Stu Allsopp has been a key part of Modern Art Oxford’s creative community for years. You’ll have spotted him photographing events and performances – and here he highlights just a few favourite images.
Stu Allsopp has always aimed to “melt into the background” as a photographer, disappearing behind the lens as he documents what happens on stage. The very act of being on stage, in the space of performers as they rehearse “horrifies” him, as he seeks to be “as invisible as possible”. But over time, Stu has been reassured by some of the world-leading dancers, musicians and artists he has photographed, that performers “want to be seen”. In this blog, he highlights just a few of these favourite performances, and the images he captured of them.
2016, KALEIDOSCOPE Live: Dog Kennel Hill Project, Études in Tension and Crisis
This performance began with each performer naked, before they dressed over the course of the performance. It took place in the basement, and it was very intimate. Stu’s first thought was “should I be photographing this”? To Stu, it was an introduction to how radical Modern Art Oxford was – “quite cutting edge and not stuffy at all”.
Stu remembers the table and piano that appeared on the stage and the way the performers leapt onto the furniture and ran across it – “it was an incredibly physical performance”.
The basement was full of people, with three rows of chairs for the audience as Dog investigated the group dynamics of power, aggression, negotiation and resolution – creating moments and scenes of tension and crisis. “That certainly came across very clearly, the dynamic between the performers”.
2016, Maria Plotnikova, Stick Apart
As Stu reflects on these years as the “invisible” photographer, he laughs as he celebrates having moved in the last 18 months to a silent camera – long gone are the days of the “mechanical shutter with a little click”, though he is grateful that this ‘click’ got ever quieter as new cameras were developped.
This performance, in partnership with Oxford Brookes University, brought the entire audience to a focused silence – each of the performers was being “extremely disciplined and walking in exact coordination”.
Each performer had to walk at a constant speed with those around them, as they worked to maintain the tension between the wooden rods suspended between them – which Stu remembers as “nerve-wracking”.
2017, Mandala Youth Theatre Responds to Lubaina Himid: Invisible Strategies
Stu was first asked to photograph the Mandala Youth Theatre group as they responded to works by Lubaina Himid during an exhibition, now he works with the group regularly.
Stu describes how “they were looking at the artworks and working out how they felt about them, how they reacted to them, copying them, whatever they wanted to do. It was creating from the experience.”
During their time in the gallery, nobody else was allowed into the space, so Stu was the only witness to their work – “I was an audience of one”.
Over the years, Stu has photographed an astonishing number of events. He shared a snapshot of them below – a look inside the system that has catalogued so many years of creativity in Oxford.
“I was an extremely insular person, extremely shy”, Stu shares with us, “until I started doing photography for events… mainly for Modern Art Oxford. And because I was then getting into a group of people I could relate to, and who would ask me to photograph more events, it just snowballed and it really all stems from here.”
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