TransAmerica Pyramid, San Francisco
Transamerica Pyramid
San Francisco
Heterogenous Spectacles
Trans America
crusing through Paradise
Solipsism in a car window while waiting in the Mission….
I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle cruising through Paradise.
Cruising Paradise
SFMOMA Closing Celebration
SFMOMA Closing Celebration: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art threw a four day party for itself before temporarily closing their doors to the public for two-and-a-half years of construction on the museum’s major expansion project.
Ava at Fort Point
Ava Roy San Francisco We Players
The mystical structure, with its perfect amalgam of delicacy and power, exerts an uncanny effect. Its efficiency cannot conceal the artistry. There is heart there, and soul. It is an object to be contemplated for hours.
Herb Caen, May 1987
Ann Carlson’s The Symphonic Body
Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall
The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are individual dances, custom made for each person, choreographed from the movements they already do. The particular choreographed gestures themselves become part of a larger movement tapestry within each performer and within the piece as a whole. By engaging with this performance practice members of the Stanford community come together in concert to expand, renew and re-experience the artistry embedded in the everyday.
Franconia Performance Salon #7
Franconia Performance Salon #7: featured performances from Ryan Tacata, Angrette McCloskey, Kellen Hoxworth, Jamie Lyons, and Tonyanna Borkovi.
The idea behind the Franconia Performance Salon is to share sketches or segments of works in progress; drink some wine, and talk about the work. Don’t come expecting a “show” but rather a piece of something in process that you can respond to with feedback.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Gertrude Stein
The dreams of youth grow dim
Solipsism on a boat: Ava‘s sailboat Ingwe…. And a sweater, the best one I ever had, that I miss dearly.
The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life? What follows is not a blueprint for the man entombed; not many people find themselves in a situation paying a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year (as if any man is worth that much). But the struggle is relative: it’s a lot hard to walk away from an income like that than from a fraction thereof.
Sterling Hayden, Wanderer, 1963
Ingwe Haul Out
Sailboat Haul Out: Ava Roy’s Ingwe at the Berkeley Marina
If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up the men to gather wood,
divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…
Antoine de Saint Exupery
Hunters Point Billboard
You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
Banksy
Franconia Performance Salon #6
Franconia Performance Salon #6 included a piece by Martin Shwartz, a live music set by Meghan Dunn, and a large-scale hair choreo-poem by Michael Hunter.
Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.
Gertrude Stein
Mission San Juan Bautista
SCOTTIE
No, no, I have to tell you about Madeleine now. Right there, we stood there and I kissed her for the last time. And she said, ‘If you lose me, you’ll know that I loved you and wanted to keep on loving you.’ And I said, ‘I won’t lose you.’ But I did. And then she turned and ran into the church…and when I followed her, it was too late.
Scottie pulls Judy into the church.
JUDY
I don’t want to go in there.
They begin climbing the tower’s steps.
Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, Virtigo, dir. Alfred Hitchcook (1958)
Mission San Juan Bautista
Easter Sunrise
Guillermo Gomez-Peña
Guillermo Gomez-Peña at the Performance Art Institute
“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing positionalities and identities. In this border zone, the distance between “us” and “them,” self and other, art and life, becomes blurry and unspecific.”
Guillermo Gomez-Peña
Building Score 101b
Allan Kaprow, Notes on the Creation of a Total Art
For instance, if we join a literal space and a painted space, and these two spaces to a sound, we achieve the “right” relationship by considering each component a quantity and quality on an imaginary scale. So much of such and such color is juxtaposed to so much of this or that type of sound. The “balance” (if one wants to call it that) is primarily an environmental one.
Whether it is art depends on how deeply involved we become with elements of the whole and how fresh these elements are (as though they were “natural,” like the sudden fluttering by of the butterfly) when they occur next to one another.
