‘The Circle of Everything’ is an interdisciplinary solo performance from Kamila CK, featuring live Enso painting, aerial dance and moving image projection. After a critically acclaimed premiere at Camden Fringe 2024, the performance comes back to London this May 15th and 16th at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, London, this time in dialogue with a visual exhibition.
‘The Cosmos Within’ is opening on May 14th – 6th June, with the Private View happening on the 13th, from 6pm, at the Firepit Gallery in North Greenwich, London.
Your work spans painting, live art, physical theatre and aerial performance. What draws you towards working across so many different artistic forms?
I have always had interdisciplinary interests, and many of my practices naturally overlap and inform one another. Working across interconnected forms gives me a sense of freedom — the ability to express ideas beyond traditional boxes and categories. Painting, movement, performance and philosophy become part of one larger language. Something is pioneering and exciting in that space between disciplines, where there are fewer rules and more possibilities.
Your journeys to Japan seem to have had a profound impact on your work. How did those experiences reshape your artistic perspective?
Japan completely changed me. There is a life before Japan and a life after it. During my time in Kyoto, I reconnected with a deeply intuitive and artistic part of myself that I had abandoned or forgotten. It gave me a profound sense of passion and purpose.
Since then, I have studied Zen calligraphy under Japanese artist Rie Takeda, developing the meditative Enso circle painting technique that has become central to my work. Alongside this, I trained professionally in circus and aerial performance, allowing movement and visual art to merge into one evolving practice.
The Circle of Everything combines live painting and performance in real time. What excites you most about creating art in front of an audience?
It becomes a shared energetic experience unfolding in real time. There is presence, unpredictability, and a sense of the unknown that cannot be recreated. Each performance only exists once.
Creating live also changes me as an artist. The energy of the audience guides the process and allows the Enso paintings to emerge with a different intensity and emotional charge than if I were painting alone in the studio. I feel like I am painting with the moment itself.
How does movement allow you to express ideas that words or static images perhaps cannot?
Movement can communicate emotion, transformation, and human experience in a way that words or static image often cannot. Dance has carried stories, rituals, and emotions for centuries through the body itself. Sometimes ideas speak to me in painting forms but very often those are conceptual stories and ideas best expressed in live art form.
What do you hope audiences feel while experiencing the performance?
The Circle of Everything is designed as a visual performance meditation — a lived emotional journey of transformation, connection, and release. Through the symbolism of the circle, the work invites audiences to reconnect with the deeper forces that shape our existence and to feel, even briefly, part of something larger than themselves.