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Fredo’s Program Notes #COIL16: Confirmation

For a more enhanced experience, PS122 has committed to commissioning program notes for each major production. We’re hoping that through these writings we can provide a deeper connection to the ideas that are prevalent throughout the work or the artist’s body of work and how these ideas relate to contemporary issues permeating throughout society. Our goal is to foster dialogue so if you feel compelled to share your thoughts, leave a comment.

Program Notes for COIL 2016: Confirmation by Chris Thorpe & Rachel Chavkin
Notes written by Rachel Chavkin

“A lot of politics is about telling people who they are” – note from a discussion with Professor Mark Harrison University of Warwick Economics Department

We began with the basics: the biology behind the bias, how it functions in the world in areas ranging from journalism to scientific research, and the challenge of spotting it in oneself. Underneath the investigation lay Chris’ wrestling with the atrocities Anders Breivik committed in Norway in 2011. He was wondering if Breivik had felt heard by the world, would he have done what he did? We wanted to know if it is possible to truly listen to an opposing point of view. And what might be broken or healed in the process of trying.

I came across Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow just after it had been released, and Chris met with a number of academics at Warwick University, working in fields ranging from psychology to economics. He was directed to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Both books posit this image of the mind as “the rider and the elephant.” As much as we’d like to believe our decision making process is rational or conscious, most cognitive psychology research has proven that David Hume was correct when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” The conscious level of our thinking exists largely to justify or rationalize what the subconscious decided many, many nanoseconds ago.

Over Skype and periodically in person (at Warwick Arts Centre, in New Haven, etc.), Chris and I talked about the narratives that liberals hold onto, particularly the belief that if someone is educated and cared for on personal and societal levels, then they will naturally be liberal. Chris began looking for someone with opposing political beliefs whose external profile matched his own: white male, British, educated, middle class. He vanished down rabbit holes of online comments and white supremacist websites, went to conservative political meetings, and all this finally brought him to “Glen,” our generous partner on this work. Glen and Chris began to talk via Skype, and ultimately carried on their conversation for over 8 months. I gave writing prompts and Chris used those to synthesize the research into material. Confirmation is the result.

PS122 + Yehuda Duenyas are moving into the future.

PS122 is incredibly proud to report that, in collaboration with artist Yehuda Duenyas, we’ve received a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Implementation grant for the Building Demand for the Arts program. This program supports partnerships between artists and arts organizations focused on using the performing arts in unique ways to develop meaningful connections.

“We believe that strong, creative partnerships between artists and organizations have the potential to nurture a public that is deeply invested in and understanding of the way the performing arts enriches it,” said Cheryl Ikemiya, senior program officer for the Arts at DDCF. “We are delighted to support this outstanding cohort of grantees and are confident that they will act upon this shared belief and engage their communities in bold and unconventional ways.” Read the full press release from Doris Duke.

Here at PS122, we’re partnering with director, technology designer and long time PS122 artist Yehuda Duenyas to work on the development of our virtual programming series. As Yehuda describes it, “I see this series as an emerging hybrid art-form made with the bones of live performance, the nervous system of new media and interactive technology, and a mind devoted to connecting humans to one another.”

Here’s a bit of Yehuda’s recent work with the Ad Council:

Needless to say, we’re excited by the possibilities.

Fredo’s Program Notes #COIL16: The Holler Sessions

Program Notes for COIL 2016: The Holler Sessions by Frank Boyd
Epiphanies in Real Time by Brendan Kiley

Lovers of art and performance—and, when it comes down to it, lovers in general—know the thrill of discovery. It’s an ineffable and electric feeling to realize you’re on the verge of some new wonder: The lights dim (usually), the event begins, and after a few minutes you realize you’re already leaning forward in your seat, beginning to glimpse the contours of some beautiful phenomenon you never knew existed.

That visceral experience is rare—but it’s even rarer for it to be viscerally dramatized.

The Holler Sessions is, in its first few minutes, just a slice of a DJ’s workaday life. He makes coffee, waters plants, sits in the booth, plays records, and talks into the vacuum of a radio-station microphone. But solo performer Frank Boyd brings something wholly apart from the usual, sleepy persona of most jazz DJs in most cities—he’s a volcanically enthusiastic neophyte, not a cognoscenti snob. The pathos, exuberance, and intricacies of jazz are giving him epiphanies in real time. And we get to be there.

