Gavin Krastin & Alan Parker | Research Trip
Switzerland | Performing Arts
November - December 2022 — Performing Arts
Gavin Krastin and Alan Parker are a South African creative duo who have been working together for over a decade. As multidisciplinary artists working predominantly in live art performance, Gavin and Alan’s interests lie in the body’s representation in alternative and layered spaces. Their practice straddles theatre, dance, visual arts and curatorship, resulting in artworks that are often full of beauty, but not always easy to stomach. The queering of space intrigues them and inspires a questioning of behaviours and transgressions in their work. The duo will be in Switzerland from 18 November – 16 December 2022 for a research trip to host workshops and develop new work.
In 2018 Gavin participated in a three-person residency at Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, during which time he established connections with other experimental performance artists and curators in the Swiss scene. During their upcoming research trip Gavin and Alan will build on from some of these connections. At the University of the Arts Bern (HKB) they will offer workshops to a group of students under the theme “Performance Space – Performance Stage.” They will then spend the majority of the research residency at Muzeum Susch as part of the Acziun Susch residency programme. During their time in Susch, Gavin and Alan will be working together on a performance project which they hope to share with the local community at the conclusion of residency.
BIOGRAPHY
Gavin Krastin and Alan Parker are both award-winning performance artists, theatre-makers, curators and educators, operating in a few major cities across South Africa but based in Makhanda, where they both lecture at Rhodes University in interdisciplinary performance practices and practice-based research. In 2017/2018 they founded, and currently produce, the Live Art Arcade; Gavin as curator and Alan as dramaturg. The Live Art Arcade is a nomadic exhibition platform for young artists working in interdisciplinary performance with interests in durational and site-responsive work. They have performed, exhibited, taught and presented in the USA, Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, Switzerland and Serbia. In 2021, Gavin was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, and in 2022, Alan founded the Network for Embodied Research in Africa (NERA), an embodied research and community-building initiative, based at Rhodes University.
