Lives of the Performers

Written by Hilton Als

Directed by Peter Born

Featuring Helga Davis + Victoire Charles

(LA alternate for Okwui Okpokwasili)

11.17.19 / 7:30pm

11.18.19 / 7:30pm

LAXART is pleased to present Lives of the Performers, the in-progress, debut play by writer and critic Hilton Als. Still developing through a series of workshops, Lives of the Performers is an experimental narrative examining race, sisterhood, the self, and the forces that threaten to destroy it. 
This is the first time the play will be workshopped and presented—in its in-progress form—on the West Coast.

Lives of the Performers is loosely based on the life of Sheryl Sutton (b. New Orleans, 1950), an actor in the company of playwright Robert Wilson who starred in many of his greatest works including “Deaf Man’s Glance” (1970) and “Einstein On The Beach” (1976). About the latter, Hilton Als writes, “I grew up—partly—with a recording of the piece, and I listened to it over and over again. I was so taken by Sutton’s voice and intonation that she stayed with me, as did these questions: What was it like for Sutton to be a female person of color in the predominately white male avant-garde back then? What was it like to be Sheryl Sutton?” Drawing on this experience and a biography of Sutton by Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky (a text that fuses fact and fiction), Als intertwined the factual Sutton with the historical story of June and Jennifer Gibbons; the Gibbons sisters were West Indian twins who grew up in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and ‘70s and developed their own secret language largely as a result of their segregation. By melding these stories, Als doubles the character of Sutton—as embodied through the performances of Helga Davis and Okwui Okpokwasili—to examine, in Als’ words, “how many selves the black female performer must be or become in order to be herself.”

An initial segment of Lives of the Performers was performed in New York in 2017 at a benefit tribute to Als hosted by the non-profit Triple Canopy. This version was expanded for a November 2018 performance at Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This third iteration of the work is hosted by LAXART and will be presented as a work in progress in two public performances. This workshop precedes a full-scale production of the play that will premiere on both coasts in 2020. LAXART will co-present the West Coast premiere in November 2020, in partnership with the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, where a series of painting exhibitions curated by Als is being presented.

This workshop of Lives of the Performers is presented through a partnership of LAXART and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Lead support provided by Conor O’Neil.

Curated by Catherine Taft. Special thanks to Adi Nachman and Shaun Regen.

Deep Listening Festival

Birgit Ulher (Trumpet, Electronics) + Gino Robair (Electronics)

11.09.19 / 8pm

Exceptionally seasoned improvisers, Robair and Ulher have two releases under their belts, Sputter (2004) and Blips and Ifs (2008).  Working with circuit bending and what he refers to as “voltage made audible,” Robair is a percussionist in the expanded field.  Ulher, a trumpet player, favors the instruments inner workings over its traditional outward timbres.  Her lip, tongue and valve-work expose the instrument as little more than an extension of human plumbing.  Given the date of their last release, this gig is a long awaited reunion of friends who are sure to pick up right where their ever evolving, always exciting musical dialogue was last left.   Whether it is a spikey contrapuntal exchange of the snap, crackle and pop variety, or the melding of textured yawns peppered with Ulher’s signature hisses and kisses, this duet is all about toe-to-toe points of connection. In addition to their duet work, the two of them have graciously agreed to engage with Phil Peters’ low frequency sound installation which is featured in the exhibition Outside/In.  

Deep Listening Festival

Toshiya Tsunoda: A Retrospective

11.03.19 / 7pm

Yokohama-based Toshiya Tsunoda is a sound artist widely regarded as one of field recording’s leading practitioners.  His sensitivity to native ambiance at both the micro and macro levels is balanced with a deep experimental drive.  For him, the microphone is anything but a passive recording device. Instead it allows for a revolution in perception, giving us access to otherwise imperceptible phenomena.  While his vibration studies are as severe as the most abstract piece of electronic music, his “landscapes,” as he calls them, notably those from the seashore in and around the port city of Miura, are drop dead lyrical.  Earlier this year, the folks at Erstwhile Records released a 5 cd set Extract From Field Recording Archive, with selections going as far back as the early 90s. For this event, Tsunoda was asked to make a roughly 90 minute selection serving as a retrospective of his work.

