Jonathan Stone

Jonathan Stone is a well known and highly respected theatre practitioner.  As one half of Ralf Ralf his play The Summit toured the globe in the 1980’s, and was recently revived in 2003 as still very politically relevant and astute.

Jonathan returned to the UK in early 2004 after seven years living and working in New York.  He observed that as a senior British artist who had been absent for a time, on his return he felt disconnected and alienated from his own city, and did not know how to begin to plug himself back in to London and its artistic community again.

In partnership with Metal, Jonathan came up with a creative idea which would help him re-introduce himself to the people of London via the making of a piece art, and at the same time Metal would assist him to re-connect with other artists through the discussion and debate around his idea.

Jonathan set out to collect 100 video portraits of random London residents and visitors dancing with their face muscles to their favourite piece of music.  He used his time at Metal to investigate the best ways of collecting these portraits to ensure that he obtained a good cross section of the population, whilst also developing his own ideas alongside other artists at three dinners held at Metal.

The project will be taken on to its next stage of development at the Place in November of 2004.  Jonathan believes that there is a live performance at the end of the process, using the video footage alongside live dancers, and he is discussing this with Theresa Beattie and John Ashford at the Place.

“Work that had been lying fallow for some time seems to be moving again, and I have to give you a big thankyou – the time and space at Metal have helped me to feel like a functioning artist again.”    Jonathan Stone, artist