A Night Dancing Underground: Exploring the Somerset House Studios AGM 2024

Photo credit: Anne Tetzlaff

By day, Somerset House Studios neoclassical façade serves as a central stage for the heart of London’s creative industries. With a long history of influence, ideas and counter-cultural perspectives, this spirit of continuous curiosity attracts creatives working across contemporary art, digital technologies and commercial business. This forms into a singular community working to merge disciplines across genres, and showcase iconic experiences to the cosmopolitan public.

Once a year on a very special evening, this culmination of artistic expression brings together performances from artists and resident creatives, allowing public audiences to experience a rich kaleidoscope of independent projects designed around a singular goal - to make you think. On the 11th of October, the gates to this mysterious paradise opened, inviting people to look at a patchwork of cultural history in the making.

My experience began with Harun Morrison’s ‘How To Do Things with Non-Words’ in the venue’s River Rooms. In collaboration with the Somerset House Community Choir, Harun guides audiences through a special kind of linguistic power – non-words. Defined as a measure for language proficiency that follows the structure of words, Morrison’s readings, accompanied by heavenly choral singing, allows audiences to step into a transcendental experience. Certainly one that I will be thinking about for many months to come.

Weaving between a kaleidoscope of creative experiences, I eventually arrived at the Lancaster Room to watch Imran Perretta’s 'A Riot in Three Acts'. This piece was created in response to the complex narratives surrounding riots, civil uprising and systemic injustice. Perretta expertly combines cinematic techniques and physical mediums to address the alienation of communities and the decline of public spaces, driven by his personal experiences of the London Riots in 2011.

Leaving at the end of a busy night, I am reminded of the importance of stopping to think. In a city that ‘never sleeps’, the temptation to keep going from one goal to other sinks into the hearts of every resident living under London’s concrete jungle. Sometimes, taking a moment to lose yourself in the exhilaration of performance and public art is, in itself, an act of casual resistance against the mundane.

The AGM 2024 was an evening event made available as part of Somerset House Studios on Friday the 11th of October 2024.

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Edited by Julia Curry - Music Editor