ON THE BOARDS

Marcie Sillman of KUOW reviews Dream Dances by Kate Wallich + The YC (Dec 7-10).  

Eric Pitsenbarger is an artist and writer based in Seattle. 

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Awaiting Oblivion...follows the story of AO, an anonymous street artist who has tasked Tim and Jeffrey with the creation of a performance as a way to share AO’s “temporary solutions” for existing within our collapsing empire. Inspired by creative processes developed by the '60’s Fluxus art movement, each “temporary solution” is a visual/textual poem contained in a Flux-kit (a cigar box collaged with stenciled imagery and typewritten letters). We follow Tim, Jeffrey, and AO in a flurry of street art, secret messages, and performance scores in a poetic, radical fight for survival.

Tim Smith-Stewart and Jeffrey Azevedo’s Awaiting Oblivion follows the story of AO, an anonymous street artist who has tasked Tim and Jeffrey with the creation of a performance as a way to share AO’s “temporary solutions” for existing within our collapsing empire. Inspired by creative processes developed by the '60’s Fluxus art movement, each “temporary solution” is a visual/textual poem contained in a Flux-kit (a cigar box collaged with stenciled imagery and typewritten letters).

One of the many inspirations for Awaiting Oblivion: Temporary Solutions for The Dystopian Future We Find Ourselves Within at the Present was the anti-fascist work of Surrealist artist Claude Cahun...

Koushik Ghosh What liberty might we know if could collapse the duality of gender? Geumhyung Jeong’s hour-long exploration on this theme gives us Oil Pressure Vibrator. I am sure you will leave asking questions, or wishing that you could sit down with the artist or spend some time with her. Jeong takes us down a path, where knowing the terrain of desire involves decisions, and constant, obsessive observation. Knowing, what feels good. Knowing what does not. Knowing that we get bored. Knowing, that there can even be evolution. Jeong’s work is about knowing something in us that never quite leaves us. Jeong makes friends with an urgency in her, and allows it to take her places, places in the natural world, places in the inanimate world of objects, places that are not so familiar and yet so. She never takes us back to society, or another human being. Machines and nature make love in a world where desire lives on, without human beings. Desire, lives on objectively, in space and time, without human interference, larger than human need, larger than life as we know it. You will laugh. You will be moved. You will be intrigued.

What I saw was intense fascination as the relationship between performer and machine was erotic, with increased distress or discomfort as the relationship intensified, followed by disengagement as it ‘failed.’ Toward the end of the performance, there was a lot of shoe gazing, which I read as discomfort rather than boredom. Even in a situation when we are permitted to observe one another, we feel discomfort doing so. Perhaps mutual acknowledgement of the trauma of our shared experience - watching a simulated human death - would be comforting? Or make the action seem less strange and distressing? It’s impossible to know - as modern humans we are more comfortable looking in mirrors than at each other.

other works by Geumhyung Jeong:  Jeong’s anthropomorphic presentations of everyday objects and machines such as mannequins, vacuum cleaners, and fitness equipment suggest the communion between man and machine. In this peculiar, intimate, exploratory, and arousing relationship, the artist overthrows the role of humans as the conductor in industry, technology and our future, inciting discomfort as she redefines the role of humans as an agent for civilisation. In this exhibition, Jeong curates a selection of objects that project her desires and affection along the theme of ‘collect and possess’.

