Sang Bleu are excited to announce that Sang Bleu 6 contributor Dominic Johnson will be performing Departure at London’s Chelsea Theatre’s SACRED season on October 25th 2012.

Departure (An Experiment in Human Salvage) is a performance involving live tattooing on Dominic Johnson’s hands, carried out by the renowned tattoo artist Alex Binnie. The tattoos function as permanent archival documents of performance, and as art works in their own rights. Pain and the wound are therefore incidental to the production of a striking permanent image on the body – in Departure as well as in tattooing as a traditional cultural practice more generally. How might disaster be represented or produced without recourse to sacred imagery? What might a new secular pantheon of catastrophic images look like? In Departure, the creation of a lasting image in performance mimics and explores the histories of tattooing and scarification as practices of body modification.

Dominic Johnson has performed in London at SPILL Festival of Performance, National Portrait Gallery (as part of Gay Icons), Duckie’’s Gay Shame, Torture Garden, and Chelsea Theatre; and also at Fierce (Birmingham), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow) and elsewhere in the UK. He has performed internationally in Austria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Slovenia, the US and elsewhere. He is a Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (2012) and Theatre & the Visual (2012), and editor of Franko B: Blinded by Love (2006), and Manuel Vason: Encounters (Performance, Photography, Collaboration) (2007). www.dominicjohnson.co.uk

Buy tickets here !

25^th October, 20.00

Chelsea Theatre

7 World’s End Place,

London

Photographs by Briony Campbell