The marvel of The Holler Sessions is watching a person who’s marveling. He rhapsodizes while telling the story of Louis Armstrong getting his first cornet as a kid delivering coal to New Orleans brothels. When he hears a favorite jazz solo, he sits back in his chair and throws a towel—which he normally wears around his neck—over his head, too awe-struck to speak. At one point in the show, he slogs through the day’s newspaper, summarizing its contents for his invisible radio audience while Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges’s “Basin Street Blues” plays in the background.

In the Seattle performance at On the Boards, he consulted a USA Today: “The Dow is down … Sports—who cares? … There’s nothing here!” Suddenly, energized by a few notes from a horn, he sat upright, backed the song up to the 5:50 mark, and became a verbose lightning rod for Harry “Sweets” Edison’s trumpet solo that begins quietly and unassumingly, then builds to a clarion call, then falls back into a humble virtuosity. That, to our DJ guide, is the real news.

“This should be our national anthem!” he shouted, stabbing the air. “Fuck this Francis Scott Key bullshit! This is us! It feels like us! This should be playing before every ball game! We should all learn the chord progressions in kindergarten! Everybody can plunk along on something!” He was right, of course, but he—like we—realizes he lives in an imperfect world. Then he threw that towel over his head, overwhelmed.

The Holler Sessions is also semi-autobiographical. When I interviewed him in Seattle, Boyd said that he used to think of jazz as little more than sonic wallpaper. (I know a successful young woman in New York who says she refuses to sleep with any man who has her over to his apartment and puts on a jazz record—she thinks it’s a sign of aesthetic laziness.) But then Boyd started to really listen to the music, and research it, and had his own epiphanies. “To disregard this music or not encounter it is a huge opportunity that’s lost for self-discovery,” he said. “There’s something here that I need, and I don’t know what that is yet. But it’s important.”

Watching a person realize something is important but not knowing what that importance is—that’s The Holler Sessions. It is, at its root, the lucky experience of watching someone fall in love.

Fredo’s Program Notes #COIL16: bewilderment and other queer lions

Program Notes for COIL 2016: bewilderment and other queer lions by Samita Sinha
Written by Anand Balakrishnan

Somewhere near the halfway mark of Samita Sinha’s solo performance, Cipher, the Indian-American artist occupied the body of an old woman. Squatting back on her heels, slowly turning amid a spartan stage, she half-sang, half-muttered a song in a language I could not understand. The melody could have been drawn from any number of the knotty genealogies Sinha traces, disentangles, and rebraids: the melismatic abstractions of North Indian classical music, the metaphysical riddles of Bengali folk song, the wry lyricism of the blues. The character herself might be from anywhere: South Asian myth, French feminism, her family, or sprung from imagination alone. The affect was achingly enigmatic: was this a love song? A lullaby? A lament? When the song ended, Sinha rose, paused for a time, and then moved again to occupy another character, with another song. And so it continued: a sequential conjuring of aural worlds, separated by moments of silence that invited us to reflect.

Or to explain, noisily. That night, after the performance, I tried to describe Cipher to my mom. My mother is, like many of her class and generation, a dedicated if amateur student of the Carnatic music, the classical music of South India. She is also religious. Her religiosity is at once a source of community, of strength, and of spirituality; a ritual practice; and an object of intense scholarly inquiry. I once accompanied her to the Hindu temples of Khajuraho, famed for their flagrantly erotic statuary. There, standing beside her, I experienced a painful sense of eternity as she explained how the endless series of intertwined stone bodies in fact represented basic forms of geometry that mirrored philosophical concepts of infinity, the universe, and man’s place in the world. What was necessary, she insisted, was to understand the sculptures as exemplars of an artistic and intellectual tradition dedicated to the contemplation of being — and not be distracted, like an outsider, by the profane exteriors.

On the phone, my mom asked whether Cipher was “fusion music.” I felt the sharp edge of disdain. Fusion was the enemy. Fusion was a sitar in a pop song, the Devi on a t-shirt, group tours to the Kumbh Mela. Yes and no, I said. I tried to explain: this was a fusion that came from working inside traditions not a simple borrowing of surfaces. Sinha began by ripping ragas brutally apart into ragged phonemes. She then adopted different personae — women in different phases of life — and reassembled these basic sounds into new songs, each coming from a new place inside her body, such that emotion and melody were grounded in physicality. By the end, when the blues slipped seamlessly and eerily into her performance, it was less a collage than a distillation of both sources, American and Indian, and their transmutation into something else.