trailer for CPR Practice- Geumhyung Jeong 

trailer for Oil pressure  vibrator by Geumhyung Jeong

Koushik Ghosh This weekend, Tiago Rodrigues invites us to an experiment at the OTB, and explores an urgent question of our times. Do uncommon words, signifying wisdom, when learned, ingested, extend our lives, beyond this time and space? Do they create a community that survives and triumphs over the ill fates that sometimes befall us? Rodrigues, uses a stage and 10 people from the audience to illustrate the point. He says that he arrived at this experiment, which he most recently conducted in Berlin (and this week in Seattle) through a journey that began with George Steiner himself. He recalls over and over again that he had heard the following in a Steiner interview of the TV program Beauty and Consolation: “Once 10 people know a poem by heart, there’s nothing the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo can do about it. It will survive”. The experiment proceeds on stage, with 10 souls submitting their memory to this experiment, an apparently willing audience who 'agree,' to be witness to this hypothesis, a sonnet written centuries ago and Rodriguez inspiring the audience and the TEN with stories of resistance. Resistance of various kinds: to dullness and repetition of life, social chaos, authoritarianism, torture, blindness, death and above all, desperation. The truth or lie of this bold theater lies with the audience. It is courageous, fierce, and ultimately empirical - something David Hume of Scottish Enlightenment fame would have been proud of. The artist submits his experiment for YOUR review. You, the audience get to decide if the experiment is a success. Go see it for yourself. The artist has done his work, his duty. He has invited you to a truth he has arrived at, a truth baked in that oven which burns books, but cannot touch the incandescent words imprinted by the unconscious that lives in all of us. Go see if the community of unconscious will resist the ills that tempt us today and if the poem will be that magic wand that will deliver to the light of an uncertain dawn.

"an ode to memory, resurfaced from the collective memories of those onstage — and expressed a deepened meaning even for those who had simply been listening."

by Elissa Favero ​On Sunday night, to celebrate a birthday and to brace ourselves for an impending inauguration that looms in the week ahead, writers are gathering here in Seattle and in cities around the country to read to each other. Beloved Seattle writers will read from the works of other beloved writers, many long since gone: Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Paine, Susan Sontag, and others. Their written words, now spoken aloud, will, I expect, at once console and fortify us; they will at once alert us to our differences and unite us toward common purpose. ​Last night, at the opening of On the Boards' new show, By Heart, Portuguese writer and performer Tiago Rodrigues introduced us to some of his own favorite writers and readers: William Shakespeare, George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Ray Bradbury, his grandmother. These figures are for him, to use a phrase from the Shakespeare sonnet we all came to know so well over the evening “precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.” But Rodrigues did not allow them to remain hidden. He unearthed them for us, telling us of their stories of struggle under authoritarianism and alongside the treacherous silencing that so often accompanies it. The rise of right-wing populism here and abroad reminds us, of course, of the totalitarianism many of these writers lived under in the USSR, and also of American persecutions of free speech and freedom to assemble in the McCarthy era, of repressions here and there and elsewhere. Language and its power to connect us to stories and to each other now, as then, feels vital and urgent. ​Besides Rodrigues’s old “precious friends,” the evening introduced us to new friends too. “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,” the second-to-last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 goes. The whole poem is addressed to this friend who ameliorates woes and worries, who offers a balm to raw emotions and fragile feelings. By Heart, likewise, is itself one long address. Rodrigues starts the performance with an invitation: for ten people to join him on stage and to learn and recite, by heart, over the duration of the performance, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. The centuries-old language is strange to our ears; it coarsens in our mouths and struggles to escape our lips whole and unmangled. Aside from Rodrigues’s engaging anecdotes and his own delivery of memorized passages from writers he loves, aside from his many improvised and very funny quips to the audience, By Heart is made of acts of bravery and empathy. (One participant, a woman for whom English is not a first language, admitted that she hadn’t known what “by heart” meant when she accepted Rodrigues’s appeal for audience members to come on stage. How I admired her courage to stay there before us, under the hot lights and our scrutiny.) I mouthed along, or at least tried to, with each of the participants as they learned their lines. I clapped my hands in excitement when they remembered. My heart went out to them when they forgot. I was moved by the story Rodrigues told of his grandmother and their shared and enduring love of books, but more than anything, I felt connected to these ten participants who, as my friend put it, acted as a kind of mirror to the rest of the audience, reflecting back to us our best desires to learn and to collaborate. ​Language, as linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff tells us, rewires the neural circuitry of our brains and bodies. It can also, as Tiago Rodrigues tells us, change our hearts.