Angrette McCloskey’s Building Score 101B
at the Performance Art Institute
notes on live art and video
audiences witness this performance
three different ways
1. as the actors work in their presence
2. as a complex of live video images
captured and displayed on walls
in an apparently seamless connection
with the actors
3. and as video images
recorded prior to the performance
and played during the performance
the pre-recorded narrative video
functions essentially as cinema
or at least I intend it to be
a film-within-the peformance
audiences respond to video images
differently than they would
if the body of the actor
were not in their immediate presence
and they respond to the body of the actor
differently because that material body
dispersed in some way into the video images
sound is amplified and altered
through the use of wireless microphones
processed through a sound mixer
this component of the performance
integrates the physical and the technological
the aesthetic consequence
relates the body of the actor
to its technologically produced image
captured in the video
what occurs is an impossible
fragmentation of the body of the actors
that is distributed among media…
a. the conventional theatrical media of immediate presence
(actor sharing the same space as spectator)
b. the actor as video image
both in live mixed video
and in the pre-recorded video
c. the actor as the sound source
for the speakers projecting voice
this distribution
accomplishes at least two antithetical strategies
such fragmentation accentuates
a perception that the characters the actors perform
is a theatrical image –a representation and aesthetic construction
because that character is subject
to being represented in different media
the spectator disconnects the character
from the body of the actor
views the character more as a fabrication
formed by acting within the space
as an object caught in moment of performance on video
and a sound produced technologically
the mediatizing of the actor/character
authenticates or validates the live actor/character
countering the perception of the figure
as an aesthetic representation
by equating the figure to the omnipresent series of figures
seen in everyday life in ceaseless display on screens
this media validation is not a humanizing authentication
rather it is a leveling process
where the perception of the everyday functions
as a perception of images
in which the everyday becomes interchangeable
with the fictive
repetition
when live theatre incorporates
immediate performance
and the re-play of video material
(material created earlier)
audiences are forced to recognize
that the immediate event
the live performance
is in more than one instance
a reenactment
a recovery
a recuperation
a repetition of work
created in the past
theatrical performance is invariably
the reproduction of work created
and codified at earlier moments
in my role as director
I rely upon the psychic and kinesthetic memory
of actors to record behavior generated in rehearsal
in rehearsal
persistent repetition
writes a sequence of movement
vocal patterns
in an actor’s memory
that plays back in the live performance
spectators sometimes forget that the illusion of immediacy
–behavior taking place spontaneously—
is an illusion
a première performance
references the past of rehearsal
attempts to recover a past
–the manifold sequence of moments–
where the material performance
was generated and polished
the following performances
attempt to recover
or regenerate
the details of the previous performances
in a serial repetition
changes
revisions occur
often in an attempt to realize
an idealized and unattainable idea of perfection
but the actors’ work
remains one of recuperation
recovery
repetition
the reenactment of the work of the past
in the labor of the present
a production of a performance
that is
a re-production of earlier work
an actor’s body
constitutes the primary technological instrument of theatre
is it useful
to conceptualize acting as a technology?
an action that functions
to reproduce voice and gesture recorded earlier
an actor’s body records the substance of the performance
in both mental and kinesthetic memory
in performance
actors play back the recorded data
that rehearsal and previous performances
inscribed in their minds and bodies
the French term for rehearsal is repetition
performance depends upon
the function of systems of memory
performance is the material embodiment of memory
I can make the distinction
between live performance
as a reenactment of the past
and the medium of either film or video
as a record of the past
this difference
takes into consideration the distinction
between the self-generated use of memory by an actor
to re-embody the work of rehearsal
and the recording of images on some medium
the point I am emphasizing
is that the actor’s body
is imprinted with material
by extensive repetition
to respond in performance
as closely as possible to some predetermined
previously generated sequences of behavior
such sequence of behaviors
may be contained within the field
of the actor’s psychic excitement
stimulated by an awareness of the situation
and the perception and response
of the audience witnessing the performance
audiences may recognize
that the actor’s work is energized by their presence
but
at the same time
they realize that the game of spontaneity
or immediacy
is part of the aesthetic lie
–that the performance is a repetition
not simply a creation of the moment
whereas audiences celebrate
the immediacy and spontaneity of live performance
they also return to performances
music
drama
dance
to experience the satisfaction of repetition
the reoccurrence of formal patterns that have
in some way
been inscribed into their memory
each production of a text
makes reference to the prior existence of the text
the prior incarnation of the text
in the labor of rehearsal
that produces the repetition
that is the performance
each performance
makes reference to each preceding performance
the pleasure of these aesthetic experiences
derives from the anticipation
the satisfaction
of experiencing the fulfillment of a formal structure
that has a prior existence
Freud’s theories of repetition
may be useful here
but not wholly necessary to understand this enjoyment
repetition
becomes a significant component of aesthetic experience
in repetitions within the performance
in repetitions of the performance
this significance reinforces that performance is
in concrete ways
an embodiment of the past
as much as an event in the present
one motive of attending performance
is to experience a past moment in the present
to experience one unit in a series of repetitions
while some may
in an attempt to validate live performance
in relationship to film and video
emphasize the uniqueness of each performance
the basic work of the actor is to repeat
to re-embody the work of the past
in the present work of this performance