Lighting Peter Harrison
Juliet Aster originally trained in Fine art, spending several years as a painter before studying flamenco dance to professional level.
In 2003 She received an Award's for Artists from Dance East, and since then has been creating innovative and original performance art, using flamenco in new and frequently surreal ways. Describing herself as primarily a visual artist who creates " Meta/ physical paintings in 4D' her darkly surreal pieces integrate movement and rhythm with film, animation and installation. She has showcased at Resolutions! Pulse Festival, Colchester Art Centre and The Junction.
Her work 'The Betenoir, Destinies Carrots, version 4' was selected for "Joining the Dots', The Live Art Development Agency's, National Platform DVD in 2007.
She is currently researching experimental theatre practices, and developing a new work, 'The Regretrospective' with support from Colchester Arts Centre and the Mercury Theatre.
I left Bath Academy of Art in 1983 with a degree in Fine Art, and continued to make and exhibit work until1993, when I decided I'd rather see my paintings as performances. I had created a rather surreal 'alternative reality ' and the figurative elements often had a strong choreographic feel about them. This was no doubt connected to the fact that I always preferred painting to music, especially using rhythmic or experimental soundtracks. Using music was ideal for accessing the more intuitive and immediate images that my imagination would conjure up. Deciding to transfer into dance seemed the natural step to take, even though it did mean learning a new medium and the technical skills before I could begin using my visual art as a basis for performance.
Flamenco might not seem the most obvious choice of dance styles to have studied for this purpose as I was influenced by artists and choreographers like Michael Clark, Lindsay kemp, Christopher Bruce and Pina Bausch. However I had always been attracted to the unpredictable sense of edgy danger, emotional power, and complex rhythms that flamenco offered.
I spent the next ten years re training going on to work with guitarist Steve Homes in Nuevo Flamenco. During this time I also took contemporary and jazz classes, and a foundation course in mime and physical theatre at Desmond Jones School in London. I was already developing my own personal dance language and style, inspired by artists like Antonio Canales and Belen Maya.
My research into flamenco's roots, dramaturgy, and poetic symbolism, unearthed many parallels with my visual art practice. Not only discovering similar iconic imagery I had been using, horse's heads and knives for example, but also affirmed when Art, regardless of differing media, strives to be about understanding who and what we are, the results often are, strange, uncomfortable, challenging, even downright bizarre, but then they can also feel instantly familiar and recognizable as well.