Latest Projects
Judita’s ongoing performance projects and collaborations
Into the Woods: woodland promenade show
The Wellesley Woodlands (The Land Trust, TCV) commissioned us to adapt Into the Woods into an outdoor storytelling performance for their Halloween event in October 2024.
We created a woodland promenade show that takes the audience on a short walk, stopping to meet different forest creatures, sing songs by the fire, explore intricate mycelium webs, and find the Witch.
Concept and performance: Barbara Touati-Evans and Judita Vivas
Sound: Christine Dodd
Photo credit: Shaun Jackson Photography
Performed at the edge of the Wellesley woods (where the inspiration for the show and materials for the puppets came from), the show was filled with poetic storytelling, animal puppets, sounds and singing, encouraging care, respect, and wonder for the natural world. Together with the audience, we momentarily lifted the veil between worlds - the living, the natural, and the magical - welcoming glimpses of light on a very dark night. The best response I overheard during the show was a kid asking, “What, the trees talk to each other?”.
Lift Off!
Lift Off! is a gentle, poetic, and sensory performance for the whole family. Using props and puppets made from yarn, fabric, plastic sheeting, balloons and other repurposed materials, we take the audience on a sensory journey. Together we visit a landscape with a big sky and a curious child, play with floating air molecules, help an imaginary aeroplane lift off and soar through the clouds, and explore more sustainable ways of flying.
Concept and performance: Barbara Touati-Evans and Judita Vivas
We presented Lift Off! at the Rushmoor Heritage Festival 2024. The show is inspired by Farnborough’s aviation history, especially the flying machines of the early days, such as balloons, kites and airships, as well as the science of how flying happens.
Into the Woods
Inspired by our local woodlands with their trees, mosses, stag beetles, squirrels and frogs, this is a fun participatory show for all the family that promotes care and respect for the natural world. Come along before or stay a little longer after the show, and join us for some creature-making out of natural materials. Into the Woods, created for the PlayFest! 2024 in Aldershot, celebrates the beauty and diversity of Rushmoor woodlands and waterways. The audience/participants are invited on a magical journey through the woods, down one of the existent trails.
Concept and performance: Judita Vivas
Costume and puppets: Barbara Touati-Evans
Interactive storytelling, participatory movement and puppets made out of locally sourced natural materials help Judita share a story inspired by her regular woodland strolls, often with her 3-year-old son leading the way.
Usually, not much happens on these strolls, apart from picking sticks, leaves and stones, and doing our best to shoo mosquitoes. At times, however, we have pretty magical encounters with real or imaginary creatures, plants and animals.
Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARiM)
From June to December 2024, I am on the Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARiM), a self-directed, open-source artist residency to empower and inspire artists who are also mothers, created by Lenka Clayton. I want to fully experience and explore the fragmented focus, limited creative and/or free time, continuous interruptions, forgetfulness, distractedness, limited ability to travel, almost non-existent financial resources, and general upheaval that parenthood brings, allowing it to shape the direction of my work, rather than trying to work “despite” it.
During this ARiM, I will revisit the idea of daily practice, long ago introduced to me by a dear friend and colleague. A daily practice that takes place not only during the specially designated creative time/space but also whilst performing any daily task, including parenting, like going for a walk or taking a shower, playtime or daydreaming while putting your child to bed.
A practice that falls in between the cracks of professional time/space, but can be just as meaningful. During this residency, I want to put the foundations for a new performance work. In the process of my daily practice, I will consciously incorporate parenting, in all of its forms, into my creative work. I will be curious about it. I will celebrate it. I will embrace the daily challenges, and especially the immense depth of new emotions, experiences and creativity that parenting brings. While the new performance work might not be about parenthood, being with my child will be part of my daily creative practice. Maybe the most important part.
Collaboration with Barbara Touati-Evans
This ongoing collaboration, which began in the spring of 2023, is a meeting between two artists: Barbara Touati-Evans, who works with installation and soft sculpture, and Judita Vivas, a movement practitioner and performer.
Barbara uses the traditional craft of crochet to explore the rich metaphorical associations of yarn in human emotions, imagination and language. Her work engages diverse disciplines, including meditation, feminism, mathematics and neuroscience.
Together, we delve into the meeting points between our practices, the collisions of stillness and movement, flow and dissonance, and imaginary and lived experience.
In October 2023, we collaborated on a response to Jyll Bradley’s sculpture “The Hop” for the Frieze London festival. The resulting performative installation - a large site-specific wool structure - crystallised our excitement to continue sharing our practices and experimenting together.
SHIFTY
SHIFTY (2018 - ongoing) is a multi-year creative project of online and in-person performances, original writing, and visual artwork.
It explores multiverse and magic realism, spinning a web of stories about the city, memory, loneliness, creativity, and the natural world. These stories are told by characters who share a block of flats and whose lives collide in unexpected ways. We meet Tadikus (or is it his ghost?) unable to leave his home; a Forgetful Woman who likes oranges and is making a “know-it-all” map; Ms C. Nocturne who is obsessed with plants and jars; a curious Young Artist who hears voices; and a shapeshifting Storyteller-Fox who secretly follows all of their journeys.
Created, devised and performed by Foxtale Ensemble, SHIFTY continues to grow as the company works in person and online, organising monthly meetings, intensive residencies, live and online performances, making visual collages and co-writing the book of SHIFTY: A Tale of Tails.
