ICA LIVE ART FESTIVAL | Heavy Metal

'Heavy Metal' is a double bill of two solo live art performances by Alan Parker and Gavin Krastin that investigates the intimate, political and material entanglement between human bodies and metal. Positioned between choreography, performance art, lecture-action and scenographic installation, the work asks what it means to live with metal rather than merely around it. It proposes metal not simply as substance or tool, but as collaborator, prosthesis, memory and infrastructure. The project unfolds as a dialogue between two distinct bodily conditions: an able-bodied negotiation with gravity and effort, and a disabled negotiation with surgical intervention and internalised structure. Rather than staging opposition between these experiences, 'Heavy Metal' situates them in adjacency. The performances operate as two trajectories through the same terrain, producing a relational field in which weight, lift, resistance and support become shared questions rather than individual attributes.