you are the audience

you are my distant relative

i address you

as i would a distant relative

as if a distant relative

seen only heard only through someone else's

description

 

neither you nor i

are visible to each other

i can only assume that you can hear me

i can only hope that you can hear me

 

-Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

“Audience Distant Relative” 1978

   

It has been two months since my return to Brooklyn. Prior to January, I was working in Philadelphia on a curatorial fellowship for the Aux Performance Space, built out of Vox Populi gallery. It was my task to fill the theater space with performances that should, in one form or another, speak to the audience of artists there.

 

Not having any connection to the city, I had to find a way to imagine an audience before I could know who that audience would become. The space itself was painted black, but modular, meaning that there was no built-in stage or proper set up. I spent a lot of time emptying it of everything and walking in it, trying to understand what could happen there, how performance could open up that space and likewise, how the space could become a proposition to the performers.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, A Ble Wail, 1975. Trip Callaghan. efanyc.org

 

The mental picture that formed in my mind was of the documentation of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 1975 performance, A Ble Wail in which she is blind-folded, very slowly walking among lit candles while chanting. She speaks of blindness as a metaphor for not being able to truly access the other, where the inner vision is perhaps more reliable than the eyes.

 

I would say that this is how it felt to be walking through a new space in a new city, with the title of curator, implying that both the artists' desire and the audience's attention would be my responsibility. Blindness in that black space except for the imagined incipience of the work.

 

Last month, I found myself in the theater of the Kitchen. I wasn't sitting in the chairs on the risers to see a performance, but instead sat facing the black painted brick wall on the stage. I was there for the L.A.B. (Language, Art, Bodies) panel on "Audience" with artist Boru O'Brien O'Connell, choreographer, Jen Rosenblit, and director, Jay Scheib. We were all strewn across chairs on the stage with some on the risers, semi-facing but not really facing one another. Each speaker discussed the various positions they felt the audience takes up in relation to their processes and their pieces.

 

So we were all kind of sitting askew, facing one another's profiles and talking. A bisected conversation about audience. Somehow there was a comfort in that. It made listening easier. Maybe, like Cha, we should have been blindfolded, channeling one another's thoughts.

Image from the “Draft, Capture, -” exhibition by Boru O’Brien O’Connell, thekitchen.org

 

O'Brien O'Connell screened a video clip that was not included in his exhibition, Draft, Capture, -. The piece presented a mis-translation of a son talking about his father, however slight the ruptures in translation revealed themselves to be. It was as if their generational gap was a void in which simple thoughts and desires plunged and became irrevocably misunderstood. That rupture might serve as a metaphor for the artist-audience relationship, where the artist's output might or might not match up with audience's expectations, creating a gap or hole in which the work might never be accepted. I have in my notes: DILETTANTISM AS A MULTI-GENERATIONAL IDEA OF CULTURE. As an artist, your successes appear to be trivial in comparison to your parents' expectations for you to be an expert at something outside of your myopic world, like "Well, you can't do anything else," or simply "I don't get what this means" - a gap that you might try to fill with explanation, or just leave be, and orbit around in your personal worlds of shame and ambition. Forever.

 

In response, Rosenblit asked if there can be a space between when something is working and not working. She screened an excerpt of When Them, a performance she made 4 years ago at Danspace Project, and discussed being more interested in the space in between, the fleetingness of pleasure and the space of non-pleasure. I have in my notes: PRECARIOUSNESS V. RECLAIMING and CRAFT V. WITCH CRAFT. "Where is the witch craft in craft?" and "What is economy?" PROFESSIONAL ECONOMY V. SPIRITUAL ECONOMY.

video still from “Platonov, or The Disinherited” by Jay Scheib art-nerd.com

 

Scheib screened a video that was part of his recent immersive performance of Platanov, or The Disinherited, where he interrogated the difference in the audience's expectations of watching a film v. a play, and how to improvise text in a play within a video within a play. "The piece exists because it is part of the world and it can exist, but I still feel like I need to hide from Chekhov devotees," he said. I have in my notes: THIS IS HOW YOU HIT A PIÑATA WITH A BASEBALL BAT AND MAKE A BODY COME OUT OF IT and THIS IS THE THING I AM AFTER AT ALL COSTS.

 

That weekend I moderated a post-performance discussion (ppd) at New York Live Arts for a shared evening of work, macromen by choreographer, Tess Dworman and i shot denzel by dance artist, niv Acosta. For niv’s piece, the audience was invited to take seats on the stage so, like sitting at the Kitchen days before, I ended up having a newly disorienting experience of the stage. I was aware of the stage lights, and realized that any move I made would distract from niv’s performance. I held my notebook and pen open awkwardly on my lap for the ENTIRE show and wrote NOTHING because I was too self-conscious.

 

The ppd began almost immediately after the show. I didn’t want to walk across the stage, so I crept to a wing and fixed my pants before approaching the microphone and chairs that had been set up. The stage lights continued to be in my eyes, although the house lights were on. I could not think, feel and talk at the same time. I greeted Tess and realized that I was emotional from niv’s performance. Then niv came, and then niv’s mom came (she was in the show, in case you didn’t know, and you can read all about it) and then I wanted to cry, but then I had to DISCUSS THE WORK.

Kyli Kleven, Caitlin Marz and Tess Dworman performing “macromen” at New York Live Arts. www.nytimes.com

 

The discussion was a blur. I remember Tess talking about wanting to make an AUTONOMOUS, CREEPY LITTLE WORLD with her dance. I remember niv’s mom talking about learning how to ACCEPT NIV’S TRANS-NESS, and how that’s what the journey of the piece was about FOR HER. Our talk was about possibilities for the body, about risk - when you pull yourself from the sea of your cosmology of influences to step into your own weird orbital as an artist.

 

i shot denzel had nothing to do with Denzel Washington, but that was it - niv’s body occupying a non-space, as a thing that has not yet been defined, that is no more served by a black male archetype than anything else. I kept thinking about his monologue as this kind of voice-from the-beyond, like Cha’s.

 

...you see,

we need each other,

and not the way love what we know of it prescribes,

but the way we infect each other during, after and perhaps before we meet,

through the way we even glance in each others direction.

a tiny bang.

just a twinkle behind that red strip in their eye.

the small of the small of my backs reflection.

no one has died inside of me.

all lives continued inside of me.

my life continues inside of you.

my absence grows bigger inside.

or outside and without me.

engulfing deep orifices no one knew existed beside me.

it happens to be a magical ability.

my will.

my thought.

beneath that my love and hate.

my being becomes the being of others.

i will not fight it cause i’ve already lost.

and won.

- excerpt from “sacrificio”

niv Acosta 2014   - MARISSA PEREL Marissa Perel is a Brooklyn based artist and writer. Her working method is interdisciplinary and includes performance, installation, video, text, collaboration and curating. Her work has been widely shown in New York and abroad, and her criticism has been published on many on-line platforms. She originated the column, Gimme Shelter: Performance Now on the Art21 blog, and was an editor of Critical Correspondence, the on-line dance and performance journal of Movement Research. She has contributed to the Performance Club, Bomblog, Bad At Sports, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. www.marissaperel.com