#LAXfestival

[riting]

Kestrel Leah in conversation with Nichole Canuso

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Nichole’s performance, PANDAEMONIUM made in collaboration with Lars Jan and Xander Duell, runs from October 18th–21st at the Los Angeles Theater Center, in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival. Details can be found here.

KL: How did Pandaemonium come about?

NC: It began with Lars and I … with the idea of being alone and together at the same time—both being connected to people you don’t realize you’re connected to, as well as the great chasm that can exist between people who think they’re close, who think they understand each other. It began with the visual image of two people separated in space, two solos in two different cities that, through live feed, fit together like a locket. So the two people are actually having a duet in the virtual space. We brought Geoff Sobelle in pretty quickly, thinking that he would be the other performer, and the two of us would be in different cities.  But when we got together to rehearse and we put Geoff on one side of the room and me on the other, with the video in the middle—just to rehearse—we started to realize that it was pretty powerful to see both people side by side not knowing the other was there, and then to see the third space, the video space, at the same time. So we decided to go forward with this idea of a triptych, where the audience could scan all three spaces, and I decided to table the idea of the two different cities for an installation that would include the audience.

That installation is actually what I’m developing currently—I’ve finally returned to that aspect. It will be in two separate locations, but instead of two performers, it will be two audience members at a time that meet in that virtual space. It’s using the same video design and software as Pandæmonium but with a very different take. The participants will see themselves and their own surroundings, but they’ll also see someone else sitting at the table who’s not actually there … and those participants will be able to talk to each other.

You describe Pandaemonium as a "performance concert.” Can you explain your choice and expand on the role of music in the piece?

Xander Duell plays live and is on stage with us. We brought Xander into the process pretty early and started to realize it would be a non-verbal piece—that the music would be the sonic environment and that the story would be told through visuals and sound. The music he’s made sometimes takes over and we take a back seat to the music and sometimes we come forward and the music is more of a support. I really do think of the music, the video and the choreography sharing voice, sharing the story telling.

So they were created quite symbiotically?

Yeh .. Really the five of us, meaning Geoff, Lars, Xander, Pablo and I made the project together. We were on a residency actually … there was a book of photographs by Richard Misrach called Desert Cantos—and he actually uses the term Cantos to describe these photographic essays—and we gave this book to Xander while we were rehearsing. He would go off hiking and look at these books, and write music, and come back at the end of the day and show us what he’d played. He actually wasn’t in the room with us much of the time but we were both using the same source material. On the flip side, sometimes he was in the room, scoring live what we were doing, and some of it would inspire our improvisations. We found a way of communicating, a way of speaking together.

I find musicians, as performers, keep their performances open to a degree of spontaneous improvisation that can be in opposition to the way most theatre and dance performances are composed …

It’s pretty set. That wasn’t much of a conflict.

You clearly use the languages of both dance and physical theatre in this performance. Do you lean more on one than the other?

I always see my work and my approach to the world through a choreographic lens. So everything that I do, structurally and physically and formally, it all feels like choreography to me. That said, Lars and Geoff both come from theater so that influence is pretty heavy as well. I also have done a lot of physical theater—I’ve done some clown pieces—and that world feels useful at times. We do lean into different modes in different sections. There are sections when we lean into the characters and the humor and the relationship between two people and you see them as characters who are going through something. And there are times when we lean into the visual aesthetics of the space and the relationship between object and body. So I think what the piece does is take sharp turns. Someone said it felt like a cubist painting … that it’s taken apart and put back together.

What kind of voice did Lars have as you and Geoff were going on this journey?

The three of us often functioned like co-directors and we would lean on each other for our strengths. Much of the show was born out of improvisations. As the outside eye, Lars was an instigator, a reflecting board, but then the three of us would make decisions together about how to move forward—and often include Pablo and Xander in those conversations. We relied heavily on Lars for his eye on the whole, and he’s a wonderful provocateur igniting things. We trust and feel inspired by each other and that’s what drives the collaboration.

What is your relationship to technology as an artist who works in body-based disciplines?

Photography and film have always been a passion of mine. I work with Lars and Pablo because I feel like they share a desire to address this tension between the live body and the digital image, and so I feel like this is at the heart of the pieces that we make together—this collision, this tension, and using the technology to show chasms of all sorts, and sometimes to show the technology we are interacting with in the world. The video is never arbitrary. It’s always at the heart of the work, or at least that’s the goal.

Has the project changed since you created it?

This is the first time since 2016 that we’re doing it … we’re unpacking costumes and re-remembering the choreography! We were really in each other’s lives when we made the project and it’s a reunion of sorts. Feeling the way the world is now changes the embodiment of the piece. And there’s something different about performing something at the end of a process, where it’s sort of the bloom of the process, as opposed to re-approaching it with a fresh perspective.

Kestrel Leah is a British actor and director working internationally across stage and screen. She often collaborates across music, film, dance and visual art, and is co-founder of PHYSICAL PLASTIC theater project with Cypriot composer and sound artist Yiannis Christofides.

Nichole Canuso creates performance experiences that embrace the complexity and absurdity of humanity while sitting at the crossroads of movement, visual art, and theater.

photos by Nichole Canuso

[jessemmanuel]

Thank you to everyone that came out to the Los Angeles Performance Practice @la_performancepractice annual #LAXfestival where I performed two sections of an untitled work-in-progress (“Witnessing Her” & “Decolonize That Mind”) as  well as curating an evening of new works by LA based artists Amie Cota @cotamusic & Chris Bordenave @chrisemile of No)one. Art House @no_one.arthouse (“Any Place But Here”) and Anna B. Scott @thinkwithreach (“The Bliss Point”). Thank to the artists for sharing your beautiful work. Thank you LAPP and #TheBootlegTheater for all of your support! And thank you to EVERY SINGLE PERSON that came out to see our work.  I love and appreciate every single one of you❤❤❤ (at Bootleg Theater)

[deauditievedienst]

Second day of testing #amongus @unionstationla #soundwalk #immersive #laxfestival

[riting]

Miwa Matreyek in conversation with Susan Simpson

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Susan’s piece, A Machine for Living, opens on October 19th, 2018, at Automata in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs till October 21st. Details can be found here.

Can you give me a brief synopsis/blurb for someone who hasn’t seen the show yet?

A Machine for Living is a sci-fi thriller. Its live cinema performed with puppets and handmade special effects. The story is of a Southern California artist who after absorbing errant extraterrestrial DNA slowly evolves into highly advanced alien other. As she receives revelations from her distant planet her body transforms. She finds herself capable a supernatural botanical reproduction that could transform the human race. When her secret is discovered, she is pursued as a biological terrorist and must decide her next steps.

Two things are happening to Constance Jones, the main character, during the play, her alien consciousness is compelling her to make volumes and volumes of art which seem to be diagrams pertaining to her home planet while her body is mutating: sprouting, flowering, pollinating, producing seeds and viable seedlings which she is tending. She knows she has the means to spread her alien DNA. She meets a young girl with the same alien characteristics, so she realizes whatever she does she does not just for herself but for other aliens like her.

What is the original inspiration and conception/desire to make this piece?

Probably one of the earliest inspirations for the piece is the artwork of Hilma af Klint a very early twentieth century painter who made really stunning abstract and somewhat diagrammatic paintings. She was a spiritualist and said that her work was all images channeled from "The Master".  I saw images from a show at The New Museum a couple years ago and was really blown away. Coincidentally there is a retrospective of her work opening at the Guggenheim this week.

I was also inspired by the jazz musician Sun Ra, who claimed to be an alien from Saturn sent to earth to teach peace. Agnes Martin was also an influence. The retrospective of her work at LACMA had me thinking about the transcendent reality she accessed through her very obsessive and exacting  art making process.

I started thinking about making a show about art making as a spiritual practice, opening up one's consciousness to other realities or realms. Somehow the idea of channeling God, or universal truth, or spirits didn't seem appealing me but the idea of channeling an alien consciousness resonated with me the most.

On an entirely different strand I have been really interested in recent studies of plant communication. (For example trees communicating through underground fungal webs.) I am interested in the idea of all of the communication going on around us in the natural world that we have difficulty perceiving.

So, naturally I wove these things together into a story of art making, altered states of consciousness, and alien reproduction and communication through botanical means.

What were some of the original or strongest mental images you envisioned when you were conceiving of this piece?

I have always been interested in the botanical world and the flamboyant sexuality of plants. Images of alien looking plants appear pretty often in my work. I like to imagine plant human hybrids as a way to screw with notions of what is "natural" in regards to sexuality and gender. I thought of the Constance character as gender-fluid not in the usual human terms we are familiar with, but in a more fantastical botanical sense.

