Although Elyse had been training in Musical Theatre for about three years during her teens, she initially set out to pursue a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Malta. She soon realised however that she wanted to go down a more artistic route.
“Taking a year out to audition and apply for universities in the UK, I joined the Teatru Manoel Youth Dance Company, and through that, started experimenting with composing music, developing visuals and developing my performance practice as a whole,” Elyse explains.
Elyse was delighted to receive an offer from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama to follow the BA in Experimental Arts and Performance, an unconventional degree that allowed students to develop their artistic practices in a variety of ways. Students were also encouraged to contextualise their work within a cultural context, to develop skills that support their practice (such as producing and curation) and to explore different materials and performance forms.
Having grown up in Dingli, moving to London to study in October 2022 came with its own set of challenges, she explains – in particular, learning how to be self-sufficient, and juggling work and university studies.
“I remember going to Tate Modern for my first day of university and it was incredibly surreal,” recalls Elyse, “Not only was it the first time I’d ever encountered performance art documentation being exhibited, but the building itself is converted from an old power station. This marked the beginning of my thinking into how things can transform in unconventional ways.”
“I hadn’t spent much time in London before, and, although initially it was quite overwhelming, I really enjoyed getting to live in a city, to understand how the infrastructure works (I am particularly fond of the underground system), to explore its vastly different areas, and to meet so many different people from all walks of life – it’s an extremely inspiring environment in which to live.”
“Throughout the degree, we studied about many facets of artistic practice, engaging with a multitude of theorists speaking about performance, critique, its histories, and then applying the learnings to several events my classmates and I curated, produced and performed in as a collective: these included an immersive show Wildlands at Ugly Duck – a promenade performance on the iconic London Bridge; the experimental festival Fractalia at Toynbee Studios which ‘oozed queerness and the deliciously strange’, and the exhibition Mutate Inhabits at Chats Palace in East London.
Alongside this, we also developed our solo practices, in which I developed my sound practice by engaging in a ten-week-long research project exploring the sensorial elements of sound, experimental instrument-making and animating.”
“During my last year, I married my love of engineering with my artistic practice, and developed a performance installation on collective care systems, systems that disrupt the idea that every individual must fend for themselves. It is a shared and accepted responsibility towards one another, in opposition to the view that ‘I don’t owe anyone anything’, an equitable process where everyone cares for themselves and others fluidly, according to their ever-changing capacities and circumstances.”
“The performance installation was part of our degree course final showcase in March. I curated a comfortable installation space, equipped with cushions, chairs, dangling circuitry and all the tech I needed to operate a robot, named Bob, whom I had I built from scratch out of a camera I found in the university’s tech waste bin and scraps of circuitry from my local electronics shop. Audience members could encounter and interact with me and Bob, 3 people at a time. During this encounter (lasting around 7 minutes), the audience members could teach Bob how to shake his head no, how to draw a Rubik’s cube, and play games.”
Elyse also researched the video game as an artistic cultural object that allows us to think about alternative futures.
Elyse is now an active part of the Live Art and Gaming Network initiated by Symoné, an artist in residence at the Live Art Development Agency, the UK’s largest institution for live art. She was seeking curious and engaged creatives to join a network exploring experimental approaches to gaming, digital art and live interdisciplinary performance. The network is a collective of ten people working at the intersection of live art and games, attending events and creating our own games through game jams (a process where you make games in a specified, short amount of time).
Elyse is also facilitator on Access All Areas’ Performance Making Diploma for people with learning disabilities. Moving forward, I am looking to further my exploration in the intersection of art and science, not as a divided dichotomy, but rather, how they can both bleed into one another, and follow my curiosity wherever it may take me.
And what’s next?
“I’m not quite sure what the future holds for me yet, but I an planning on bringing what I’ve learnt so far back to Malta! I’d love to be able to help make the route I’ve gone down more accessible to other people, and potentially to collaborate with Maltese galleries to curate works that are less conventional.
Elyse was a recipient of the Malta Arts Scholarship Scheme funded by the Government of Malta
