Biography
Gavin Krastin is a South African performance artist, curator and educator working across live art, installation and durational performance. His practice investigates relationships between bodies, materiality, space and political histories. He is founder and director of the Live Art Arcade, a nomadic platform supporting experimental live art nationally. Krastin presents work internationally and received the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art. He is completing a PhD in Theatre and Performance at the University of Cape Town.
Alan Parker is a South African choreographer, performer, dramaturg and researcher whose practice spans physical performance, live art and embodied research. His work investigates memory, gravity, materiality and the changing conditions of the performing body. Parker holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance from the University of Cape Town and is a senior lecturer in Drama at the University of Pretoria. An ICA Live Art Fellow and Writing Fellow, he is resident dramaturg and co-director of the Live Art Arcade.
Synopsis
Heavy Metal is a double bill of solo live art performances by Alan Parker and Gavin Krastin exploring the intimate, political and material entanglement of bodies and metal. Moving between choreography, performance art and lecture-action, the work considers metal as collaborator, prosthesis, memory and infrastructure. Parker confronts gravity through the metals circulating within an able body, while Krastin negotiates the surgical metal forming his disabled spine’s internal architecture. Held in adjacency, their performances transform weight, lift, resistance and support into shared questions, forging a relational landscape of humour, exhaustion, endurance, adaptation and transformation.
