Friday Lates performance: Shadow serpents

Inspired by the multifaceted symbolism of serpents in our paintings, artist Wiebke Leister and choreographer Vanessa Ewan have developed a performance of interconnected poses, images and whispers, into a multimedia portrayal of the interaction between humans and snakes.

Echoing the satyr entwined by a snake in Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne', the performance uses motifs of shadowing, slithering, entwining, doubling, and other acts of 'snakelation' to isolate and connect the different figurations by means of photography, movement and spoken word.

Vanessa Ewan is an actor movement specialist, working across screen and stage as a movement consultant, coach, director, researcher & lecturer. As Senior Lecturer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, she works to challenge and inspire actors at all different stages of their training through Actor Movement practice. She conceived, developed and co-authored the first ever British MA in Movement for actors (the MA/MFA Movement: Directing and Teaching), of which she has been joint Course Leader for nearly two decades, training many of today's movement directors.

Wiebke Leister is an artist and researcher, who teaches at the Royal College of Art. Both her photographic and written practice develop a performative understanding of how movement enters the structure of the still image, and how the liveness of viewing interacts with our interpretative processes. Building on her earlier research into the ambiguous character of snake-women in Japanese theatre, she is currently comparing contradictory Serpent Symbolisms in Western painting. Her book ‘Echoes & Callings: A Hannya Manifesto’ was published with Ma Bibliothèque in 2023.

Rebecca Kleineidam is an actress from Berlin, who graduated from BA Acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2022. Passionate about movement and dance, she most recently toured Italy as 'Sybil Vane' in the European Arts Company’s production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Oct 2023-Feb 2024). In 2025, she trained with Catherine Alexander (Complicité), Victoria Worsley (Feldenkrais), Adrian Look (Tanztheater) and Scott Williams (The Meisner Technique).