So in this vein, I was thinking of what plant like self pollination would look like and the earliest image I had in mind was the image of a seeds coming out of a stomach, like seeds from a lotus pod.  I wanted to create an image that would create an intense sensory experience for viewers. I have a bit of trypophobia (fear of things with lots of little holes) so images of things growing out of lots of little holes in a body is about as intense as it gets for me. So the first thing I built for the show was a special effect device that creates the image of the seeds popping out of a stomach . It was a challenge to carve something out of wood that could cause a strong visceral reaction in people but I think it worked.

What are ways you personally resonate with this story or characters?

The main character has an alien consciousness and lives in between worlds. I think being an introverted, queer, puppet artist I happily identify with character of the alien outsider. So much of mainstream norms of gender, sexuality and aesthetics can seem a bit foreign to me so I do feel alien, at times, in my own culture. Of course the alien as the symbol of outsider resonates for a lot of people. I guess Constance Jones is kind of my Ziggy Stardust.

Also in terms of my own artistic practice I suppose I aspire to Constance's experience of tapping into something both deeply internal and beyond the known world.

What do you think puppetry can lend to storytelling that other forms (film, theater with live actors) can’t? How about for this particular show?

I think it lends poignancy to the characters. The audience can see the struggle to keep them alive and it makes the characters appear more vulnerable and fragile. Puppetry telegraphs a lot about the construction identity and the struggle to maintain it. There is something in there about the loving acknowledgement of fakeness as a form authenticity.

Also the artifice foregrounds the construction of narrative so the story itself seems fragile and provisional, which I like because it causes you to question it more. I don't want to make something that washes over you. I want to make work that leaves the audience in a state of uncertainty.

Why did you choose to tell a lot of the story through live-cam and projection? And what are ways that performative and cinematic languages and tropes play a role in the piece? I’m curious about cinematic composition choices vs. choices of how puppets and sets are built.

I really wanted to tell a traditional sci-fi narrative and felt like that is really best done through cinematic language not straight theater. I wanted to make weird anatomical special effects, alien landscapes, and depict hallucinatory art making. These things are hard to achieve in satisfying ways live on stage but really fun to play and I think effective in miniature in front of the camera.

I built the sets and the puppets first with shot composition in mind. After that I thought about how to arrange them on stage so that people can see them.

We are cutting between different camera angles from close-ups to long shots, etc. The idea that Ting Zhang and I had was that the audience is seeing a movie and the making of the movie at the same time. This is different (in our minds) than if audience is watching a puppet show and documentation of it at the same time.

Puppets perform, but they cannot speak. What were you considering for your choice to use pre-recorded dialogue to narrate the story?

I like the idea of a late night radio dramas. I was particularly influenced by the late Los Angeles radio artist, Joe Frank and his radio stories, many of which unfold entirely through phone calls. I love how all his stories seemed to live in the ether rather than being grounded in any physical reality.

So this is how Jesse Mandapat, the sound designer, and I approached A Machine for Living. All the voices are heard through phone calls or answering machine messages so it seemed appropriate to have them as recorded rather than live voices. The way Jesse treated the voices I think they seemed really unmoored in space and time which is something that really worked for this piece.

You have been working in this form for a long time. What are some ways that your thinking and approaches have changed through the time that you’ve been working?

I think that there is a lot of puppetry that has evolved from something nostalgic into something that is at home in the contemporary art world.

How is puppetry relevant now? Any interesting ways you see the puppetry world changing and evolving?

I am not sure if puppetry is any more relevant now than any other time. It does still seem to resonate with people on an emotional level. As our experience of the world is mediated more and more through digital means I think there is a craving for the tactile that puppetry fulfils.

I guess also we are at a time with virtual reality, really advanced prosthetics and highly intelligent machines that have people thinking about where the body ends and the object begins. What is life, what is non-life. Puppets allow us to explore some of these questions in a very disarming way.

Miwa Matreyek is an animator, performer and designer based in Los Angeles. She makes works that integrates projected animation with a live shadow silhouette, at the cross section of cinema and theater, often weaving narratives of creation and destruction, humans and nature.

Susan Simpson is a Los Angeles based, multidisciplinary artist and designer. Her practice includes installation, puppet theater, miniatures and animation. She makes performances and interactive public art works that engage viewers in intimate viewing. Her works often investigate the history, mythology and social dynamics of the sites where they are located.

photos by Susan Simpson and Molly Allis

[riting]

Daniel Corral in conversation with Alexander Gedeon

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Daniel’s performance POLYTOPE, runs on October 17th and 19th, 2018, at Think Tank Gallery in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival. Details can be found here.

Daniel Corral is a composer and multi-instrumentalist born and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. I was previously aware of his work through several showings at REDCAT, and a very memorable performance of Circle Limit III for 8 guitars, presented on a downtown sidewalk as part of the LA Phil’s Noon-to-Midnight festival last year. On the occasion of his presentation of Polytope this week at the LAX festival, I was able to ask Daniel some questions about his rapidly evolving musical and theatrical language.

Polytope is a multimedia performance for MIDI quartet, but it’s also a standalone album, released by Orenda Records several weeks ago. As a recording, Polytope embodies ‘the gold standard’ of ambient music — it can hover in the background and cast a subtle vibe, but will also stand up to closer inspection: delicately layered overtones cascade and recede, forming a spellbinding latticework. In moments, it’s not unlike water drops on a windshield, dripping and streaking reflected light with each movement of the wiper.

For this week's performance, the audience sits in darkness as patterns of glowing light expand and contract in geometric sequence. The visual patterns become predictable in a way that’s oddly satisfying: one becomes seduced into thinking the music is as simple as the light show looks. But it’s not. Corral’s untraversed realms of microtonality create an uncanny, persistent tension. One reviewer compared the music to “Gamelan from Pluto”. In hearing particular harmonic relationships for the first time, I feel like I’m having unique, emotional responses I can’t quite pinpoint. It’s impressively weird.

AG: As I listened to Polytope, there were a handful of moments where I wasn't sure whether the sound was coming from outside on the street, or from my speaker. The sound seemed immediately like an organic part of the environment in my apartment. It kept distracting me from multi-tasking and making me give the record my undivided attention. How did that happen?

DC. I also found that to be true as I was listening to mixes of Polytope while driving around LA. Some of the low-frequency difference tones in Polytope interacted with the sounds of semi engines in fascinating ways. I think this happens because the monochrome sound world of Polytope is based on a sine tone, which is a simple type of sound wave that is often used to create more complex waveforms. Since the material is so basic, it can either draw attention to its own timbral austerity or latch onto the partials of other sounds in the environment.

I'm struck by how mindful you seem to be with the audience's overall encounter with your music -- and the music you've blogged about. Many of your pieces have an interactive component, you've written opera reviews, and your recent 'micro-tonal audio/visual series’ is a brilliant visual articulation of your musical language. What animates this sensitivity to the audience's experience? What are your influences in this regard?

My approach to music has been heavily influenced by public libraries and bargain bin CDs. As a kid I used to listen to stacks of CDs from the Anchorage public library, often chosen at random. Similarly, I found all sorts of incredible music in $1 bins at Borders or Sam Goody, stuff that apparently no one else wanted. These days, I think of it as a Jonathan Gold approach. Good music can be hiding anywhere. You just have to find it. To facilitate that process, I try to offer audiences multiple levels of engagement with my work.

In my microtonal audio/visual pieces like Polytope or Comma, someone might be drawn in by the rhythmic minimalism, the visual spectacle of the live feed video projections in the dark, by deciphering the pieces formal structures, or by the microtonal harmonies. However people are able to engage with it is OK, and sometimes that permission can open up even more unexpected doorways.

I think this care for the audience experience really began to manifest with Requiem for György Ligeti, my giant music box with 100 wind up musical movements built into it. When I display it, I make a point of letting people know that they can wind up a few of the movements, try to hear all 100 simultaneously, or just hang out and listen as others interact directly with the box. I originally did that because the box was a little bit fragile and I didn't want it to break. But, I found that approach really let people relax as they experienced it.

When you start composing a piece like Polytope, do you have an end-result in mind? I wonder if you could talk a bit about your explorations in microtonality and how they connect to your compositional process.

Writing music is often like approaching an object in a thick fog. At first you only see the hazy outline, but as you approach it, details slowly emerge until you eventually crash into the windmill. Writing Polytope was very much like that. There was a lot of conceptualizing and programming needed to get to the point where I could even just play with the instrument I had “built."

