Sunday 11 January 2026, 7.30pm
“Improvisation is the work of precisely choosing actions from moment to moment, by preparing as many sensory and perceptive antennae as possible. In a sense, if our antennae grow more numerous as a result of training, an action that might happen by chance comes nearer to necessity (nature).” – Masaki Iwana.
Dimension Inhabited by Spirits features three duos: Flavia Ghisalberti with Sylvia Hallett, Sharon Gal with John Butcher, and Moreskinsound — the movement and sound duo of David Toop and Ania Psenitsnikova. Curated by Moreskinsound, the evening unfolds through improvisation, sound, movement, and moving image, tracing the thresholds between chance and intention, presence and spirit.
Moreskinsound is a duo of musician/writer David Toop and performance and visual artist Ania Psenitsnikova. They explore extremes of stillness, working with space, presence and the intensity of punctuated silence and its impact on bodies. Their work encompasses live performance using found objects and instruments, flutes, aerial movement and inactions - events in remarkable wild spaces, in sea caves, clifftops and alien landscapes.
Since 2023 their public performances have included the National Gallery London, Prague, Basel, Tartu, Volume Festival Sydney, Punkt Festival Kristiansand, Edinburgh and Glasgow, Knock Tokyo, Hidden Christian Building Nagasaki, Enryuji Temple Isahaya City, Kunisaki Peninsula, Kyushu University, Soto Kyoto, Atelier Arbor Inversa Tokyo, Tatami Studio Tokyo, Tatsue Mingei Museum Mochizuki. Non-public events, described as inactions, have been recorded in Cornwall, Australia, Norway, a cave of bats in Krabi, Thailand, sacred springs in Kyushu, Japan and the ancient and silent Viru peat bog, Estonia. All of these activities can culminate in workshops which explore improvisation, listening, movement, objects, materials and the nature of space.
"From the ceiling of this dark room a swathe of material hung down and the shadow of a shape began to dilate like an accordion opening out, slowly an arm unfolded; this was Psenitsnikova as chrysalis becoming human body." – Jazzwise, November 2024.
Ania Psenitsnikova is a visual and performance artist and curator. Born in Estonia, she has travelled and studied with Flavia Ghisalberti, Moeno Wakamatsu, Masaki Iwana and Daisuke Yoshimoto. Studying piano, classical guitar, voice and accordion in music school and independently since 1988, she has worked as an aerial performance artist since 2011. In the same year she graduated with a First degree in Performance and Visual Arts: Dance at Brighton University. Between 2015 to the present she has collaborated with Daria Apakhonchich, co-curating seven exhibitions in four countries, exploring the censorship phenomenon and participating in performances and events, include the Grow and Decay ecological festival in Estonia. Their exhibition, One Can Not Be Too Careful, Feminist Edition, was nominated for the best visual art award in Brighton Fringe Festival, 2018.
David Toop is a musician, writer and curator. He has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. Artists he has performed with include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Thurston Moore, Sidsel Endresen, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Akio Suzuki and Rie Nakajima, along with butoh dancers Mitsutaka Ishii and Min Tanaka. His books include Ocean of Sound, Into the Maelstrom, Sinister Resonance and Two-Headed Doctor and his record releases include New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments, Sound Body, Entities Inertias Faint Beings, Apparition Paintings, The Shell That Speaks the Sea, Garden of Shadows and Light and his 1978 recordings of Yanomami shamanism, Lost Shadows: In Defence of the Soul.
https://www.moreskinsound.com/
https://instagram.com/moreskinsound
Sharon Gal is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, vocalist and composer, specialising in free improvisation, experimental music and collaborative, participatory large group compositions. She works with voice, electronics, extended techniques, field recordings, found audio, video and collage; exploring presence, listening, embodiment, and the relationship between people, sound and space. Sharon performs solo and in collaborations with: David Toop, John Butcher, John Edwards, Sue Lynch, Andie Brown, Yoni Silver, Steve Beresford, Phil Minton, Charles Hayward, Anat Ben David and Lina Lapelyte.
Since 2007 she has directed a series of site specific, large group compositions, inviting musicians and non-musicians to take part. She curated music concerts, including the series Sound Matter, at Café OTO, and concerts at Iklectik arts lab. Her music was released by many labels, including five solo albums and various collaborations.
Past performances include The V&A, ICA, The Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern & Tate Britain, MACBA, and Colour Out Of Space, Borealis, Supernormal, Supersonic, TUSK and Tectonics festivals.
Etudes by Sharon Gal, a collection of text & colour scores, presented as a deck of 78 cards, was supported by Sound and Music and published in 2021. Her project, Healing Choir, ran @ the Kilburn Tin Tabernacle between August-October 2024.
https://www.sharon-gal.com/
https://sharongal.bandcamp.com
Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp.
Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award).
"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright
Flavia Ghisalberti is a multi-disciplinary artist, director and choreographer of Italian and Swiss descent. She had periodic exhibitions and and created poetry sound performances with with self-made instruments from 1994-1996. Since 1998 she has worked extensively with Butoh dance. Flavia's art explores the limits of the body and the mind and what they are willing to endure. Her Butoh style of primarily independent of a particular Butoh school or master even though Masaki Iwana was an important teacher for her. She co-founded the Butoh group In Between in 2003 and co-founded the international project Limits in 2008. She is director of the bi-annual festival Butoh-Off since 2010 which is now a tri-national project with Freiburg and Strasbourg. She performs and teaches through Europe, Russia and the United States.
Sylvia Hallett is a multi-instrumentalist and composer moving between violin, bowed bicycle wheel, saw, hurdy-gurdy, electronics and found objects. She currently plays solo, with the walk-in interactive installation, Colourscape. Recent collaborators have included Chris Dowding, Tansy Spinks, Ansuman Biswas, Michael Ormiston, Mike Adcock, Anthony Haddon, Mike Cooper, David Toop, Anna Homler, The Heliocentrics, Clive Bell, LaXula, Opera North, h2dance, Miranda Tufnell, Eva Karczag, Wonderful Beast, BBC Radio Drama, The Royal Shakespeare Company. She performs internationally as a solo improviser, having released six solo albums. She enjoys performing in unusual spaces, such as an Italian vineyard. She is currently working on the score for a new short film by Takako Nakasu, which draws on the theme of the Kuroko (a stage-hand clad in black).
http://sylviahallett.co.uk/index.htm
https://www.facebook.com/sylvia.hallett
