Samir Kennedy + Sean Murray — IT'S GOT LEGS!!!!!!
Drawing upon our collective memory of cabaret – yes, we also didn’t know we had it! – these two divas create a spectacle that manages to be generously camp, surprisingly minimal, deeply human, and even deeper beyond-the-human all at once... The pleasure is in the paradox, mon amour!!!!!!
+ artist talk
IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!! was born from the question what other forms emerge when queer historical forms, icons and divas from broadway and beyond are forced into a prison of poe faced postmodernism: Can the high camp and the minimal share a stage?
The result is an infinite, infernal foreplay of a ‘cabaret’ to expose the precarity of constructing a performance and of constructing the self. Using the basic tools of theatre and DIY performance – microphones, speakers, lights and set – Samir Kennedy and Sean Murray question if the way we produce our identities is all that different to how we put on a show.
Embracing the ugliness and chaotic beauty of becoming and unbecoming, IT’S GOT LEGS!!!!!! traces the intricate dances of subjugation, subversion and seduction we’re all forced into as performers, as artists, and as humans. Operating within a complex space of non-arrival, most of the time the duo appears to be just trying to get on with it...
Prepare yourselves for a seemingly never-ending revue of vulgar, visceral, and vampy renditions of the long lost “numbers" that lurk in the depths of our minds. References abound to familiar double acts alongside double entendres as Samir and Sean unearth the only real concrete thing there is in this life and in this business: instability <3
about
Samir Kennedy is an independent artist based between London and Marseille, working at the intersection of choreography, performance, sound, and video. His work critically engages with themes such as class, race, otherness, queerness, and abjection, considering the body as a site for exploring and subverting archetypal figures— the devil, the zombie, and the clown. He interrogates collective consciousness and cultural symbolism, using these figures as frameworks for examining intersectional identities.
instagram.com/samirkennedyisreborn/
Sean Alexander Murray is a UK-based artist whose practice centres dance, cabaret, design, and performance. Their work plays on queerness, abstraction, camp, excess, and the absurd. Using improvisation and science fiction as frameworks, Sean creates choreographic systems that encourage participants to navigate choice, memory, and imagination. Their interdisciplinary work embraces imperfection and unpredictability, seeking to dissolve boundaries between audience and performer, real and imagined, body and thought.
instagram.com/cestsean/
+2, PMR-accessible space and PMR-accessible toilet via the elevator accompanied by someone with a building access badge (ask at reception)
Performance, choreography Samir Kennedy, Sean Murray Scénography, objects Tim Spooner Technical Manager, Lighting Designer Seth Rook Williams Dramaturgy Joe Moran Outside Eye Liz Rosenfeld Sound Samir Kennedy Production Marie Lhotellier
Coproduction BNM - Ballet National de Marseille, Battersea Arts Centre, pp+a - performance, possession + automation, Maison Saint-Gervais, Transform Festival, Arts Council England
Supported by ICI-CCN - Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier, KLAP maison pour la danse, La Ménagerie de Verre, Wainsgate Dances, Queen Mary University London, Les Théâtres, Théâtre des Bernardines, La Friche Belle de Mai