Deep Listening Festival

Bow Hard At The Frog

Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) + Gustavo Matamoros (field recordings)

10.13.19 / 7pm

In 2016, cellist and improviser extraordinaire Fred Lonberg-Holm was invited to the Subtropics Artist Residency at Audiotheque, a Miami based initiative. He then set out into the Everglades of Northern Florida where he took as collaborators the very vocal and varied species of frogs. Impeccably documented by the experienced soundscape artist and field recordist Gustavo Matamoros, the result was the 2018 release Bow Hard At the Frog. Matamoros’ microphones literally soaked up the swamp, with its teeming insect life and assorted gurgles. For this live concert, Lonberg-Holm will perform over a spatialized remix manned by Matamoros. The evening will kick off with a version of Matamoros’ 2013 recording Distant Bats.

Deep Listening Festival

Geneva Skeen +  Anne Guthrie

10.06.19 / 7pm

For Skeen and Guthrie, the field recording is simultaneously binding agent and base layer. Skeen's 2019 release, Dream State takes its title from a 2016 composition she reworked into a brooding, ambient affair. Drawn from the Oakland Port, its source material is set within a soundscape aptly evoking a dense fog. Guthrie’s Brass Orchids (2018) is a palimpsest of lingering sounds in which space and distance play no small part. Abstract electronic tones and textures only serve to throw its lyrical pre-recorded material into high relief as it takes on the character of memory and nostalgia. This concert will feature a set by each artist consisting of live, four channel mixes, and, in Guthrie’s case, live acoustic samples.

Screening + Discussion with Bogosi Sekhukhuni + manuel arturo abreu

05.19.19 / 4pm

Artist Bogosi Sekhukhuni explores African diasporic perspectives on technology, design, national consciousness, and digital capacities for utopia. His work calls upon the intersection of technology and the occult, capitalism's exploitation of ancestrally-embedded biological and cognitive structures, and what it means to take utopian proposals seriously. For this event, Sekhukhuni presents a selection of video works that take a critical posture toward the presuppositions of afrofuturism. Makayla Bailey will moderate a discussion between Bogosi Sekhukhuni and manuel arturo abreu after the screening. 
 
This free event will be livestreamed and archived online for distance learning at homeschoolpdx.tumblr.com.  No RSVP necessary.
 
Bogosi Sekhukhuni describes himself as a lightworker. He studied at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the “tech-health artist group,” NTU, and has worked with the collective, CUSS Group. His most recent project is a “visual culture bank and research gang” calledOpen Time Coven, which investigates “emergent technologies and repressed African spiritual philosophies.” He was included in the exhibitions The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poeticsat the New Museum, New York (2019), I Was Raised on the Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); Art/ Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); the 9th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2016); and the Dakar Biennale in Senegal (2016) among others. His debut solo exhibition in the USA took place at Foxy production in New York (2018).

manuel arturo abreu is a Dominican poet and conceptual artist from the Bronx. Currently living and working in southeast Portland, they use what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They have presented work at MoMA and MoMA PS1 (New York), AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles), Yaby project space (Madrid), Veronica project space (Seattle), Rhizome and the New Museum (online), and in Portland at Yale Union, PICA, Open Signal Portland Community Media Center, S1, and more. They wrote two books of poetry (List of Consonants and transtrender), and one book of critical art writing, the 2019 Oregon Book Awards creative nonfiction finalist Incalculable Loss (Institute for New Connotative Action Press). 

Women’s Work, a Discussion with Scholastique Mukasonga + Randa Jarrar

05.13.19 / 1pm

Join authors Scholastique Mukasonga (The Barefoot Woman, Cockroaches) and Randa Jarrar (A Map of Home; Him, Me, Muhammad Ali) in conversation on writing womanhood—the work of mothers and daughters across time and place facing genocide, tradition, and memory. Moderated by Edwin Hill, Associate Professor of French and Italian and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. A book signing will follow with Eso Won Books.

