December 18 at 7pm
GIFTS
a film featuring 2015 PWNW Visiting Artist Clare Whistler
FREE or by donation

Performance Works NW
4625 SE 67th Ave. Portland, OR
MAP

Offering a spacious moment of community and reflection during the material frenzy of the holidays, PWNW presents a screening of  GIFTS, a 65 minute film by Nichola Bruce centering on a 10-year project by U.K. artist Clare Whistler. Clare’s project was inspired by eight objects that were traditionally given in England to welcome a new child into the world:  Egg, Coal, Evergreen, Salt, Candle, Bread,Coin and Silver. 

Each symbolic gift was the theme of a public event created by Clare in collaboration with leading artists, musicians, poets and documented from 2005-2015 by established filmmakers. GIFTS is an interpretation of the eight events, directed by Nichola Bruce. The film brings together English traditions of ritual and landscape.

Clare joins us from England via Skype!

Financed by Gift Economy movement and Arts Council England

Clare Whistler has had a 30-year career as a dancer, choreographer and director, including 15 years working in opera, education and community projects. Trained at Elmhurst Ballet School and Rambert School of Dance, Whistler worked as a dancer and choreographer in Toronto, New York, and San Francisco, with her own company
DanceArtCompany, for which 40 choreographers made pieces. Whistler creates site specific collaborative performance works that are often accompanied with books. She has been a Leverhulme Artist in Residence at QMUL and an Artist in Residence at Bunces Barn since 2010, working on projects about wildflowers, bees, poetry, and a Dancers in Landscape Collective.

Clare has also worked for the past 15 years in opera, as a director and movement director, mostly at Glyndebourne Opera House and including working on iconic productions by Peter Sellers and Bill Viola, Theodora and Tristan, as well as directing numerous education and community projects. She has been a visiting artist at the University of
Brighton and Queen Mary and has won two Royal Philharmonic Society Awards in 2006 and 2008.

“My work breaks down the boundaries between disciplines and artists to find ways to offer insight, feeling and moments of timeless beauty, whether in performance, site-specific work, text, music, visual art and landscape. With a source in movement and gesture, I respond, interpret and collaborate. I am always looking for ways to encourage, ignite and inspire creativity in others.”

Nichola Bruce works with the moving image. Her work is primarily about expressing the way the mind composites vision through memory. She films elements of her life almost every day and has an extensive archive of over 30 years of home movie.

Born in Bromley, brought up in Kent and London. She was educated at Kingsdale School, Hornsey College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic. She began making films on super eight and 16mm. Collages of live action, performance and animation. She was awarded a NESTA Fellowship to study Perception. She has also made feature Dramas and Documentaries. Many of these evolve through her drawing process. Her archive continues to inform her latest works.

She exhibits her work as film, installation, single and multiple screenings; at galleries, cinemas, other venues and online.