Staging BLAST! is a dance-led research project that looks at the intersections between modernist magazines and cabaret culture in London in the early 20th century. The project took its impulse from the modernist magazine BLAST!, published in July 1914. The project involved parcelling out research material and asking 100 art historians, artists and creative practitioners to respond to particular extracts from modernist magazines. These responses have been collated into a present-day version of BLAST!, which can be explored on the Decade Online website.

This project was supported by Collaborative Project Grant.

Staging BLAST!

  • Woman in hat looking up to the sky

    Grace Brockington is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. As a specialist in modern British art, she has written about art in relation to war and pacifism, internationalism, the Bloomsbury group, puppetry, and universal language. Together with Sarah Victoria Turner, she convened the AHRC-funded research network “Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870–1920” (2009–2014). She was guest curator of the exhibition Gaudier-Brzeska: Disputing the Earth (Royal West of England Academy, 2019).

  • Head and shoulders portrait of Joshua Ben-Tovim

    Joshua Ben-Tovim is a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, writer, painter, sculptor, and cook—in that order of emphasis. Alongside running Impermanence (2011) with Roseanna Anderson, which has been his major occupation since graduating from the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, he has performed with artists Lea Anderson and Jasmina Cibic, as well as teaching at various universities.

  • Head and shoulders portrait of Roseanna Anderson

    Roseanna Anderson started her dance training in Newcastle, Australia going on to study in Dresden, London, and Leeds. As a co-founder of Impermanence (2011), Roseanna has collaborated with over 100 artists, making performance works for theatres, pubs, festivals, and cabaret bars. In 2018, she choreographed her first opera, a revival of Stanford’s The Travelling Companion, worked with Clod Ensemble on their show Placebo, and set up a monthly cabaret lunch designed to reduce loneliness amongst older people in Bristol.