#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

[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 [email protected]

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]

Gina Young on Sara Lyons: I’M VERY INTO YOU

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Sara’s piece, I’M VERY INTO YOU, opens on October 13th, 2018, at Think Tank Gallery in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs till October 21st. Details can be found here.

In August of 1995, Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark had a passionate three-day encounter in a hotel room in Sydney. The emails that ensued between them were hot, heady, and fraught with gender play and power dynamics, self-consciousness and intellectual foreplay.

Director Sara Lyons has adapted I’m Very Into You, the book of Kathy and McKenzie’s emails, into a performance project that runs at the LAX Festival from Oct 13-21 at Think Tank Gallery. Part archival and part performative, I’m Very Into You will be performed by a cast of eight local artists, of which I’m lucky to be a part; few of whom have an easily identifiable gender, most of whom identify as many, multi and complexly gendered, and all of whom Sara believes can embody the queer maelstrom that is Kathy and Ken.

“I’ve been working on this piece for two and a half years now, through many iterations,” says Sara. “It emerged because I stumbled upon this published correspondence in a bookstore by chance... and was kind of slapped in the face by it. There’s so much feeling and emotion in what they’re writing... and they really capture something that feels connected to my own lineage as a person and as an artist: an early moment of reckoning with technology and ideas and desire and genderqueerness. I’d never felt that articulated so well in a text that I’d picked up before. I thought, I have to make something out of this, because I can’t stop thinking about it.”

What evolved started as a realistic two hander, adapted with the blessing of McKenzie Wark and Matias Viegener, the executor of Kathy’s estate. (Kathy passed away from breast cancer in 1997). But while a more realistic adaptation was sexy, it seemed ill-suited to Kathy’s legacy. Sara says “compared to Kathy’s formal progressiveness and how violently she attacked conventional form in her writing, it felt almost regressive [to stage it that way] in a dramatic context.”

So in February 2018 at OUTsider Fest in Austin, Sara debuted the piece in a new form. “This isn’t a bio[graphical] play, so putting [Kathy and Ken] on multiple bodies and letting them live in multiplicities felt right. It’s not a polished, beginning-middle-end theater experience, and the performers contribute their own writing and kind of coauthor the piece.”

Sara collaged excerpts from Kathy and Ken’s email correspondence (apropos given that Kathy is so well known for collaging and appropriating canonical works) together with narratives from the performers’ own lives in a “quick and dirty” rehearsal process, just asking that the actors bring themselves to the text. The cast in Los Angeles comes from varied backgrounds in theatre, spoken word and performance, and includes Paul Outlaw, Jer Adrienne Lelliott, Provvidenza Catalano and Rabbi Robin Podolsky.

“I want to bring queer and feminist-identified people from all generations together in this cast,” Sara continues, “Age diversity was a priority in casting, and folks who express themselves differently in terms of gender.” This liquidity is essential to the piece: “Kathy and Ken are working out their own genderqueerness in relation to each other. Ken now uses they/them pronouns, which is a concept that wasn’t really available at the time [of the emails.] Kathy was even writing about [gender fluidity] in the 70s; concepts that are only just coming into the mainstream now.”

In rehearsing with Sara, who also uses they/them pronouns in addition to she/her, we as a cast have already bumped up against the constantly shifting landscape of language in the queer community, and discussed how our perception of our own identities has changed as a result of evolving new language finally catching up with long-held feelings.

“The project is also about queering time; absorbing and acknowledging and centering a queer legacy that doesn’t necessarily follow the historicized narrative of culture and identity in America. To acknowledge the ways that different kinds of past and future selves resonate in our bodies in ways that are not necessarily bullet points in a timeline,” says Sara

The heart of the work is romantic: what Kathy and Ken exchange is evocative like old school letter-writing. But it’s also about the development of the internet, and the relationship between queerness and the internet. Sara says, “How do the internet and technology play out inside of our relationships and in these spaces? People say, ‘They ruin our relationships!’ but it’s actually just a structure of relation, a technology, a tool.”

The internet was uncharted territory in the 90s. We didn’t know what the rules were, and we were often making them up as we went. With the inaccessibility and disappearance of real life queer spaces, online spaces continue to hold a special importance for queer people. While laughing that in some ways I’m Very Into You is “a rom com for nerdy queers,” Sara also acknowledges very sincerely that, “Part of the goal of the project is to honor Kathy Acker and help to pump her legacy and her work and her iconography back into the culture.”

More than 20 years after her death, the culture might finally be ready.

Gina Young is a playwright, director and performer living in Downtown Los Angeles. She is the creator of SORORITY, a performance hub for queer and feminist work, and her plays, musicals and curations have been presented by The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Highways, Los Angeles Performance Practice's LAX Festival, USC’s Visions & Voices Series and the Women’s Center for Creative Work. Gina is a winner of the Jane Chambers Award for Playwriting, a Finalist for Center Theatre Group's Richard E. Sherwood Award, and a winner of the HUMANITAS/PLAY LA Prize.

Sara Lyons is a director and adapter working across performance disciplines. She seeks to explode convention in form and politic, creating work that is critically embodied around questions of gender, sexuality, race, and contemporary technology. She works frequently in adaptation, social engagement, and new media and has presented original work across New York City, Los Angeles, and internationally.

Photos by Sara Lyons and Rolando Sepulveda II/OUTsider