All of my microtonal multimedia pieces thus far are based on different tonality diamonds, which are ways of organizing microtonal pitches into a grid. Once the grid of notes is set up, the compositional process then involves creating visual metaphors to lay on top of those notes. To satisfy my own sensibilities, these need to be engaging aurally, visually, and conceptually. Because of this integration, the live feed projections are actually an important part of fully understanding Polytope. The lights that the audience sees projected are the score that the musicians follow, and they can watch as the shadows of the players' fingers perform the piece. The only end result that was clearly defined from the beginning is transparency.

There seems to be less emphasis on texture in Polytope than, say Diamond Pulses -- really dug, by the way!. What I hear, though, is an obsessive, laser-like attention to slow, prismatic shifts in microtonality. The experience is somehow illuminating as a listener -- particularly in the 'Pulses' movements. Would you say the circle of concentration is tightening in your compositional concerns? What's motivating that shift?

I’m glad you connected with Diamond Pulses! That was my first piece that explored microtonality in a way I felt confident in. I would say the sound of Diamond Pulses is a bit more representational and also involves more layered side chains. When I started developing Comma in 2016, the influence of minimalist music and art inspired me to streamline my materials even more. The influence of light and space art also looms large on all of my microtonal multimedia pieces, as do artists like Sol LeWitt and Bridget Riley. Their streamlined aesthetics manifest in both the sound and visuals of Polytope. I originally experimented with quite a few different sounds for Polytope, but ended up reverting back to the basic monochrome sine tone that I used for Comma, the eloquence of which reinforced Polytope's minimalism.

I wouldn't say that the circle of concentration is tightening in all of my music, but some of it is definitely going in that direction. I think the more focused branch of my music started with writing music for installations and public spaces, where an audience might pay attention for 5 seconds or stick around for 45 minutes. Both interactions are equally valid, and the challenge is in making both rewarding. To address this concern, I've thought a lot about the difference between what is Streamlined versus what is Simple (really, anything considered Simple has just not been fully understood, but that is a much longer conversation). The interface of a hammer is relatively simple, while a smartphone touchscreen is streamlined. So, I guess I try to shape my music into a smartphone that you can use as a hammer! Polytope leans that way, as does Circle Limit III, my recent guitar octet which was premiered by the Los Angeles Electric 8 in November and is being released as an album next year by MicroFest Records. My accordion ensemble piece Neotrope fits into this category, as does Dislike. I tried to make these pieces capable of being taken at face value or appreciated for the gradual processes at play. Again, it's a consideration of time as the medium of music.

On the other hand, I am currently working on a song cycle based on summit registers I've documented on peaks around the Angeles National Forest. That piece will be quite colorful, closer to my music for Timur and the Dime Museum or my string quartet Comic Book. As Whitman said, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

In one of your older reviews, you dropped this Morton Feldman quote about the 'duration' of a composition: "Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it's scale. Form is easy: just division of things into parts. But scale is a different matter." As it stands, Polytope is seems deliberately formatted, and I definitely felt an 'arc' in the listening experience. What would Polytope look like if it was two hours long, or longer?

It’s funny that you mention that, because I originally intended for Polytope to be much longer. There are 15 structures in Polytope, each of which has about a dozen or so sections within it, and I use a foot switch to manually control the rate of progress through the piece. The form and tempo of each of these sections is consistent, but how the four players interact within each section is different in every performance. The rate of progression dictates the number of repetitions of each musical idea before moving on to the next section. So, if Polytope were two hours or more, it would basically look the same, and the tempos of each section would be the same, but the duration of each section would be longer, with more repetitions. I think it would be really lovely, actually. Maybe we'll do that on Friday night and make it a 3 hour performance. I wonder if the players in my group would be angry or ecstatic... As it is, I don't think I quite jumped the shark from form to duration in Polytope. But, I try to think of every piece as proof of concept for the next one, so stay tuned :)

I really do love music and art that is about duration, though. Under the hood, time is the medium of music. My favorite film maker is Béla Tarr, whose films often involve very long single shots, and the inescapable linearity makes you evaluate your own relationship to time. Though not exactly the same, that consideration of temporality is related to John Cage's As Slow as Possible. Another example is La Monte Young's Dream House, which is a steady state drone installation bathed in Marian Zazeela's lights. It just runs all day, and it's up to the visitor to curate their own experience within it. In contrast, many of the bagatelle-like pieces from John Zorn's Naked City go in the opposite direction, increasing temporal density with very short structures. In all of these cases, the audience is likely compelled to consider what baggage they've dragged into their own relationships with time.

Alexander Gedeon is an opera director, performer and songwriter. He will associate direct John Cage’s Europeras I & II at the LA Phil this November.

Now living in Los Angeles, Daniel Corral’s unique voice finds outlet in accordion orchestras, puppet operas, handmade music boxes, microtonal electronics, site-specific installations, chamber music, post-punk opera, and inter-disciplinary collaborations. His music has been commissioned by venues and festivals around the world, and recordings of his work have been released by Populist Records, Orenda Records, Innova Recordings, the wulf. records, and independently. He will be joined onstage at the LAX Festival by Erin Barnes, Cory Beers, and Andrew Lessman.

Photos supplied by the artist.

[riting]

Jmy James Kidd on Meg Foley: THE UNDERGIRD

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Meg’s piece, The undergird, opens on October 18th, 2018, at Think Tank Gallery in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs till October 19th. Details can be found here.

Radical Eulogy

The thing about words is that they will never be the Thing, they surround the Thing and try and get as close to it as (humanly) possible. This body, this person, in this time -- Meg Foley -- encircles grief, isolation, anger, confusion in her solo work The undergird. During our video conference interview I ask her if she considers this piece a performance and she tells me that it is not not a performance. She tells me she wants to be in the same Room with the people present and together, with every being, she wants to find the/a door to the unknown.

She wants and needs connection to other humans. Throughout the run of her solo (improvisation, dance, conjuring) in her studio, in a room in a house in Philly that she created for her work, that she has been working in for 3 years, in a Zoom meeting, she looks directly at me. She speaks. One moment she talks about my ankle which she can't see, she speaks of touching my ankle and I feel my face flush, I feel the warmth of connection.

Meg's dad passed away in 2010, six weeks after a diagnosis. She gets a call that he is gone, she goes to him and places her hands on his chest, she feels the warmth still in the body. She leaves the room for a bit and when she comes back and touches the body it is cold.

My father passed away in 2015, a month and a day after he called me to tell me he had a month to live. That time until he died was the time I felt the closest to him. He was open, he was scared, he was sweet, he was cranky, he was thoughtful and he was dying. The spirits started filling the room. The night before he died the hospice person told me over the phone he thought my dad was going soon because he had just taken a massive BM and that is what the body does right before it loses its warmth, it clears itself out.

The Body Knows How to Die.

In 2015 Meg was still grieving, she was still dancing. In the middle of a dancing session, she put her arm up and felt her Dad there with her. Since that encounter she has been setting up dances, scores, work of her body that invites her Dad to be there. She knows when he is with her.

Meg is Now still grieving, she is Now still feeling the loss, she is Now still living. She wonders about the purpose of her dancing: why is she doing this? Every day I wonder this same thing about my own work. The undergird has been a group work, a social therapy. In this solo version she holds the group in her body. She doesn't feel like she has anything to lean on. She feels like the mission of her work is shifting and she is not sure what the pivot point is. She desires a Radical Eulogy Movement.

I realized when my father died that Death and Dying is not something many people in my version of American Culture talk about or want to talk about or have experience talking about or have any deep traditions regarding dying and grieving. Funerals didn't suffice. What does? Grief, the loss, the memories are endless really, they live in the living body.

The living body is Warm. What is that Warmth? That Warmth of a Body can feel so good, it can be the best thing in the world to sense another human, another living being and feel that Warmth. The Body is actually the Thing. Dancing is the Body. Meg is the Wall to lean into, Meg is the Room we are in, Meg is the Door to the UNKNOWN.

Jmy James Kidd is a dance-maker, outfit-maker and space-maker, living and working in Los Angeles, CA.

Meg Foley is an educator, performer, and choreographer. Her work is influenced by her identity as a queer artist and parent and is rooted in a loving tumble with formalism in dance and what constitutes performance. She makes dances, events, and objects that explore the materiality of physical and social identity as choreographic form. Photos by Kevin Monko

[riting]

Ben Levinson on Edgar Arceneaux: UNTIL, UNTIL, UNTIL

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Ben’s piece, UNTIL, UNTIL, UNTIL, opens on October 17th, 2018, at the Bootleg Theater in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs again on October 19th and 20th.. Details can be found here.

