A man holding a black sheet of plastic with writing covering his entire body on stage

Agat Sharma, The Sudden and Untimely Death of David Attenborough, 2026

Exposure and Heartbreak
Agat Sharma
Phoenix Yemi + black:ECHO
Red on Gold
Fri 9 October 2026, 7pm

£18/21 Tickets on DICE

We are heartbroken to announce that JJJJJerome Ellis had to cancel his artist’s talk and evening performance due to illness. Please join us for Heartbreak by Agat Sharma, Spellling: Black Charms for Protection by Phoenix Yemi + black:ECHO, and a set by Red on Gold (Saurabh Shivakumar and Anastasija Stanojevic).

Exposure and Heartbreak is the second evening of public events and performances part of the Field Studies: Present Tense. It offers a rare opportunity to witness and share an intimate space with five incredible artists and performers.

Agat Sharma and Field Studies participants are writing Heartbreak, a narrative performance that draws on a series of heartbreaks lived through in the six years since his move to the Netherlands. Sharma writes the text in public, drafting it during the residency with participants he has not met, oversharing by design and open to input from anyone who recognises what he is going through. The writing becomes an account of what remains after loss, all this love that’s left behind.

Spellling: Black Charms for Protection by Phoenix Yemi and black:ECHO draws references from the ritual elements of Ìsomọlórúkọ, a traditional Yoruba naming ceremony performed to formally introduce a newborn to the world, Spellling explores the ways in which words become invocations, woven into ritual and spoken into being. Drawing further from Black traditions, music and art, the work explores language as a talisman; an active force capable of concealing, affirming and protecting.

Red on Gold is a voice and guitar duo formed by guitarist Saurabh Shivakumar and vocalist Anastasija Stanojevic. Blending voice and guitar with electronic effects, the duo explores the meeting point between composed form and spontaneous creation. Drawing on their distinct cultural and musical backgrounds, they shape soundscapes that move between intimacy and abstraction, lyricism and texture. Red on Gold seeks to create an open dialogue where every performance unfolds as a new conversation, balancing structure and freedom, familiarity and surprise. Their music invites listeners into a shared space of reflection and discovery.

JJJJJerome Ellis sadly had to cancel his performance. JJJJJerome was going to present a continuing work titled Exposure, a photo series investigating stutter and earth. Ellis approaches different plants and tells them how grateful he is for them, opening the camera’s shutter when he begins to stutter and closing it when the stutter stops. The photographs become ‘documents of lessons‘, with Ellis approaching the plant as teacher and the stutter as a kind of classroom.

Venue

Present Tense
4 Ferntower Road
Newington Green
London N5 2JG

About Present Tense

Present Tense is a five-day teaching residency led by a group of international artists and practitioners that approaches performance not as the culmination of solitary practice, but as a form of group research and collective practice.

In the evenings, the programme opens to a public audience with a series of events featuring performances by the artists and work created with participants during daytime workshops. Download the full Present Tense timetable.

Present Tense opens on Wednesday 7 October 2026, 10am and closes on Sunday 11 October 2026 in the afternoon. Download the timetable. The fee for the full five-day workshop and evening programme is £415. The number of students admitted to the full programme is limited to 25. A limited number of day tickets are available for £90. Both five-day and day tickets include shared lunch and access to the public evening programme. Up to 50 participants can attend on any one day.

Featured Artists

JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist and surfer who lives in Norfolk, Virginia, US. He and his wife Luísa Black Ellis live in a monastery on a creek.

Agat Sharma is an artist, theatre maker and educator. His multidisciplinary theatre practice works with poetry, story and song, through embodiment and voice. He works from a situated position, in response to his experience of the world, approaching decoloniality as a close, intimate and political process and using embodied practice to bring individual experience and the state of the world into relation. The complexity of the relationship between land, body and voice is a theme often present in the work. He is currently beginning work on a new theatre project about coloniality, love and non-dualism. Agat grew up in India and moved to Amsterdam in 2020 to study at DAS Theatre. He is the founder of Intimidation Tactics, a theatre company and research studio. Agat lives and works in Amsterdam.

Phoenix Yemi is a British-Nigerian poet and artist writing at the intersections of body and earth, myth and memory, desire and dissent. Rooted in a surrealism of liberation, her creative practice dismantles imposed realities to summon new ways of seeing and being.

black:ECHO is an audiovisual project conceptualised by moonchile. Structured as thematic responses titled ‘variations’ the work gathers lived narratives, primarily of the Black experience and renders them resonant through sound collage, visuals, and spoken word. Each variation becomes archive; memory refracted, reverberated and held in echo.

Saurabh Shivakumar is a composer, guitarist and improviser whose work moves between notated music, free improvisation and live electronics. Born in India and raised in Singapore, he lives in London, where his practice centres on listening as a shared, embodied act: feedback systems built from electric guitar, modular synthesis and the room itself, in which performers, sound and space shape one another in real time. With singer and electronic musician Anastasija Stanojevic he forms the improvising duo Red on Gold. A PhD candidate and Manson Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, he researches experimental, improvised and electronic practices within composition. His music has been performed by Riot Ensemble and The Hermes Experiment, and he has collaborated with choreographers Adhya Shastry and Jessica Ridge, Neil Luck and Ushara Dilrukshan. He has performed at LSO St Luke‘s, Music We’d Like to Hear and the 840 Series, and won The Musicians' Company Priaulx Rainier Composition Prize in 2026.

Anastasija Stanojevic is a Swiss-Serbian vocalist, composer and improviser based in London. Her work moves between jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composition, often combining voice with live electronics. Alongside Red on Gold, she performs solo as Krš, drawing on Serbian and Bulgarian vocal traditions and is one half of the Swiss duo UNSERE ELTERN. She studied Jazz Voice and Free Improvisation at Hochschule Luzern and holds an MA in Jazz Voice from the Royal Academy of Music.

Red on Gold is a voice and guitar duo formed by guitarist Saurabh Shivakumar and vocalist Anastasija Stanojevic. Blending voice and guitar with electronic effects, the duo explores the meeting point between composed form and spontaneous creation. Drawing on their distinct cultural and musical backgrounds, they shape soundscapes that move between intimacy and abstraction, lyricism and texture. Red on Gold seeks to create an open dialogue where every performance unfolds as a new conversation, balancing structure and freedom, familiarity and surprise. Their music invites listeners into a shared space of reflection and discovery.