Serenade on Skin – Tamar Geist – Part of the Bloomsbury Festival 2021

20-23 October 2021
Open 12-5pm Daily
Admission free

Opening Night Concert:
Wednesday 20 October
6pm
Suitable for ages 16+
Tickets: £8 (£6)
Buy Concert Tickets Here

In her multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct), Tamar Geist challenges the traditional conventions of both art exhibition and classical-music recital by interweaving bodypainting works, live singing, and performance art.

Haunting, beautiful, tragic, mysterious: for centuries, Ophelia’s decline into ‘madness’ and her premature death have inspired countless painters, poets and composers; in this opening concert, Tamar inhabits the iconic character of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in an immersive performance of songs by Brahms, Strauss, Heggie and Gavrillin. The music intertwines with her ethereal paintings that use her own body as a canvas.

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. This is one of three themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed body-painting artworks) in which Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

More about the Bloomsbury Festival and program of events here