Until, Until, Until… is a sort of trans-dimensional replay of Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Gala. A non-chronological relapse that collapses the tragedy of an individual (Ben Vereen) into the social trauma of a collective (black Americans past, present, and future), finding their collision in a peak moment of societal descent. Frank Lawson plays Ben Vereen, a performer who met public shame after his tribute to vaudeville performer Bert Williams was cut short by ABC. The edit that the network made omitted the critical second half of Vereen’s performance in which he wiped his face of the blackface makeup that he had donned for his portrayal. This gesture was intended as a critique of the storied violence that blackface represents. Without it, the already precarious use of blackface by Vereen (at a celebration of Reagan nonetheless) had even less to hold it up. In Until, Until, Until… we see Arceneaux’s and Lawson’s Vereen not only prepare for this fateful performance, but relive it through hazy repetitions in a nightmarish recursion.

Arceneaux’s documentation of this 2015 performance begins with a shot of lead-performer Frank Lawson tending the venue’s bar before the piece begins. There’s a casual pan across the mostly white audience. When the play begins we, the audience, are not let in on the nature of our involvement, the character we are playing. Nor do we know who we are watching, even as the premise is clear to us. Lawson/Vereen/Williams (all three folded into one) is rehearsing his choreography. We are eventually addressed and given a clue when his director (Edgar Arceneaux, from the back of the room) suggests he try the verbal introduction so he can get into character and loosen himself up. He does so. A slapstick shrug follows. This shrug is a totem for us to latch onto, a wink, some relief, or at least a sympathetic representation of our own unknowing.

Throughout the performance, timelines elide, characters morph, and epic tensions meet improper resolutions. In a transitional sequence, three presences combine: upon a white canvas: red, blue, and green light producing bright white light as they overlap. According to Arceneaux in an interview with Weston Teruya for Art Practical, these colors represent three distinct traumas attempting resolution but never arriving. The RGB analogy arrives in a previous iteration of Until, Until, Until… in which Arceneaux chose to represent this concept with three busts titled Blue Bert, Green Ben, and Red Ronnie (2017), each faceless but donning the headwear of their respective subject. There’s a certain imbalance to this triad which inevitably crumbles under its own awkward pressure points. Those two whose names are drawn together by alliteration (Blue Bert and Red Ronnie) are drawn together as if cooperative to one another or at least antithetical to Green Ben. Of the busts, Ben and Bert (who are nominally resonant) share a hat style while Ronnie does not. This imbalanced triad exemplifies the way in which Arceneaux’s work disallows conclusion. It opens up more than it gives answer to, particularly effecting when the topic of conversation is as pertinent as his are.

As much as his work is historical and referential, it resonates in its moment. While it was left to Johnny Carson to joke, following the gala, that the Reagan administration was "the first to have a premiere," the theater of presidential politics is at such a high now that the New York Times cheekily joined in last week presenting a three-act script of a typical Trump rally 

Beyond that, Arceneaux is particularly conscious of the space he is working in. In the midst of the show is a potent critique of whiteness in the institutional art world that takes little more than the lifting of a veil and the tilt of a mirror. Guilt is brought from the narrative guilt that a viewer can place upon gala attendees to a tangible discomfort in the room. Just as we saw Reagan’s audience swoon and chuckle behind Vereen, a camera is turned to us so we must see ourselves projected as a backdrop, holding our gaze. Again, Arceneaux will not hand you the answers. He gives us an image, a context, and space, and lets us, the readers, draw from it what we will.

In a way, it is my sense that the trust he bestows us with as viewers is what truly allows his work to resonate.

Back in the world, I had a flight delay. I sent an email to Edgar about changing our call time. It might have been for the best, I was still unpacking for myself the questions his work had already asked. Eventually he didn’t respond to that email, and eventually I did not pry. I found that what he had given me had been enough. What could I seek to clarify if the work had described what it needed to describe in the way it needed to do so? Any question I might have asked would ultimately be its own answer. Arceneaux demonstrated something for me, perhaps unwittingly or perhaps fully aware: that the reading process is much like the writing process, that showing is much like speaking, that the response is never the same.

Ben Levinson is a writer and musician living in LA. He writes album reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes, co-edits Soap Ear (an online journal about experimental music in LA), performs as Cali Bellow, and organizes shows with friends. He tries to keep in touch at benlevinson@me.com

Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) is an artist working in the media of drawing, sculpture, and performance, whose works often explore connections between historical events and present-day truths. He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012. 

Photos by Edgar Arceneaux

[riting]

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko in conversation with Tyler Matthew Oyer

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Jaamil Kosoko’s WHITE STATE | BLACK MIND opens on October 18th, 2018, at the Bootleg Theater, as part of the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival . CHAMELEON (work in process) opens on October 20th, 2018 at Think Tank Gallery. Details can be found here and here.

TMO: Where are you right now? What takes you there?

JOK: Currently in Princeton. Heading to Sweden this evening should all go according to plan.

For LAX Festival you will present two works: WHITE STATE | BLACK MIND and CHAMELEON (work in progress). What are the central ideas behind these works?

Using the following quote by Bryan Wagner as a point of departure, "Being black is belonging to a state organized according to its ignorance of your perspective - a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind", WS | BM is considering ideas around perception and how lived experience dictates/determines how we read and are read in the world. This experience may be racialized, gendered, political, class related, etc. Chameleon is unpacking ideas related to survival and adaptation to visible/invisible complex systems as it relates specifically to Black life.  

I've never seen you perform live, but something that draws me to your practice and is a personal interest in my work, is the idea or method of conjuring. What is your relationship to this term? How does it function in your performances?

Conjuring serves as a way of navigating the unknown, the unrecognizable, and the illegible. Essentially it becomes a research tool for me. At this stage of the work, it's been quite freeing to linger in this state of conjuring for as long as possible.

I respond to the chameleon as symbolic mechanism for survival. I’ve been thinking a lot about disguises, both actual and symbolic. There is power and protection in disguise, resistance. Was there a specific moment that caused you to make Chameleon? How does disguise function in your choreographies?

Chameleon like much of my work remixes themes of history, autobiography, and fantasy. I’ve been pulled deeply into the idea of creating my own biomythography, a term coined by Audre Lorde (but inside a multi-tiered chameleonic performance based process/context) where the contours of the presentation is ever shifting depending on its environment and the performers. This project will take many shapes (book, film, performance, and podcast series)

In regards to my use of materials, I’m more concerned with what various unruly configurations of objects and garment and materials might reveal about the often times invisible societal systems that shape our lives.  My interest now is to investigate the internal illegible realities of the performance subject(s).

The notion of lingering in any state offers notions of the subject as unproductive, anti-reproductive, the rebel even. Do you feel your work deals with time in ways such as the linear narrative arc or in more abstract, disorienting ways? How do you think about holding space?

My work is nonlinear and oftentimes asks the viewer to reposition their attention to time. That said, I recognize time as precious and am not interested in wasting mine or anyone else’s.

Space, to that end, becomes a container for ideas, failure, recovery, intimacy, discovery etc. To hold space is impossible but I do try to move through it as fully as possible.

Do you have thoughts of translating tactics and methods from your performance works into the time and space outside the formal presentation of the theatre? In other words, are there elements of your work that you could see being used or are already used in political activism?

For me art making is deeply political. Much of this work is connected to my teaching practice, my writing practice, and curatorial practice. I have a hard time drawing a line between these various frameworks. I cross-pollinate my interests in community organizing with what I’m doing in all other parts of my life. And I’m certainly drawing from activist tactics to create work, even if I don’t always position myself or my work within an explicitly activist vantage point.  

Called an "interdisciplinary gospel immortalist" by Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Tyler Matthew Oyer is an artist, writer, organizer, and educator based in Los Angeles. He is the founder of tir journal, an online platform for queer, feminist, and underrepresented voices. Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American poet, curator, and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2018 National Dance Project Award recipient, 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2017 Jerome Artists in Residence at Abrons Arts Center, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. He lectures, speaks, and performs internationally. 

Photos by Jonathan Hsu

[riting]

Gabriella Rhodeen on Greg Wohead: CALL IT A DAY

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Greg’s performance CALL IT A DAY, runs from sunrise to sunset on October 14th, 2018, at Think Tank Gallery in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival. Details can be found here.

I’ve never met Greg Wohead. We spoke via a pixelated skype connection for an hour or so on a Saturday morning. He was in Texas, I was in California.

It’s impossible to know someone in an hour but what struck me at the start was his curiosity. How it fills him. When he spoke, his whole body leaned forward slightly, tilted, shifted suddenly then settled again.

Our conversation moved much in the same way; shifting and slipping from one thought to another, getting lost down one to jump suddenly to a new idea then settle again.

Recently, I told him, I watched and became entranced by a docu-series about Fundamentalist Mormons living on the side of a rock face in Utah. The community, founded by a man who had been imprisoned for bigamy, works to be entirely self-sufficient; building their homes, growing their food and quietly, blissfully birthing nations to serve their Lord.

