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written and performed by:
Maria Leonard
Lighting:
Moses Weber
Script reader:
Yossi Rayner
Assistant Producer and Director:
Mona Ramirez
Maria Leonard
Impasto
Performance
I got muscle, but I came undone. In the gym and out of it; on the canvas and off of it. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling, in the balance of desire and lack; work and desire and lack. I want the paint to work as flesh does.
"Impasto" is a solo performance by Maria Leonard that plays with the writer-performer-director hierarchy. Using nonlinear narrative strategies interspersed with poetry, physicality and rage, Impasto focuses on the inventive ways temporality, the future, queerness and the desire to ‘get free’ through physical exercise and the backdrop of neoliberal austerity plays out in the balance of failure and chaos.
When you lose control of your body, you have just about lost all you have in this world.
"Impasto" explores failure and becoming, strength and undoing, the placement of the state in the most intimate part of our lives, and the queer ways temporality and the desire to ‘get free’ play out for the individuated self. It is a script written in verse and physical movement, written through and against neoliberal demands.
From weight lifting and the treadmill, to the paint canvas and the small violence/tenderness at the heart of our states of desire and resistance to ‘lack’, Impasto is for anyone that enjoys being a complicit spectator, physical extremes, getting free, and creating the space to be ‘undone’.
Desire is no light thing. To be running, in and out of breath, but not yet arrived – this is delight. This is suspended joy, a kind of hope.
Maria Leonard is a writer who has appeared Modern Queer Poets published by Richard Porter and Pilot Press, the Verve Poetry Press, the Soho Theatre London and the Young Company at Almeida Theatre London.
She is curator of the in tandem, live literature reading series focusing on poetry, politics and translation with Lettrétage Literaturhaus Berlin in collaboration with the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at Freie Universität.
She is also the curator of the LIMINALITY cultural series focusing on liminal mental states, cultural constructions of madness and rationality.
Maria is the director of the Invented Futures research platform, which has collaborated with Bristol Digital Futures Institute, UCL, the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies and the Centre for Gender and Technology at Cambridge University.
Maria has appeared at the York Festival of Ideas, Bristol Technology Festival and Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics. She teaches public learning workshops and seminars for cultural organisations, and she is an independent journalist for publications such as Qisetna: Talking Syria and Words Without Borders.
Die Aufführung wurde mit Unterstützung der Lettrétage, der Ankerinstitution für die freie Literaturszene Berlin und der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin produziert.