'Scene' presents works by artists Sasha Ercole and Katie Shannon and collectives TLC23 and Young Boy Dancing Group, examining how dramaturgical devices may be deployed in the staging, representation, and enactment of the political, governmental, social, and communal. Within their practices, the exhibited artists variously reveal how much of contemporary life and widely received truths are subject to strategies of staging, just as the explicit artifice of the performance space can paradoxically reveal profound truths about the “real world” that it re-enacts.

By creating a controlled environment where elements of reality
are heightened and recontextualised, performativity can expose underlying societal structures, power dynamics, and human behaviours. Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “Verfremdungseffekt” (or “alienation effect,”) intentionally disrupts the audience’s emotional involvement to encourage critical detachment and reflection. Heiner Müller often employed this Brechtian effect
and drew on historical events to liken the past to the present, inviting the audience to recognise continuity and recurrences in human behaviours and societal patterns. Jane Arden frequently incorporated autobiographical elements into her plays as well as real-life testimonies, interviews, and factual data, which grounded her plays in reality, providing a factual basis for the dramatic action and reinforcing the connection between the performance and real-world issues. She, like Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed”, also used interactive performance to empower spectators, transforming them into “spect-actors” who could explore and challenge oppressive situations, highlighting the potential for social change. Through these devices, theatre’s artifice becomes a mirror reflecting deeper truths about our world, compelling audiences to reconsider and potentially transform their realities.

SASHA ERCOLE’s practice looks specifically to dramaturgy as a creator of self-contained power systems. General Assembly features a page from a theatre textbook which uses a scene from Sheridan’s comedy of manners The School for Scandal to illustrate how lighting can be used to illusionistic ends onstage to influence atmosphere, storytelling and audience affect. Ercole expands on the strategies of image and meaning-making in a new pendant of framed prints The Ambassadors which eponymously (and chromatically) references Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1533 double portrait and vanitas of the same name. Holbein’s painting depicts French ambassador Jean de Dinteville and Georges De Selve, a Catholic Bishop, posing
by an array of scientific and musical objects and an infamously distorted skull, selected to bestow further subtextual and allegorical meaning upon the sitters. Ercole likens the representational framing of governance to a form of staging and theatre, with the vanitas genre as model for further constructing meaning. In her work, a traditional floral still life on a Manfrotto table (a ‘still life table’ used in product photography) is accompanied by a wider shot documenting its making. By revealing the lighting, backdrop, and studio set-up, the image’s staged nature is rendered visible and foregrounded as subject. The semantics of the titling also interested Ercole, as the role of the ambassador implies a model of transnational statehood that, in a globalised context, could represent a form of universal governance. Viewed through the lens of the staged image, contemporary vehicles of power – product, commodity, desire – could also be likened to ambassadorial currency in late capitalism.

KATIE SHANNON also draws on staging strategies in her graphite on paper work EROS HOUSE, more specifically on the theatrical device of the tableau, a static scene often composed of several actors who are carefully posed in costume, with props, scenery and lighting, thereby containing aspects of both theatre and the visual arts. The tableau’s intentional staging turns image into allegory, its artifice operating on a symbolic rather than representational level. Brecht notably used the tableau to suspend time and action momentarily, inviting audiences to take in a scene and all the individual components making it up. The tableau is not considered a snapshot but a conduit to analyse how multiple parts can be composed to achieve an overall symbolic effect. This idea speaks to the notion of the collective,
the subculture, and the ensemble cast, which Shannon asks us to contemplate in EROS HOUSE: a group of individuals who share a common characteristic, activity or set of beliefs which unify them into a cohesive group. They make up a “scene” in both the word’s social and theatrical sense.

Shannon based her tableau on an image from PEDESTRIANFETISH Series 1 by the collective TLC23, instigated by Shannon and
fellow artist Keira Fox, of which three further shots are featured in the exhibition. The photos, taken by Amy Gwatkin, document the backstage of a happening staged by TLC23 outside Eros House, a privately-owned brutalist block of flats in South London which, in 2018, had found itself at the centre of protests by residents over the poor living conditions, which reflected the broader housing crisis facing Londoners. TLC23’s costuming of tape, belts, cling film and repurposed clothes unified the members aesthetically while referencing what they identified as pedestrian fetish shoots of 80s and 90s magazines like O and Bad Attitude, in which day-to-day objects, materials and architecture were fashioned and fetishised. This scrappy make-do-ness further alluded to the physical and ideological crumbling of the social(ist) architecture and original aspirations of brutalist projects like Eros House, yet Gwtakin’s photographs – which show the members dressing each other, preparing and relaxing together – speak hopefully to the potential
for collaboration and collectivisation in the face of unrest. The coming-together of individual agency and group ideology can situate performed action as a form of lived institutional critique, an alternative mode of presence within the present, thereby proposing new kinds of togetherness.