There is so much in this that feels weird to me, but as time passes the weirdness slips away and you’re just watching people - parents, spouses, friends - living life in the best way they know how. The image of sister wives embracing each other while their husband courts a potential third wife becomes less and less odd as time goes by.

We discussed Greg’s inclination toward weirdness like this - slipperiness - and how very often, as is the case in his piece CALL IT A DAY, what is unsettling, odd or perplexing doesn’t come in the shape of a climax but rather in a mundane, sneaky, incremental way.

Weirdness is something you suddenly find yourself in. Feel your guts rumbling. Feel your head cocking deeply to one side, your eyebrows raising, as you bear witness to what, to you, feels ever so slightly askew, unfamiliar.

CALL IT A DAY pieces together Greg’s memory of a meeting between himself, his then partner and an Amish couple (friends of his aunt and uncle) in Illinois many years ago. The actual interaction was not all that significant according to his recollection; there was no partisan shaming, no attempted conversions, no arguments. Just four humans encountering each other and feeling not quite settled. Not quite sure.

Greg’s attraction to the odd or off-kilter was a consistent thread through everything we discussed. And his tendency toward it is an active one. What once was a repertoire of autobiographical solo pieces has now shifted into works born from a magnetic pull to a particular person or people; trying to say or express something “...deeply in me or, I guess, concerning me.”

His impetus toward creation and performance now is consistently based in his desire to build community and he likes the idea of using the sensation of never-quite-settling to engage and challenge that community.

He wondered aloud, how can a term like weird that has long been used to dismiss otherness instead be used to invite inquiry, curiosity and understanding?

I asked Greg, with this in mind, what feeling he aimed to give his audiences in his work and he instead recalled one of his most poignant experiences as an audience member himself - watching a piece that blatantly crossed or blurred lines of ethics in performance. He remembered it being hilarious, and he remembered noting his inclination to laugh and wondering whether or not it was appropriate. What it said about him.

In this, he experienced a most honest moment as witness not only of the performance, but of himself within the context of that performance. When we experience, as Greg did, this dual focus and engage in the act of self-witnessing in performance we have a chance to see ourselves more clearly: our place, our presence, our privilege.

What would happen if when we encounter what feels other, as the couples in CALL IT A DAY do, we were to focus instead on ourselves, our reactions, our inclinations, rather than everything that doesn’t make sense to us about the creature before us?

This, I think, is what Greg is poking at.

Oftentimes the problem with performance, if your choice is to do as this other artist did and shock self-inquiry out of the audience, is that there’s no real way to get someone’s consent without forfeiting impact. So you become in danger of merely enraging and losing the opportunity to engage.

Even as I write this I recognize my contradiction. Sometimes we need a shock. Sometimes we need rage. I suppose, then, what I’m saying is that there needs to be a very specific container created - thoughtfully, purposefully - to hold that shock and bend it into self inquiry.

We struggled together to refine a thought Greg was expressing about “human-ness” and encountering the “other”; how when you view someone in this way they can very often lose some of their personhood. When you simply cannot - no matter your efforts, no matter your exercises in empathy - find an access point into another person’s point of view or way of life, they lose some part of being human to you.

They become defined, instead, by their “otherness”.

When we encounter these moments in our own intimate partnerships we work through them, making every effort to tease out what doesn’t make sense. We employ empathy and mercy. We go to therapy.

Not so with a stranger.

The weirdness of watching the Fundamentalist Mormon series never quite went away but, with time, it quieted. And I still think about the moments when I called out “OH HOW WEIRD” and wonder - why so weird?

I’m curious to see how the constellations of familiarity and weirdness shift throughout the hours spent together during CALL IT A DAY. Curious to see how the steady passage of time in the not-quite-settled place can reintroduce us, as witnesses, to ourselves.

Gabriella is a performer currently based in Los Angeles.

Greg is a writer, performer and live artist originally from Texas. He makes theatre performances, one-to-one pieces and audio works.

photos by Greg Wohead

[riting]

Rebecca Bruno and Alison D’Amato in conversation with Alexx Shilling

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Rebecca’s performance, PROCESSION RELIC, opens on October 11th, 2018, at Bootleg Theater in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs again on October 12th and 14th. Details can be found here.

Alexx Shilling: What are some of the motivations or questions that brought you to Procession Relic?

Rebecca Bruno: Procession Relic is part of a larger research project, Life Keeping Recipe for a Relic, in which I am wondering about how to relate regenerative cycles (as seen in agricultural methods focused on soil health) with choreographic practice. I am exploring this link in ephemeral works like this performance, and through sculpture and painting in the context of a residency at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. The project is about trying to contain both hopeful and dismal outlooks in confronting issues related to a changing climate. For instance, menstrual blood is a robust fertilizer, but it is divorced from soil in current conventional modes of land cultivation. By processing menstrual blood dilutions through a bio spectrometer - a machine that measures the molecular contents of a substance by shining light through it - one is able to translate the nanometer measurements of the blood’s light absorption into color schemes. I am hoping to then create a small light show depicting the readings of menstrual blood that are both inside and outside a spectrum visible to humans. This process is at once exploring a biological link between women’s bodies and the earth while existing as a detached or distanced object. A question arising from this (taking embodied information into material processing) has to do with what kind of containers these objects become?

One thing that has stayed with me while working on Life Keeping Recipe for a Relic, is the physicality of the earth’s soils’ capacity for breathing and how land cultivation has and continues to interrupt this process. Our soil actively absorbs, holds and releases carbon.

Another question for me has been, what is a kind of dance that is synonymous with ‘no-till farming.’ Is it a ‘non-doing dance?’

Alison D’Amato: One big reason that made me excited to be a part of this process has to do with my own recent dance-inquiries into movement and materiality. Rebecca and I were in dialogue over the summer as she was learning the improvisation score I was developing; this became The Sacred Something. It then felt really natural to enter into her process as a dancer. I think the things I am interested in right now are really resonant with, and can even to a certain extent live inside of, this process.

AD: Thinking back on conversations we had during CHIME [Choreographers in Mentorship Grant], and of some of your work I’ve seen unfolding since then, I’m curious about how this piece will be presented. How have you been thinking about your relationship to audience, time and space? I’m remembering works you have presented in visual art spaces that were designed to unfold over long periods of time.

RB:  Procession Relic is in line with a group of works that position a dancer’s attention as a primary force in performance. In a work entitled The Beginning, the question was about what a dancer could, if anything, indicate about the energy of the people present for her performance. In we are inseparable there is no time (a performance and installation looking at the gender, ideological, and territorial divisions around the Western Wall in Jerusalem) the exploration was about the dancer’s attention alternating between her internal experience and her external environment. For Procession Relic, I am in an active conversation with Flora, Alison, Jordan, and Yann about what is needed to create a scenario in which we feel that both our bodies and the space we are in, in some sense, are ‘breathing.’ The dancers and I have developed a series of subtle constraints that support our performance and Yann has created a sound and light composition that both follows and contains a number of these progressions.

AD: Because the progression of subtle constraints coming from the score is specific with respect to duration, it doesn't feel to me like a "durational" work. It seems like we are going somewhere. Initially I was surprised to hear that the work would be in a theatrical format rather than something more installation-like, but now that I'm in it I can't imagine it being otherwise. It feels like a complete experience. It also does not feel like the projection, sound or movement components could exist alone. As to what it will feel like with an audience, I have no idea!

AS: Can you talk a bit about the rehearsal or research process? I sense that there are deep internal motors or motivators that generate form but are not chiefly concerned with form.

RB: Perhaps we are more concerned with the places that give birth, life, and death to form, and what it means to experience the unfolding of this process live with an audience. I hope we highlight the way in which our bodies might be perceived as a phenomenon of nature (not a symbol or a reference) and how the presence of a viewer is necessary in its spontaneity, subjectivity, and depth.

The dancers and I have developed a series of constraints together. These constraints have developed from the work Samantha Mohr and I created during our performances in we are inseparable there is no time. The subtle constraints exist as a document in chart form that we use to support our practice and performance.

AD: My experience changes pretty radically each time we do it. I am a different person each time, and the work changes with me. Of course, as an improviser, I am constantly asking questions about the extent to which I want to be seeking form, but in my own practice I have been trying to let those questions and impulses arise and exist and be important whether or not I "do anything" about them. I am not sure how I/we appear in the work - as a body making choices, following impulses, an organic object, a bundle of energy, a conduit for something else?

AS: Yeah, I remember finding an interesting tension when I was working on your piece Requital Recital, Alison, between energy and object. As a performer working in relationship with objects, in this case, carefully strewn about the space by John Emison but in close proximity to our bodies, I would experience myself as being both pure energy but then recognizing my ability to become or to be perceived as material. This really complicated my own notions of form in movement or dance.

