First person accounts of performances I've never seen (Pt 2)

Part 2 of my three-part series of performative writings in which I adopt an imaginary time traveling avatar self in order to witness the “intimacies” that I imagine generated in participatory performances that I have never seen, is now live at The Present Tense!  Though fictional, this account is based on research, and includes quotes taken from a paper by the artist, Helen Paris.  Here's a little taste:

I turn off my phone and reach for the metal.  I feel a gentle shock and see a faint blue spark reaching for me.  I saw one of these as a kid, I think.  At a science museum or fair. I remember reaching for it with fingers sticky from candy, Mom telling me not to touch or I’d get it dirty.  I hover my fingers just off the surface, a blue string of electricity dancing between me and the apparatus.  My hair stands on end.  On the platform there is note:

Egyptians believed that the third finger of the left hand follows the vena amoris, the vein of love that runs directly to the heart.  A direct “digital” blood flow.

I imagine this blue flame swimming up my inner arm and through my coronary arteries.  I shiver and pull my hand away.  

(Read more)

First person accounts of performances I've never seen (Pt 1)

I was recently invited by Boston-based online archive and performance project The Present Tense to publish three short pieces of performative writing in which I adopt a fictitious self who can travels through time to witness, through a leap of imagination, three participatory performances that I have never, and will never, see. These accounts are fictional, but based in rigorous research.  The first piece, on Julie Tolentino's For You (2003), is up now at thepresenttense.org.  Here's an excerpt:

As I enter the room, Tolentino lies on a bed, swathed in white sheeting. A small lamp casts a pool of pinkish light her feet. Next to the bed, a plastic chair. I flash momentarily to a hospital scene, a sick ward, a maternity ward. I smell the plastic of the curtain, the chair. Quietly, respectfully, I take the seat next to the bed. The seat of care, I think.

She lies with her back to me. She does not speak. She lies still, breathes, occasionally shifts or moves a bit, never leaving the bed, subtle adjustments, as if she’s listening to me, for several minutes. Eventually…

She performs. And it is for me.

(Read more)

Rafa Esparza on violence and performance in LA and Mexico

L.A. based artist Rafa Esparza, my dear friend and collaborator in the L.A. River encounter I organized in May 2013, recently published a wonderful piece of writing reflecting on violence, memory, and performance as part of a transnational, transdisciplinary project called The War on Both Sides/La guerra de los dos lados that looks at the impact of drug related violence on the lives of Mexicans and Americans, on both sides of the border.

As part of his reflection, Rafa had this to say about our L.A. River performance:

rafa-river3.jpg

When I arrived at my apartment I lay down next to my boyfriend and rested briefly. Our friend Allison Wyper had scheduled an encounter in the L.A. River with a group of fellow artists, part of an international project where artists in different countries performed in highly contested sites. Allison invited us all to take part in this through a "site responsive encounter."

The idea was to go to the river, address the space, and respond by performing. The loose format involved some improvisation, spontaneity, and above all sustaining a strong sense of awareness. Allison suggested that we bring objects to experiment with. I waited until the final five minutes before leaving home to grab a couple of items: a five gallon bucket and a large piece of plastic painter's drop cloth.

The L.A. River is a familiar place to me. One of my first performances years ago was on the 6th street bridge connecting Boyle Heights to Downtown L.A. As I unfolded the plastic sheet, a gust of wind came and opened it up like a sail. I played with it for a while before tying each end of it to the handle of the bucket. I walked into the middle of the river and set the bucket down on its side. I sandwiched myself in the crevice of the folding plastic that slowly began to hug my body as the water carried the bucket away. The bucket tugged at me, at times with surprisingly strength and violence; at other times it barely pulled at all.

I shifted my body within the plastic from time to time. Sometimes I faced outwards and rested the full weight of the pull on my face; I could barely make out a milky image of what was on the other side of the less-than-1-millimeter thick sheet of plastic. While tucked in-between the plastic I thought of what the river meant to me, how it acted, what it was and is. In this meditation of meaning, questioning, hypothesizing, imagining, a movement emerged in my body. I started by loosening limbs, letting the current pull them, drag them, and just as I would begin to feel unbalanced I'd straighten back up.

My head, 
a foot, 
an arm, 
a thigh, 
a hand, 
a shoulder.

How many things has this river pulled down to the ocean?

 

Muchas gracias, querido.

Best 2 minutes of 2014 (so far)!

I had a BLAST performing my piece TWO MINUTES HATE at 100 Performances for the Hole at SOMArts in San Francisco, at the invitation of friend and curator Justin Charles Hoover.

(24 foam pool noodles + two minute Pussy Riot song + audience participation = Two Minutes Hate)

This  8-HOUR MINI-PERFOMANCE MARATHON drew one of the largest crowds I've ever seen at a performance art event (I heard something like 800 people attended), and involved 2-minute pieces from over 150 artists from the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Berlin, and beyond.  An amazing night!

(photos by J. Astra Brinkmann)

Tickets available for '100 Performances for the Hole' in SF

I'm excited to reprise my piece "Two Minutes Hate" for the next 100 Performances for the Hole, Saturday January 4th, 2014, at SOMArts in San Francisco, curated by Justin Hoover.  The piece was a "hit" at PSi this summer... (See what I did there...? ;-)

$12 tickets are available now at www.somarts.org/100performances/.

Audience members work out their "repressed rage" with foam pool noodles. Performance Studies International #19, Stanford University, June 2013.

New solo premiered in Boston!

Just got back to LA following a whirlwind week in my former home, Boston, Massachusetts, where I premiered a new solo project titled Intimate Performances at Mobius art space in Cambridge.  My dear friend (and sometimes-collaborator) Alissa Cardone joined me for a hooded duet action at the end, that was originally developed with LA-based dancer Rebeca Hernandez as The Lovers (After Magritte), for Confusion is Sex #3.  I received a very warm response from the local performance community, and followed two nights of performance with a two-day intensive In.To.Me.See one-on-one performance workshop, also hosted by Mobius.

While in town, I was invited to guest teach a class called Living Art in Real Space, and give a lecture on my work at Emerson College (my alma mater).  I was deeply moved to be invited by Professor Mirta Tocci to teach Living Art, a class I took in 2001 as an Emerson undergrad, which had a profound influence on the trajectory of my career.  I also met some amazing students and witnessed some profound studies they made in response to my prompt: "Make a one-on-one performance that is a Gift for that person only."  I can't wait to return!

More on this piece here.

photo by Margaret Bellafiore