Summer Happenings Festival: Composure

“Lichen Baby…It’s Me Moss” entangles dual research threads looking at lichen’s symbiosis and moss’s natural structure to find poetics of being. Engaging multiple modes such as paper works, sound scores, scripted and movement based performance, and histories of scenic painting to create portals for consideration of these unlikely philosophers. These works combine to create a nuanced multi-layer world, giving the receiver multiple ways to enter and process the work’s journey. As an organizer with a deep community practice this approach allows the artist to engage more abstractly, addressing the spiritual and ephemeral thicket of being. Avoiding the illustrative, allowing the seepage of subjects and methodologies between forms which bleed onto each other, following the score of the nature research as guide. Approaching performance as exhibit, and exhibition as performance here the bodily experience, layers nuance of the witnessable and the experiential, the fleeting and the liveness, all held in the materials.Constantly faced with what it means to hold and translate what cannot be replicated, pushing in practice to meet the cumulative research and consideration that takes place in a studio. A painting worn while reading poems, laid under while drawing with tools intended for burning, each act bleeds onto the next. Recent works sit with the personal and with research, materials, and ever-compounding time, extracting meaning that oozes beneath a new process for an old problem; I am too many, I am only me.

In the durational performance the money is in the blades, Asia Stewart will spray and lather shaving cream onto a mounted U.S. flag and cut its fabric into dozens of pieces with disposable Gillette razors. Her actions not only magnify the ritualized performance of shaving, but also directly connect the ubiquity of razors to the United States’ conduct of war. After learning that The Gillette Company’s expansion in the twentieth century was largely buoyed by its role in World War I and partnership with the U.S. government, Stewart felt a desire to recast the everyday object of a razor as an oft-overlooked tool of the military industrial complex. Here, Stewart uses that same item to gleefully tear at the seams of a national symbol and destroy it.

Like a Fugue (working title) is an obsession with movement languages—both everyday and performative—that are layered with propaganda intentions. Tuning into the trained body of a dancer shaped by Chinese Classical Dance, the work takes the literal sounds of muscles and joints, excavating what has been internalized through repetition and discipline. It also draws attention to the comfort found in familiarity—the seductive safety of repetition—and the moments of emotional failure, grief, or awkwardness that emerge in the process of unlearning. Like a Fugue is a playful investigation into the body as a living archive, asking how embedded memories guide our movements, and how choreography becomes a site of both obedience and resistance.

Revealing the powerful and painful intersections between twinship, blackness, madness, and art-making, UPSTAIRS, IN OUR BEDROOM is a multimedia dance performance that radically reimagines Same As Sister’s dual autobiography next to the true story of the Caribbean-British outsider artists, June and Jennifer Gibbons (a.k.a. ‘The Silent Twins’).

I run a mile and she talks to you about it. We take 8 minutes and 44 seconds together to think about time while she runs. It passes. Life going nowhere. Somebody help me. Yeah. 

8:44 is a manic meditation on time, mortality, motherhood and the Bee Gees. It’s also a guided walking tour. Bring your headphones.

A deflated drowning worm on the ground for a while… lol…

Providential Stranger is an environment for encounters, weaving threads of collective shame, rage, joy, and ecstasy. Without rituals of recollection can a community ever form a cohesive sense of identity? The work scrambles the visual archive with the aural, the spoken with the tactile, retrieval with decomposition. Drawing inspiration from the work of Sophie Calle, Hervé Guibert, and a host of anonymous authors, a providential stanger guides visitors through an ever-evolving space that acts as an extended archive and a mirror in which to etch our reflections.

Brood 19 is a live sound performance that combines noise, Buddhist liturgical singing, and field recordings to create a shifting sonic landscape that questions and complicates the polarities of clarity and chaos. Glenn and evan utilize no input mixing, deconstructed Shomyo singing, and extended techniques to build feedback, distortion, and tonal decay.

I run a mile and she talks to you about it. We take 8 minutes and 44 seconds together to think about time while she runs. It passes. Life going nowhere. Somebody help me. Yeah. 

8:44 is a manic meditation on time, mortality, motherhood and the Bee Gees. It’s also a guided walking tour. Bring your headphones.

This is a solo performance work in process, acting as a kind of prelude to a group work by evan called “plot hole” that will be presented in early November and probably be very different from this. plot hole draws from an interest in the internet and liminal spaces, what it means to inhabit a body in the face of information overload. It questions the neutrality of digital culture and follows surreal dream logic as a mode of speculative meaning-making.

The Summer Happenings Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DLCA).