AS: Are you working with Mak [Kern] on this project? What collaborative relationships are at play in the work?

RB: Mak and I have been working together a lot recently, on interactive sculptural installations that make sound – which do feel very related to this larger project in the sense that we are exploring how we can feel like agents in a respectful relationship with the environment. In Procession Relic, I am happy to be working with long-time collaborators and people whose works and ways of working I feel invested in. The performance relies on them.

AS: Would you leave us with any source material that has been important to you in the creation/construction of Procession Relic?

RB: Yes! There is a lot of information to do with regenerative agriculture.

Dorothea von Hantelmann’s “What is the new ritual space for the 21st century”

Adrienne Rich’s “Planetarium”

Maria Rodale's “Organic Manifesto”

Marija Gimbutas' “Language of the Goddess”

Alexx Shilling is fully committed to the infinite investigation of movement and its potential to uncover alternative narratives and allow us to remember. Her original choreography has been presented nationally and internationally, through residencies at the Millay Colony and Ebenbökhaus / Jewish Museum Munich, and with generous support from institutions including Dance Film Association, CCI, California Arts Council and CHIME. 

Rebecca Bruno is a dance artist working across performance and visual art. In 2013, Bruno founded homeLA, a performance project dedicated to dance process in private space working collaboratively with body-based artists and Los Angeles residents. Bruno is half of Objects for Others with Mak Kern.  

Alison D’Amato is a researcher, choreographer, and performer based in Los Angeles and currently teaching theory and practice at USC’s Kaufman School of Dance. She recently completed a PhD in UCLA’s Department of World Art and Cultures/Dance, where her dissertation focused on contemporary choreographic scores.

Photos by Rebecca Bruno and Chris Wormald

[riting]

d. Sabela grimes in conversation with Jennie Liu

d. Sabela grimes in conversation with Jennie Liu

I caught d. Sabela grimes in the midst of the Creatrix as they prepare for the World Premiere of ELECTROGYNOUS, “a dynamic testament to the multiple worlds Black people simultaneously inhabit.”

How are rehearsals going?

Rehearsals are going well! Oh man. They are not really rehearsals per se, but more like movement sessions, gatherings.

I was wondering about that. I was at the Grand Performances show, and I was really curious about how improvisation plays into the structure of the work, not only in terms of what you are doing with your bodies and minds physically and conceptually, but also politically. This was actually the last question I was going to ask you, but...

It’s all good, follow your intuition.

Yeah I guess I intuited that improvisation was more to you than just a way to choreograph.

There are several things that are happening. One is that I am in this enduring dialogue with myself about trust. Trusting that I come from these streams of cultural information and these dimensions of knowledge that are operating in street dance communities and Black vernacular dance communities where improvisation plays a key role. Improvisation is at the core of these systems.

You know, if you are doing concert dance you come in contact with different frameworks, different points of view about the utility of improvisation. What improvisation means to people that come from forms where improvisation is not at the core, frames how they think about its utility or value. So I have to trust that I don’t jump into that conversation, but rather look closer and closer and more intimately at how improvisation shows up in the movement practices, cultural practices that I am a part of. And just really trusting it.

And I use that word trust deliberately because there is a lot of anxiety around improvisation. From my times with Puremovement, doing Q+As with the cast as we toured, I had the chance to sit back and observe how people asked Rennie questions. This was a moment in time where hip hop was still very novel in concert dance, so after the show people would wanna ask about improvisation. And through their lens they look at improvisation as being synonymous with unprepared. 

And we come from something that is totally different. You’re not only prepared, more importantly you are ready. For anything. You’re open, you’re sensy, you know? So improvisation is so much about that. From street dance to the cipher, to— as someone that grew up singing gospel— the call and response. When the director decides to extend the song because they are listening and really paying attention and feeling out the vibe of the congregation and we continue to do a certain refrain—it’s so built into the culture. And you have to be ready for that. And there are multiple ways that you get ready for it. And part of what I’m saying is that sometimes you’re not ready. You know what I mean? Sometimes you don’t know what’s gonna come, you can’t predict it. You ready yourself in the moment. And I love that, this approach to improvisation. Its about communicating with the people that I’m collaborating with. In this case all of the performers come from this tradition and have their own take, their own interpretation, their own experiences with it. Which gives what we do in these sessions, aka ‘rehearsals’, in the ‘show’ their own sort of richness.

I’m curious about what you do to get ready. What is the training? Like when you talk about singing in the church when the director wants to do something unrehearsed, you’re drawing as a singer on a common vocabulary and knowledge that you acquire from years of singing in the church. And there are a set of references as a group, that allow you to do that as a group.

Yes, there’s that part of the learning. But what we are talking about extends past technique.

But technique backs it up.

Most definitely.

So the movement practice that you are engaging in with your fellow dancers, your collaborators, if there are rules at play what are those rules? What is the stuff that is not movement, that is also structural, that helps you let go and trust?

Yeah, we’re definitely putting sort of guidelines in place, and some of the guidelines are setting clear and active intention to witness. What is important to me is that since we’re dealing with concepts and intuitions of blackness and gender, I’m really open to the performers points of view. Because I obviously realize we’re not monolithic, and not everyone sees and experiences blackness in the same way and that’s really exciting to me. So one of the things is to really open up the space for people to contemplate that in that in their bodies and in the space, and articulate that with their bodies and their mouths and their gestures.

So I call them movement meditations, but some people call them scores. So for example to generate material one of the performers Jahana came into the space, and I said, “hey there’s someone in the room, someone that’s very dear to you, someone that you can trust someone that you can lean on, someone that you can be vulnerable with. So if that person was in the room with you where they would be?” And she began to lean to her right. It was really beautiful. So I said, “cool so that person is on your right, lets just lean in.” So we started to develop material as if that person was physically there. So she conjures up this image, in this case it was her mother, and she leans on her mom, and really physically leans on this person, and she begins to lean and her body moves and she leans her head, and we go through this sort of series.

And we bring in points of rupture. I’m really into the breaks; hip hop is so much about the breaks. How do we create and experience rupture or a break from this idea, this person? And as she interpreted and translated, we developed this nice little section of ELECTROGYNOUS. And its something that, during the show, what I call the ELECTROYNOUS EXPERIENCE, can kind of fit wherever. Like I haven’t strung everything together yet. And then maybe we can take certain sections and move them sequentially at different times, or maybe its movable vocabulary or ideas that someone else becomes attracted to and wants to put on their body in a different space at a different time. So these are different kinds of guidelines we are playing with.

So you’re describing this present of the absent. That you describe Speculative Fiction at play in your dramaturgy and in your dreaming space, is so cool. You create words, you talk about  process as being a Creatrix, you know? I was listening to NPR this morning to Teri Gross talking about Muhammad Ali and was reminded that there is this great tradition of African American cultural producers creating language. And I’m curious about how that innovation lives  in your movement vocabulary? How you bend and hybridize and otherwise fuck with movement? Because it might not be so clear to people that don’t see a lot of dance and are not reading movement, and are not so fluent in that language.

First of all, going back to Speculative Fiction. The work of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, listening to the music of Parliament Funkadelic, shoot- Prince, Grace Jones (who plays a big part in these piece), so these people are present. But in this piece I’m playing with this idea of Declarative Realness. So there’s Speculative Fiction, but what I’m saying with ELECTROGYNOUS is that we are not speculating, we’re declaring a type of realness. We’re declaring that there is something real in the visible planes, there is something real and complicated in how complex ideas of gender show up on our bodies. So we are creating physical, mechanical, reproducible movement ideas that speak to this.

So for example in tutting, there are very clean and clear lines and angles, and there is way of presenting that is…  So if there’s a break at my wrist and my palm is down but I’m holding it at a 90 degree angle it doesn’t read as feminine, but if I soften that break and soften the fingers, in many communities—and I’m drawing from Black communities—we read that as a gesture that would point you in the direction of being more feminine, or would question your sexuality. So there’s a tutting section in the piece where I’m purposefully not holding very hard angles, the angles are present but there’s a softening at the joints.  

This is a tangent, but you know Tommy DeFrantz’s idea about ‘corporeal orature’?

Yeah, ‘The Black Beat Made Visible’.

I’m going to have to read that again, but this is making me think about how in dance, there are some bodies that use movement to speak, to communicate—out of necessity, maybe, and there are other cultures—like white post-modernism—that have historically been more interested in bodies evading meaning, to satiate other kinds of needs perhaps. I’m really curious about the ways that cultural identity and background play into form.