This event is presented in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles. It is one of the 2019 PEN America World Voices Festival Los Angeles events.

Marie Voignier on Tinselwood, a Discussion

04.25.19 / 7pm

In conversation with Hamza Walker, Marie Voignier will address Tinselwood as a starting point for a discussion about her artistic practice. In Tinselwood, as with her other documentaries, director Marie Voignier (b. 1974 in Ris-Orangis, France) explores her middle class background and the baggage of inherited colonialism. Set in Cameroon, the film is grounded in formalism as Voignier: “wanted to bring out the botanical aspects in great detail." Voignier took care to balance these aesthetic concerns with the subject matter of the film—the exploitation of a country and its resources by Europeans and more recently Asians–immersing viewers into a tropical forest in Cameroon where sorcerers perform votive rituals, lumberjacks work with chainsaws and trucks, and a mysterious enshrouded graveyard awaits.

Support for this exhibition is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US and this program is part of their artistic series, Ceci n'est pas…

In Conversation: Glenn Ligon and Hamza Walker

04.23.19 / 7pm

This artist talk takes place on the occasion of Untitled (America)/Debris Field/Synecdoche/Notes for a Poem on the Third World, an exhibition of new work by Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects. For this exhibition, Ligon will present a new series of silkscreen paintings based on abstracted letter forms and several neon installations. This talk will address the new work as a starting point for other considerations.
For more information, please visit the Regen Projects website.

CBARET: What Not Speak Easy

04.23.19 / 7pm

Marie de Brugerolle

At a time of profound political changes, inspired by the re-reading of Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, Marie de Brugerolle, curator and head of the Post-Performance Future program at the School of Fine Arts of Lyon, addresses the legacy of performance art in the visual arts and asserts that, in this society of the spectacle, aesthetics are political. The result is a cabaret-style night of performances that plays with humor and seduction as weapons against obscurantism, used not only for their entertaining powers, but as critical tools. And indeed, a stool is a tool. There will be karaoke, some curtains, a Brazilian song, a play by Guy de Cointet, a page that is a wall, a bar, some stools, a chair dance, more dance with legs, a wooden box, and so much more.

Artists list includes Jennifer Bolande, Julien Bismuth, Jordan Derrien, Romain Gandolphe, Juliette Guérin, V. Haddad, Asher Hartmann, Alex Heilbron, Brandon Lattu, Emily Mast, Valérie Mc Cann, Nour Mobarak, Olivia Mole, Axelle Pinot, Nathaniel Whitfield, Anna Wittenberg and surprise guests!

CBARET: What Not Speak Easy is an event curated by Marie de Brugerolle and hosted by LAXART. This project is supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US and is part of their artistic series, Ceci n'est pas…, ENSBA (Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon, France, Post Performance Future research program, UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles, School of the Arts and Architecture).

Name That Tune: Jim Shaw

02.11.19 / 7pm

In the spirit of the game show that delighted millions of home viewers in the 1950s and 1970s, these live artist interviews are a way to get to know the participants through their interest in music. Name That Tune will challenge the ears and knowledge of select L.A. based artists whose work has an undeniable relationship to noise, sound, and/or popular music. Professor and music critic Josh Kun and curator Hamza Walker will test four artists over four evenings with sounds meant to thrill, confound, provoke, and above all entertain.

Our third contestant, Jim Shaw is a founder of the legendary experimental art rock band Destroy All Monsters. Whether he’s creating aural rites for his O-ist religion or perpetually completing a prog-rock opera, Shaw’s entanglement with music and art taps into the American unconscious with devilish aplomb. For this episode, we'll mine the rare and radioactive elements of Shaw's record collection.