Thinking back, I should have also reminded my mom of a moment from our trip to Khajuraho: near where we stood, beneath the copulating sky, a man sat alone and sang, accompanied only by the slap of his hand against the skin of his thigh. He looked middle-aged and slightly mad; though he was loud, he was singing only for himself. My mom explained this quite crisply, as well. His was a folk song — a blues, basically, about a woman who was gone — but these songs of lust and desire were in fact songs about devotion to God. She turned back to her exegesis of the cosmic mathematics of tantric sex.

Maybe that man was a version of the Bawl singers of Bengal, whose poetry appears in bewilderment and other queer lions, Sinha’s latest work. Maybe this was his life: wandering through the margins of religion and of society, singing mournful songs of desire and devotion. Or maybe, after my mom and I made our way back to the hotel to get a cool drink and read the newspaper, he got up and retreated to a moderately air conditioned office. And maybe, like us, he carried with him a memory of the moment we’d spent together: my mom, of contemplating the structures of her belief and sharing them with her son; the man, of the feeling of release, of letting his voice free to follow a song learned long, long ago from someone else; and me, of the sound of the man’s voice, which seemed to come clawing directly from his chest into the world as a desperate, yearning, unmediated rasp.

Fredo’s Program Notes #COIL16: Panopticon

Program Notes for COIL 2016: Panopticon by Jillian Peña
Written by Katherine Brewer Ball, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Wesleyan
University

Jillian Peña is the love child of The Parent Trap’s twin sisters, Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills. Put another way, Peña’s work is simultaneously perverse, adorable, and demanding. From the dance video triptych, More Than Love (2006), starring up to twenty versions of Peña in one frame, to the rigorous balletic child’s play in Polly Pocket (2014), Peña’s dance is filmic; bodies are edited and choreographed together to create mirroring alignments like the low-fi Brechtian movie magic of Hayley Mills’s mesmerizing debut. Beige and pink spandex covers Peña’s twins, triplets, or quadruplets who inevitably star in every piece. “Like dancers,” Hilton Als writes, “none of us gets over that figure we see in the practice mirror: ourselves. Choosing your twin gives you that reflection forever— or as long as it lasts.” This moment of self-recognition—which Als attaches to queer desire, to a need for an “us,” to a wanting we call twinning—is where Peña is stuck. But she’s stuck on it like she’s sweet on it. Watching Peña’s performances, I am reminded of the deep pleasure of the mimetic, of seeing a look and putting it on your body, of hearing a sound and putting it in my mouth, of moving in step on a sidewalk with a twin who is also a lover. Extending the stage of the practice mirror, Peña asks her audience to sit with the uncanny pleasure of the multiple, a pleasure with deep roots in the history of dance, from the Tiller Girls to the Rockettes.

In The Guiding Light (2012), I watched dancer Cassie Mey’s body multiply into other dancers as the screen behind her cut and echoed the twinning figures. I remember Mey holding her body in an impossible position for the entire show; it could have been that she was on her toes the entire time, moving in tiny steps across the floor, making me feel ballet’s visceral impossibility, its laborious desire to masochistically match. While Peña’s performance pitch does not vibrate right into the audience’s face, it does demand their full attention. She shows us that looking isn’t so sweet: to look is to see a mirror reflection of a virtuosic ballerina, and it is means of cutting or controlling the bodies upon which the gaze rests. Thinking with Michel Foucault’s theory of the panopticon, I wonder what it means for a dancer’s body to be visually available, to be a sickly sweet pocket-sized object for consumption. As Foucault observes in Discipline and Punish, “Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness . Visibility is a trap.” Peña isn’t giving us an answer to the uneven power dynamic of looking, but she catches us in it like a fly in a glue trap, like twins in a parent trap. Bringing onto the stage a queer twinning of children that never want to grow up, Peña’s dancing bodies are everywhere in the flesh and celluloid of her work. But instead of her dances simply giving over to the surveillance and mastery of ordered ballet bodies, Peña’s multiples continue to repeat until we lose the desire for an original singular figure. This cacophony of looking produces a momentary pleasure of plurality, of Narcissus’s excess, on a stage that is both a mirror and a come on.