So if people argue that the concert stage is historically a white space, and in this country in institutions like universities and colleges there are arrangements between how knowledge is produced in these spaces, and the training, and the pipeline to the concert stage that has excluded so many different dance forms. There are so many people that come through these institutions and are reprogrammed out of the knowledge systems they are most familiar with. You get programmed to see things through a certain frame, because of the power of the institution. You know, “I went to such and such a university and I thought I knew dance and then I went I found out that this is actually what modern dance is,” and you no longer speak your language. There is a real danger in that. You’re colonized in a really interesting way. You just made me think about that with your tangential commentary.

Yeah—getting back on script.

So in this concept of Declarative Realness there is a reality within the overall reality that marginalized groups experience, so in this case there are things that black people experience which they know to be true to them. And what’s really interesting about presenting some of these ideas on stage is its legibility. How legible it is? Part of it is surrendering that it’s not going to be legible. Maybe things that operate as true to us in our real lives don’t make sense from a different point of logic. So when I talk about being electrogynous some people are really easy to point to like a Prince or a Grace Jones or an Octavia Butler. Then there are those people that are less easy….  so have you seen this film Friday? With Ice Cube?

Yeah… yeah I have. Like recently actually.

You’ve seen it recently?

Yeah it was on in a motel and we watched it.

Ok so there’s character named Big Worm.

Which one is that?

Well usually he’s always looking for his money, and he drives a convertible ’61 Impala, and he’s got rollers in his hair. And people that are from LA: you’re not gonna think anything weird about that because you’ve seen really hard core, around your way gangsta type dudes with rollers in their hair, or a perm that’s prettier than their mom’s. You know, and in a really weird way there’s no question about their masculine stance or their way of being in the world, it just makes sense. But then when you pull back and you go well wait a minute, if I were to see someone else do that in a different context I would think something different.

So we’re playing with these different ideas of how this is already happening. So I’m not pointing us in the direction and saying “oh look we could be,” I’m saying “no, we actually already exercise a lot of freedom in blurring what we would consider hard gender lines. It’s weird and awesome and intriguing and it might not transfer to a different regional context outside of LA. There are certain things that are very LA about this too.

d. Sabela grimes’ ELECTROGYNOUS will have its World Premiere from October 13-15 at the Bootleg Theatre as part of the Los Angeles Exchange (LAX) Festival, 5th ed. 

[riting]

Milka Djordjevich in conversation with Tim Reid

Milka Djordjevich in conversation with Tim Reid

I was wondering about the title. Well, I’m curious about all caps.

The all caps is partly [she yells], “STOP YELLING AT ME.” When your mom is writing you a text or an email with caps lock on. It’s like they’re yelling at you through your text. So part of it is like… [she yells again] “ANTHEMMMMM!!!”

And it is also about the aesthetic and typeface. In any font all caps looks better, weirdly. And for my last work MASS, the letters were weirdly mimicking what we were doing during the piece. And then ANTHEM is a weird companion piece to MASS.

You have talked about MASS as interested in ritual. And talking about states, and the state of performance, that’s happening in ANTHEM, too, which I wasn’t aware of watching this thing early on.

The states or the ritual?

Both, I guess. And the connection between them in your work. I wasn’t thinking of ANTHEM as making ritual space in the way MASS did. Maybe it’s because of the social dance, too, which sort of launches ANTHEM. I’m not as familiar with that history, and how it may have a relationship to the more trained, contemporary dance. But there’s something that feels like extracting ritual from social dance, understanding that social space ultimately as ritual.

It’s definitely ritual. On a formalistic level, ritual for me is repetition. So I use a lot of repetition. I’ve been thinking about a variety of social dance forms. If you think about contra dancing or square dancing as white Americana Protestant sort of dance, which I don’t know a lot about, there’s something about it being a social gathering in a community setting that often is a pseudo-church or a church.

MASS was also looking at liturgical dancing, things very specific to a church. And then my relationship to folk dancing has that scenario. My family is from former Yugoslavia. They’re Serbian, and there’s this Serbian folk dance called Kolo. My parents were really involved in Serbian Orthodox church in Los Angeles. For them church was more about socially being around other Serbians. Then if you happen to be religious, great, you can go and be religious. But that folk dancing was huge. My dad would be dancing until the end of church festivities, the last one to leave. It was the only dancing that people did. And it’s repetitive and very patterned.

That’s the kind of social dance I was initially drawn to, and it has some ritualistic things. The other thing I’ll say about ritual in this piece: it’s maybe less ritual, and more about how ritual morphs into labor. And how ritual for a feminine body is about labor because of the effort to maintain, and in terms of the dance world, the effort to exist.

Also, it’s process based. There’s so much work that happens in making a dance that’s not seen, and it’s so time-consuming, in terms of having to rehearse in order to execute it. So there’s this ritual thing of rehearsal and warming up and that whole thing.

That all feeds into it. Chris Peck [collaborator, who made the music for ANTHEM] always talks about how there really needs to be access to church without the religious part. There’s so many things about why people are involved in church, that’s community oriented. And then the religion maybe mucks it up for some people. And maybe that’s why I make performances?

But there’s ritual that’s not clearly performed for other people. It’s a kind of ritual that’s still private.

I also love about this show that a lot of the richest experiences feel private to the performers. It’s nice to see people have that experience, and it makes sense that we don’t get to see it. But I don’t feel left out or alienated. It’s a space I have to imagine, that I can’t project on the performers. I need to project it for myself, and it’s connected to questions of identity, or sexuality, social performance, body, watching.

I think that the four-sided space of the work can demand or invite, not necessarily an equality between the spectator and the performer, but it has the effect of togetherness. And I am more interested in the perception of the dance, and the idea that no one can ever see the dance the same way, but I will try to let them see it the same way by having it rotate, and have that evolve into something else. The hypnotic nature of that. It’s a very controlled situation. And it’s the closest I can get to people participating and being up close to a dance without literally participating somehow.

But it’s really intense. There is this thing you can do when you perform on a traditional stage, where you can kind of hide. If you’re in a traditional theater set-up, there’s ways you can hide. Or you can even at least feel like the back of your body is hiding. Here it’s just so exposed.

Hearing you talk about MASS, it was beautiful, and it was also super funny. Your humor is part of why I responded so strongly. And everything you make is funny… Is that true?… I watched some things on Vimeo that were not so funny.

I’m wondering where that humor is learned. I wonder this generally. I had some clown people over to my house last weekend and we were watching YouTubes and talking about how we learn what’s funny. I’m wondering how you learn how to bring that into dance, if there’s a tradition of that, or if you watch like Chaplin or Keaton, or Lucy or… Eric Andre. It’s another thing I love about this show. The humor’s maybe not quite deadpan in ANTHEM, in the way it was in MASS. Something else is happening, too.

I feel like my humor, and humor in relation to myself, is so wrapped up in people’s perception of me. I’m a very serious person. And as much as I am serious, I am a total goofball, goober. There’s also something I know, that people think when they meet me, they think I have… My brother calls it “Resting Serbian face” or whatever, the “Resting bitch face”—which is so problematic with so many social codes.

In my life I’ve had people say, “Smile, you look mean.” And I’m like, “Fuck you.”

It has a lot to do with being a first generation kid, and how there is a certain perception of what I look like being a white woman, or the white girl growing up, and seeming like I should be like everybody else, but then also being off somehow. And how that creates a different dynamic. It creates this edging to marginality. People are like, “You’re not quite right in that fit.” And also growing up in an area that was simultaneously very diverse. Because then I was a white person in a very diverse setting, but I wasn’t white in the way that people are familiar with. I wouldn’t say this shapes into humor. But there’s just something about, “You think I’m like this, but really…” There’s a sort of black humor that comes from Serbians, that’s very specific.

I think all of that is also to say, as much as I am serious, and I love being serious, I also think it’s bullshit. It’s also being devil’s advocate for anything and everything, and being able to not take yourself too seriously. Being self-aware and creating self-awareness is important to me.

Dance is generally not funny. Dance training… there’s nothing funny in any dance training you do.

The humor in my work is a way to say, “Are you watching?” The humor’s a bit like, “Hello… You think you’re watching this? Hello…” It’s a little, “I know you think it’s this, but it’s also this, too.” The humor offers a certain type of access. I’m interested in making work that has room for that, but I hope it has room for other things too.

It can also be really sad, and funny things can be really, really dark.

I remember I was working on this solo in grad school and the director of the dance program, Sara Rudner, who’s really incredible and danced for Twyla Tharp, she was like, “You have to find Bill Irwin. You have to talk to Bill Irwin.” And I knew who Bill Irwin was and loved his work, but I was like, “Bill Irwin? I’m a dancer!” Of course he’s a dancer, too.

I feel like the humor, and also the content and form of the work, are tied together in that. It’s not trying to fulfill the codified expectation of dance. Somehow those things go hand in hand, now that I’m tracing it back.