Zeena Parkins + Susan Alcorn in Concert

02.10.19 / 7pm

In 1966, Sun Ra bought ukuleles, mandolins, kotos, koras, Chinese lutes from curio shops and gave them to his horn players who had no training with the instruments. The result was Strange Strings, a recording he made with the belief that "strings could touch people in a special way, different from other instruments." Ra could just as easily have been describing the work of Alcorn or Parkins individually, let alone the two of them together. Both are titans of their respective instruments and this meeting is a first.

Company Company, a Performance with Jérôme Bel

02.09.19 / 8pm

Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA in association with LAXART and Ford Theaters presents:
Company, Company
An extract of Gala (2015)
Concept: Jérôme Bel
Duration: 30 minutes

Doors at 7:30pm, performance at 8pm. No entry after the performance begins.

Company, Company offers a different approach to dance. In this collective art form, choreographer Jérôme Bel brings together amateurs of diverse backgrounds not often represented on stage. The diversity reveals the way each person’s cultural repertoire involves him or her in a singular relationship with the desire to experience something other than dance — joy, accomplishment, transcendence perhaps? To make this piece accessible to amateurs and provide them with the opportunity to give their all and make the project their own, Bel chooses common place theatrical experiences to illustrate the human desire to express one’s self through movement. Working around the concept of “Fail again. Fail bigger.” Bel enlarges the perimeter of performance to embrace everyone who wants to participate, both on stage and off, to create a shared, communal experience. This event is supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US and is part of their artistic season, Ceci n’est pas.

Name That Tune: Lauren Halsey

02.07.19 / 7pm

In the spirit of the game show that delighted millions of home viewers in the 1950s and 1970s, these live artist interviews are a way to get to know the participants through their interest in music. Name That Tune will challenge the ears and knowledge of select L.A. based artists whose work has an undeniable relationship to noise, sound, and/or popular music. Professor and music critic Josh Kun and curator Hamza Walker will test four artists over four evenings with sounds meant to thrill, confound, provoke, and above all entertain.

In part two of Name That Tune, we put Lauren Halsey’s ear for Funk, soul, and other grooves to the test. Halsey—whose work pays homage the everyday and the around-the-way, from the beauty supply to the vacant lot—heralds the DIY monument as an Afro-futurist paradise. Funk is music come again as an ethos. It’s part of who she is and what she knows. It’s a way for her to activate and transform (or “funkatize”) personal objects, setting the tone for a speculative future where imagined space can shift material reality. For Halsey, representation and collective myth making infuse neighborhood geographies with potential energy, mediating the losses wrought by gentrification and marginalization.

Name That Tune: Frances Stark

02.01.19 / 7pm

In the spirit of the game show that delighted millions of home viewers in the 1950s and 1970s, these live artist interviews are a way to get to know the participants through their interest in music. Name That Tune will challenge the ears and knowledge of select L.A. based artists whose work has an undeniable relationship to noise, sound, and/or popular music. Professor and music critic Josh Kun and curator Hamza Walker will test four artists over four evenings with sounds meant to thrill, confound, provoke, and above all entertain.

Our first contestant is Frances Stark, a Southern California native. While punk is of seminal importance to Stark, her tastes overall prove far more catholic. Her most ambitious project to date was a digital film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

I Heart Poetry + Day Drinking with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs + Ishion Hutchinson

01.26.19 / 2pm

What better time for poetry than Saturday afternoon? Laundry can wait. Home Depot is open until at least 10. And what’s another twenty miles without that oil change? Join us for midday booze and verse. The second installment of I Heart Poetry and Day Drinking features LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Ishion Hutchinson, two award-winning poets whose work overlaps at the Caribbean. Diggs' language is a mesh of pidgins, patois, and dialects; a global and syntactical leap frogging the upshot of which is a linguistic "twerking" (which her first volume is titled). Hutchinson's poems are vignettes that, all totaled, are a return to his native Jamaica. Rather than physical, the return home entails contextualizing memories of events, people, and places such that biographical remnants, in all their post-colonial particularity, can take on the proportion of Greek mythology.