Nigel Rolfe lives and works in Ireland. Since the late 1970s he has developed an international reputation as a performance artist. His practice also encompasses installation, drawing, photography, video and audio media. Rolfe‘s work explores the influence of history on the individual through aesthetic gestures wrought by his body’s interaction with visceral materials such as blood, milk, rope, flour and bogwater.
Dance Slap For Africa records a performance commissioned for an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1983. According to Rolfe, it ‘deals with concepts of freedom (Dance),sexual identity and violence (Slap) within the anthropology of cultural tribes…To dance for self, to leave the body on the one hand and then the face repeatedly slapped without defence confining self trapped inside, on the other’.