Behind the scenes of Last Dance: The Wave Epoch
Visual artist Jack Jelfs is one of four people behind Last Dance: The Wave Epoch, a unique collaboration for Brighton Festival (24 May) between fellow artist Haroon Mirza, grime DJ and producer Elijah and musician GAIKA that imagines what life will be like in 2000 years.
Devised and created at the world’s largest scientific experiment — the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — the immersive performance imagines a scenario where the collider has been rediscovered by a future civilization and turned into a ceremonial site, similar to Stonehenge.
Lighthouse caught up with Jack to find out more.
What will people who come to The Wave Epoch be experiencing?
A twelve-dimensional superposition in which our mythic past, scientific present and unknown future are overlaid.
What are the main themes of The Wave Epoch?
It’s a transmission from a future epoch in which present-day scientific knowledge has been lost. If the people of such a time discovered the remains of the Large Hadron Collider, how would they interpret it?
We think they’d view it as just another site where humans have searched for hidden patterns and order amidst the chaos of the world. This search, which involves engaging with invisible realities far-removed from our everyday experience, has been going on for at least 30,000 years and encompasses mysticism, religion, astronomy, philosophy and, most recently, particle physics. Occasionally it involves creating big circles in the landscape.
How has it been created?
It originates in a long-running conversation between Haroon Mirza and myself, concerning the relationship between the physical world and conscious experience.
We were given an ideal opportunity to transform this into something concrete during our two month COLLIDE residency at CERN. CERN is very interesting to us, since it’s a place where human nature collides head-on with the deep structure of matter.
A new dimension was opened up by GAIKA and Elijah when they joined us there, rooting the work simultaneously in the present, the past and future of humanity via music, incantation and performance. Other sources for the piece include occult experiments, ritual actions, automatic writing and psychedelic research.
What material was gathered and created at CERN for The Wave Epoch?
Video footage, photographs, sound recordings, filmed performances, conversations with physicists, discarded scientific apparatus, text fragments, old microchips, diagrams, archive materials, equations, data tapes and rocks.
How was your experience of working with Elijah and GAIKA? What did the act of this collaboration bring to the artistic process?
It’s amazing to collaborate with Elijah and GAIKA. They’ve brought an aspect to the work that is rooted in contemporary UK club culture, grime and dancehall, but which both ties together and expands the themes that Haroon and I were exploring. GAIKA became something between a future shaman and an alien being.
The Last Dance programme as a whole is about the changing face of club culture. How much has this played a part in the creation of The Wave Epoch?
Haroon and I both have a background in DJ-ing, and much of our youth was spent in clubs. Dance music continues to play a key role in each of our separate practices, and so club culture is of massive personal importance to us. There are really no other places where music, both old and new, can be experienced in such a direct, immersive and communal way.
Although the piece doesn’t directly refer to the experience of raving, the fact that GAIKA and Elijah also share the same general references as us has undoubtedly helped our collaboration
On a deeper level, raving can be viewed as a continuation of something that has always been essential to the healthy functioning of human society: the uniting of strangers and the joyful loss of personal identity and ego in an overwhelming shared aesthetic experience.
Some cultures traditionally recognise the importance of this and will gather regularly, from the youngest to the oldest, and dance, make music, perhaps ingest mind-altering substances, and generally come together as one. The present difficulties faced by many clubs is probably due to the short-sighted reaction of a fearful government (in league with property developers) to subjugate and control this essential expression of the human spirit.
Throughout May, Last Dance: Re-Imagined Futures (8–26 May) will celebrate and showcase the artistic talent involved in Last Dance, through a series of free talks, workshops and live sessions. Events confirmed so far include those by Platform B, Audio Active, QM Records, Typical Girls and Normal Not Novelty/Red Bull.
Last Dance: The Wave Epoch takes place at the Brighthelm Community Centre on Thursday, 24 May at 2pm and 7pm. Tickets cost £10.
For more information visit lighthouse.org.uk