Did you ever find Bill Irwin, though?

No, but he was in New York, I think he would have been down.

So you could have been a clown? If you had found Bill, then, it might have happened. Kind of a shame for clowns, but probably good for you, to have a career.

You know experimental dance is a way more lucrative field than clown.

You’re doing alright…

Oh my god.

Milka Djordjevich’s ANTHEM, performed by Laurel Atwell, Jessica Cook, Dorothy Dubrule and Devika Wickremesinghe, with music by Chris Peck, will have its World premiere October 11th-14th, 2017 at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater as part of the Los Angeles Exchange (LAX) Festival, 5th ed.

[jessemmanuel]

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Come see my shows "Witnessing Her" and "Decolonize That Mind" at 2pm today at the @bootlegtheater for the #LAXfestival @la_performancepractice ! Link in bio for ticket info (at Bootleg Theater)

[riting]

Stephanie Zaletel in conversation with Alana Reibstein

Stephanie Zaletel in conversation with Alana Reibstein

szalt (dance co.) is a collection of dancers, designers, and musicians led by Stephanie Zaletel, who have been generating and producing work in Los Angeles since 2012. I've been curious about her experiences as a generative artist coming up in LA, and wanted to check in on the back-end of their structure as they prepare for a new piece to emerge at this year's LAX festival.

AR: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about being an artist in Los Angeles because you’ve been making work here for a long time, and I’m pretty new here, so to me that is just really interesting.

SZ: Oh, cool.

AR: ...and amazing.

SZ: I’m pretty happy making work here in LA. I honestly can’t imagine making work anywhere else at this stage in my life. That said, when I’m in a process I don’t get to see work as much as I want. I either don’t have the time because I’m in a process, or I don’t have the mental space. I believe it’s vital for artists to support and learn from other artists, but I think sometimes it can be really challenging to create the space for that.

How do I show up and support, and also be fed by other artists, but then also have space set aside for my own energy and process later?

Right. Totally.

It’s hard.

It is hard. Of course seeing what other LA artists are doing is pretty vital to your own making.

Oh, and I love it! I love that people are making work. I love this. I want to be there. It is just not always possible. LA is a challenging landscape to maneuver.

Are there things that you feel you have to do to keep working here that you don’t really want to do? A thing that I don’t want to do as an artist, but feel like I have to do is Instagram. Which I don’t have right now, but know that that can be pretty vital. But I don’t know how to relate to it and how I would curate it in a way that feels right for my process and work. So I was wondering how you feel promotion and marketing and things like that interact with your process of making, developing and presenting, and what the process itself of curating those materials is like.

OK. Yeah, because szalt is such a small operation I really have to wear every hat-- fundraising, administration and media, creating the work, and getting the word out about who we are, teaching, etc. For a long time I was a bit resentful about all of that because I felt pulled in so many directions, especially administratively, writing so many e-mails and accumulating many stressors outside of the creative work. Fortunately this year I’m able to delegate a lot more within the company. This is pretty much the first year that we’re able to do that. I guess that I finally started to realize that we all have to wear many hats to make our work. It’s built-in, and it might just be built-into what it means to be a millennial artist in Los Angeles.

How else is anyone going to care that Stephanie Zaletel is making work unless I tell them who I am and why they should be looking. It took a while, but I also, like I said, I have help now. One of the dancers helps me organize all of the classes, workshops, and bookkeeping. And then I have another dancer who helps with media, or the newsletter, etc. We also rotate who teaches and leads company classes so we are constantly feeding and sharing with one another.

It’s just sort of like a schedule, like eating breakfast. Like okay 6 o’clock we’ll post this, great.

In the meantime I’ve become so grateful for social media platforms because I started to realize, oh my god, Instagram is a huge part of why so many people know who we are.

All these people start coming to shows and it’s like who are you, oh I found you on Instagram. So, I’m thinking, I’m definitely going to keep posting on Instagram! But it’s a constant grapple you know, because it’s not what I’m passionate about. I’m not a passionate administrator or a passionate social media expert.

But it also feels like that kind of moment of realizing, I have to tell people who I am, I feel like that could also be sort of exciting and legitimizing in a way that is useful. I don’t know, does doing that kind of work inform and make clear to you certain stuff about how you represent your company?

Yeah, definitely. It’s weird because it starts to have this bizarre effect where you really identify with what you’re posting. Or even like hashtags, where I’m like that hashtag is totally what I meant to talk about during the piece the other day but I didn’t think of it until now, so it starts to sort of feed who you are and the room.

I’m very grateful for all those platforms, and for the necessity to wear all the hats, because now it’s all built-in-- it’s all one thing, part of making work in this time.

And I imagine being able to do that has been pretty useful in securing tours and developing relationships with dance communities in other cities too?

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing because also you’re not always checking in with people via e-mail or phone. But if we visit a school in Seattle and a bunch of their students are still following the work, then we’re still in touch with them. Every day you’re in people's’ brains more, and you’re able to foster more personal relationships, even though it’s very distant. But I’m amazed at how broad of a network we’ve been able to cultivate just from this first year of touring.

So I’m interested in the tour and how working outside of LA feels for you and szalt as a company and collaborative community of artists. Does performing for a different audience, teaching workshops in unfamiliar studios, and just being together in a new city shape your relationships and how you guys work together?

Oh, yeah. Touring made it very clear what we offer, why what we’re doing is special. Because you’re away from everything that’s familiar and you’re sort of just relying on habit. What is our habit in the studio? What is our habit when we teach? What are our defaults? And we talk about everything.

Everyday we kind of debriefed, and it just became clearer and clearer what kind of dance company we want to be, what kind of energy we want to have in the room. What are we teaching people? Why are we teaching this to people, why are we bringing this piece to this place? It just became very clear. I felt very close to all of them.

Another wonderful thing that just happens when you travel is you realize how warm people are. You know? I felt so supported everywhere we went. It’s a really refreshing experience, and then when we come home we come back with this really clear sense of entity, like what we are.

I’m interested in the idea of company “habits.”Could you describe what some of those habits are and are they things that you found “positive” or were you sometimes like, oh this is something we do in LA, and we should adjust to this new community and environment?

Generally it is very positive. The kind of work that I’m interested in with szalt is creating a safe environment for people to really explore clarity without judgement. I really believe that you can facilitate very strong, high quality movement and movement research, but in a warm, supportive way where there’s plenty of time and information, and you have space to try things on your own and talk about things, and say whatever comes to mind, and delete any unconscious judgement, or whatever. And it’s really difficult to work that way. And it’s not always immediately "successful".

Part of the work is having it fail. But when we teach in other places it’s even more clear what our intentions are. I think in LA sometimes we can get in a rhythm of how we teach class, cool, but then when you have to really explain to people who’ve never met you how to approach what we’re doing, or after they see the work and they want to talk about it, it’s like oh, okay, that’s what I was trying to do, great. We are constantly growing and always trying to be mindful of energy and what we might be wearing on top of the dance that might affect the room.

Yeah. It’s so special that you’ve been working so consistently with such devoted artists and collaborators. For me that kind of commitment implies that every dancer and collaborator you work with feels and enacts their individual agencies within the collective, and I think that’s a hard thing to achieve and to cultivate as a leader, so that’s really great.

Thank you. I am very grateful for my team.

That’s not a question, but a closing thought. You’ve had company members with you for a long time right, 2012, a couple of them?

Well two of them I graduated from CalArts with, and then I think the others joined like two or three years ago, and then we have one brand new woman joining us for this premiere which I’m really excited about.

I really appreciate that it’s definitely a constant conversation. We have to make sure we’re always respecting each other, that everyone feels valued, and at the same time prioritizing the work that needs to be made.

szalt’s Marshmallow Sea will have its Los Angeles premiere October 6th-8th, 2017 at the Bootleg Theater as part of the Los Angeles Exchange (LAX) Festival, 5th ed.

[jessemmanuel]

// in the studio with the lovely @thinkwithreach // . Anna B. Scott's The Bliss Point: Hogsheads & Sugarloaves presented as a part of Human Stages + LAX FESTIVAL . Human Stages // No)one Art House + Amie Cota and Anna B. Scott // curated by @jessemmanuel_ OCT 8th 7pm @bootlegtheater @humanstages . #laxfestival (at Bootleg Theater)

[jessemmanuel]

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🎶Turn up the audio🎶 Snippet from rehearsal at @we_live_in_space with @chrisemile & @cotamusic for "Any Place But Here" presented by @humanstages & @los_performancepractice. Catch the performance at the #LAXfestival October 8th (one night only) at The @bootlegtheater Link in bio HumanStages.com (at Show Box L.A./we live in space)