Staging and theatrical devices have long been central instruments to activism. Theorists Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, and
André Lepecki have all drawn links between stage performance, choreography and political organisation. The homonym “movement” for dance and political mobilisation seems no coincidence. In general, dance and choreography appear eminently political, directly linked to creating, enacting, exposing and representing forms of order, power, togetherness and, sometimes, utopia. Since 2014, performance collective YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP has been staging radical intimacy in largely improvised, euphoric group dance pieces, their movement drawing from acro, trust exercises and intuitive touch to image structures of support, collectivism, intimacy and precarity. New permutations of performers form according to the locale YBDG finds itself in, new members inducted through a brief, intensive rehearsal process that shapes a given piece and continuously evolves the group and its work. As in TLC23 and Shannon’s works, costuming is integral to YBDG’s dramaturgy. Their artworks featured in Scene see the group’s distinctive mode of dress (shredded, repurposed and reconfigured clothes and shoes) fossilised into wall-based resin and gelatine works, which are occasionally also used as set design elements for their live performances and aesthetically absorb new members – amoeba-like – into the world, vision, and (dis)order of the group’s own making. “It’s all about the group,” founding member Manu Anima said to Interview Magazine. “I always trust the group.”

Through tactics of staging, composition, movement, choreography, costume and set, the exhibited artists expose how the artifice of theatre and performance can be revelatory of broader, universal truths, enactors or catalysts to connection, collectivity, protest, and, sometimes, change. They stage community, shared truth, and the mechanisms of power in works that reveal how these devices are also prevalent mechanisms of power in everyday life, suggesting that, ultimately, the world is theatre, and the theatre is world.

SASHA ERCOLE (b. 1998, Dallas, Texas) is an artist and researcher based in London. Her practice is formally constructed through photography and installation. She often works collaboratively across disciplines, exploring the relationship between power and visibility within infrastructural systems.

Ercole holds a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media with an emphasis in Linguistic Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University (2016) and recently earned an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2023), where she’s currently awarded the 2024 postgraduate fellowship in addition to her professional research position at The Perimeter, London. Select exhibitions and performances include Alice Black Gallery, London (2024); Large Glass, London (2024); Deptford X, London (2023); Greatorex St, London (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond VA (2020), among others.

KATIE SHANNON (b. Glasgow, UK) is a London-based artist working across drawing, installation, textiles, music and writing. Her work presents filmic framing and deferred timecoding which foreground friendship alliances, music cultures and evoke states of energetic melancholia, seeking to counter ennui with collaboration, shared intimacy and unrest.

Shannon was the subject of solo shows at Celine Gallery, Glasgow (2024) and Kunsthalle.Ost, Leipzig (2022). Recent projects include TLC23PEDESTRIANFETISHAGM, a collaborative performance at ASP Fair 8, Conway Hall, London (2023); The Artist Bar, research seminar and performance at the Horse Hospital, London (2023); Sicko fanart for Finlay Clark (2023); TLC23 collective action FET MIASMA MIS at Le Bourgeois, Catford (2023), Rebi programmed events at Cafe Oto (ongoing), and soundtracking and performance for Liquid Currency at Kunstverein Dortmund (2022). She co-runs record labels and gig series Domestic Exile, So Low and Rebi, performs with band Kübler-Ross, and has a radio residency on NTS radio. Shannon is graduating with an MFA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2024.

TLC23 is a London-based collective instigated by artists Keira Fox and Katie Shannon out of combined interest and research into mania, trauma states and unravelling female personas within film, writing and performance. This has led to collectivised events, their first in 2021 in London, which enact their research via performance, music, set dressing, site-specific happenings, curating and organising. TLC23 collaborates with fellow artists, musicians and makers, blurring the line between event and art space.

Recent projects and performances have taken place at ASP Fair, London (2023); Le Bourgeois Gallery, London (2023); Soda 2123, Vilnius (2022); Ormside Projects, London (2021).

YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP was initiated in 2014 as a mercurial performance group with no initial name and an ongoing alternating cast. Since 2015, the group, based in Zurich, has been titled Young Boy Dancing Group. As Spike Magazine wrote: “Since making their debut as a performance group at Paris’s Club Silencio in 2014, eccentric tactics earning early viral fame have matured into immersive studies in physical intensity, sensuality, and extreme absurdity”.

YBDG has performed at Art Basel, Basel (2024); Performance Space New York, New York City, NY (2024), Kim?, Riga (2024); Rhizome, New York City, NY (2024); Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo (2023), O’Flaherty’s, New York City, NY (2023), Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2023), Icelandic Art Center, Art Hub Copenhagen (2023), Perrrformat, Zürich (2021), Disappearing Berlin, Schinkel Pavilion Berlin (2021), BOFFO, NYC, OCD China town, New York City (2019), Ceremonia, Mexico,

Nave, Chile (2019), UV estudios, Buenos Aires (2018). Baltic Triannial, Tallinn (2018), Athens Bienale, Athens (2018), Creepy Tee pee, Kutná Hora (2018), Kammer Spiele München (2017), Kunstraum London (2017), Yvonne Lambert, Berlin (2017), Roskilde Music Festival (2017), Lithuanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2015).

émergent Magazine