Choreographic Residency: Week 6

I am sharing with you a blog post for the homeLA.  I have many projects coming up, so I might be utilizing this blog to help organise my thoughts.

The performance is this Saturday, August 26.  There are 3 performance: 4pm, 5pm, 6pm.  Get your tickets here: http://www.homela.org/

The first homeLA performance I created was RAKED, a ritual performance that displays the construction and deconstruction of a powder covered hill, at Rose Hill in September 2016.  The work pays homage to the histories of my migrant parents, who immigrated to America to tend to the land by working in fields.  RAKED is a work that brought me back to my California roots as a child of immigrants.  Almost a year later, I’m returning to homeLA with similar interests, inquiries, and commitment to my home.  RAKED is about labor, love, and loss, and how the land and the bodies are infused with trauma — my work often involves thematic displays of physical, mental, and emotional trauma.  In this work at homeLA, Revisited, themes of the migrant plight have emerged in an unexpected way.

This year, I received the Annenberg Beach House Choreographic Residency.  The 3-month long residency culminates in a performance at the beach, on the beach.  Faced with the challenge of creating a work ON the beach, I grappled with how my work, trauma-based physicality, belongs on the beach.  I found myself perplexed by the task of dancing on the beach, a place where all I wanted to do is sunbathe and relax. Long story short, as the waves were crashing against my brown shins, the image of the drowned Syrian boy that washed up the shore of Greece a few years back came to mind.  Sorry to be graphic, but I thought this may be where trauma meets shores.  

Coincidentally, I began conceptualizing my work at homeLA // Larchmont.  I came across a bunch of little brick-size cardboard boxes that I knew I wanted to use as material for this work.  I started building a wall.  Perhaps this was a little more obvious, but I thought of how borders, walls, and shores may serve as sites of trauma.  

My research for both these projects have included meditating at the shore, traveling to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, revisiting the Grapes of Wrath, and chats with my mother about being a migrant worker.  I have been meeting with friends, colleagues, and mentors discussing the topic of refugees and immigrants in relation to art and performance.  I think thoughtful and creative work is emerging from the tension created in this current political climate — in a world where heated rhetoric creates division between left and right, white and black, and us and them… 

With these projects, both the Annenberg Community Beach House Choreographic Residency and homeLA, I am confronted with issues where I’m exploring otherness and the call to action through the power of the image and symbols.

Choreographic Residency: Week 5

Hello California, I'm back.  My trip to NYC was much needed and now, as much as I want to relax, I have to get back into the swing of things.  I'm not sure if I already shared this, but I have a lot of projects coming this fall.  I'm going to list them here:

• homeLA // Larchmont | Sat, Aug 26: 4pm, 5pm, 6pm 

• The Broad Museum, Summer Happenings: Basquiat | Sat, Sept 23: 8:30pm

• And of course the Annenberg Community Beach House Choreographic Residency project.  I have finally solidified the showcase performance: Sunday, Oct 8, 5pm-630pm.

With these projects back to back to back to back, I'm having a hard time compartmentalizing them.  My mind is looking at all the projects like a big nebulous of creativity with no clear distinction or separation between the works.  For my sanity and clarity, I am devoting and scheduling specific times to work on each individual project.  With that said, I am noticing a through-line or connective tissue that binds these works together.  Some common themes:

• Borders, boundaries, barriers 
• Traveling/promenade performance
• Binaries, polarities, contradictions

Choreographic Residency: Week 4

Please note, this post is a week late... Consider it a #latergram, for those Instagramers out there. Also, this is a #repost because I couldn't figure out how to adjust the font size in the earlier post

I'm out here in NYC merging research and leisure by going to immersive shows and museums.  I'm making reconnections with old friends and mentors.  I'm going to music festivals and going to rooftop brunches in drag.  No big deal; I am living.

And while my life here in NY is incredibly exciting, I cannot wait to return to LA.  The exciting thing about NYC is it's true, there's so much to do.  I have multiple "New York moments" daily.  Whether I'm taking a cab from Brooklyn to Manhattan and swooning over the striking sunset amidst the towering landscape, or taken by surprise by a street performer in the subway, New York really is a magical place -- especially in the summer.

