Fringe) & AFRORETRO; a creative entity which tells stories of the diaspora through upcycled fashion and textiles (commissioned by Royal Court, V&A, SBC, Brighton Museum and awarded Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects residency).

Recent acting roles includes Mephisto [A Rhapsody] (The Gate 2019), Les Blancs (National Theatre) and Macbeth/Boudica/A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Globe), Informer, Collateral (BBC).

Anna-Maria has developed relationships combining roles as actor, collaborator, and co-director with; Half Moon YPT, Imogen Knight, METIS-Zoe Svendsen, Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler. She is currently works with LPO creating a communication programme for their Junior Artist mentorship for underrepresented musicians.

Annie Saunders

Annie Saunders is a director and live artist. Her company, Wilderness,
has presented The Day Shall Declare It in a disused warehouse in the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District with Los Angeles Performance Practice and in London with Theatre Delicatessen in the former BBC Studios and the Bush Theatre. The company has also presented work
at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, REDCAT, the 14th Factory, The Broad Stage, the San Francisco Playhouse and the Getty Villa. She is a core performer with Lars Jan’s Early Morning Opera, and has appeared in Holoscenes, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), and Abacus. She was a participant in the 2017/18 Devised Theater Working Group for next-generation performance-makers at the Public Theater in New York.

Annie Saunders has also devised and performed original work in the UK with Neil Bettles (Frantic Assembly, Thickskin) and Gemma Fairlie (RSC) on Full Stop, a co-commission for the Lyric Theatre, Watford Palace, Greenwich Festival and Latitude. She holds an MA in literature and critical studies from the University of London, and trained at the Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts, the American Conservatory Theater and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She worked for ten years as a creative activist with Eve Ensler’s V-Day.