I got the opportunity to watch Sleep No More, an immersive, site-specific theatrical performance that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel in the Chelsea District.  I've always been inspired by the show since I saw it during my first blizzard around that polar vortex time in 2013.  Once I got my ticket from the box office, I was asked to enter the performance space and watch my step.  Ensued a dark maze-like hallway that winds and turns until I entered a speakeasy bar with crooning singers.  The transportation and transformation of space awed me instantly.  I know that this is something I want to explore at the beach.  How, without walls in a expansive sandy beach, can I transport people and transform space?  Make the audience MOVE.  Furthermore, the audience was given masks and asked to never take them off during the performance.  The steward instructing us how to navigate throughout the space also provided insight on how the work should be viewed.  This is something I need to consider while creating performances in alternative spaces -- it's not like a traditional theatre where people know their assigned seat and watch quietly until the lights go out. The performance is 3 hours long and happens throughout the 4-5 floors of the abandoned hotel and the audience has the agency to roam and choose their own destiny.  The masks provide an anonymity for the spectator and creates a voyeuristic approach to entering the immersive performance.

During this last trip, I got to see the show twice: once with my partner and the other with my best friend -- I have friends in the show, so I got discounted tickets (insert winking smiley emoji here).  This time, while watching the show, I made a conscious effort to focus on the audience and how they engaged and interacted with the space and the performers.  I noticed that personalities shined as people would push their way to the front as others stayed behind.  I noticed that lust and desire was heightened because the masks, and perhaps the heavy-poured libations had in the bar before and during the show.  I noticed audience members' body language change when the performers got closer in proximity.  I love how the many spaces throughout the performance site offered the audience to explore and get lost.

I'm going to continue speaking about my influences from the past trip in NYC:

I saw Frank Ocean, an American R&B singer known for his idiosyncratic style, at the summer music festival Panorama NYC.  Now, I understand this seems more fun than research, but I believe art is entertainment, to some degree... and boy was this ARTISTIC.

Frank Ocean is elusive.  You never know when he's going to drop an album or make a surprise appearance.  His album Blonde is a cult classic, featuring tracks inspired by Brian Eno, incorporating ambient sounds with disruptive melodies and abrupt time-signature shifts.  His fascination with distorting and digitizing the human voice is artistically employed throughout the album, not to disguise vocal blemishes as many other contemporary pop songs do, but rather to display the disconnect from human connection in our internet and screen driven world.  I can go on and on about how much I love this artist and this album... OK, now about my experience at the show.  As thousands and thousands of fans rushed their way to the main stage, I pushed my way forward to get a decent view of Frank Ocean.  After all, I traveled cross-country to see him.  As they were setting up, there was an insane surround-sound setup that had different audio outputs all around us.  When Frank walked onto the stage, the audience roared as he put a cassette tape into the player, projecting it into the back left side of the auditorium. To further the nostalgic reverie, Spike Jonez comes on stage recording him with an old camcorder.  Now, you're probably wondering, how does this apply to the residency, Jay?  You just went to a music festival to live out your young adult life.  So what? Well... I'll tell you what.  I learned how to frame and curate experiences from this performance.  I learned with simple nostalgic cues and ideas, you can create impactful moments.

Ok, one last bit of inspiration, I promise.  I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Rei Kawakubo/Comme de Garçon: The Art of the In-Between.  

"The Costume Institute's spring 2017 exhibition examines the work of fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, known for her avant-garde designs and ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability."

The exhibit was phenomenal.  It was ethereal and pushed boundaries of beauty by distorting the silhouette and presenting familiar things in peculiar ways.  By working with simple binaries, like life and death or self and other, Kawakubo creates beautiful designs that inspire me to push myself as an avant-garde artist.  Some dichotomies I'm interested in exploring for this residency are bound and free, past and future, and self and other.   

Altogether, these 3 seemingly disparate, fun, and entertaining experiences I had in NY are a directly and indirectly affecting my creative path for this choreographic residency at the beach house. From immersive theatre engaging audiences, to activating nostalgic memories, to whimsical polarities; my journey as a creative individual cannot be removed from my experiences and my histories.