On a summer day in June, I walked into rehearsal to find Choreographer and Director Nami Yamamoto and collaborator Takemi Kitamura warming up. I made my way to a chair, watching and observing as Nami and Takemi chatted quietly. Their deep exhales filled the spacious room with their backs on the floor and their legs on the wall. After a few minutes, fellow collaborators Leah Ogawa and Anna Vomacka entered the space and began to work through different elements of the piece. Finally, Nami stands up and walks over to me with arms outstretched for a big hug. Her shirt reads "The Future"... I smile.

Illuminated by sunlight coming through the large windows, the space is full of puppets made of clay-colored paper. There is a gigantic beach ball-sized plastic breast and several softball-sized plastic breasts off to the side; I've seen plastic breasts in a previous iteration of the work, so I jot down a note to ask Nami about this later. The puppets are showing signs of wear, and the white tape around their tiny bodies is reminiscent of an emergency room scene from a movie. Or perhaps a graveyard for the recently departed? With the number of objects in the room, my excitement started to build; I couldn't wait to see this unfold.

"It feels good to be here, to be with the dancers, finally," Nami tells me. It's been a long time coming, and after 18 months of virtual and solo practice, she is ready to be at the stage when Trooper's Brother is no longer solely hers; that point when it takes off, and she can let things go. I admire how each dancer interacts with the materials, responding to the texture, caring for them, and understanding them. Throughout the rehearsal, they take turns watching each other and offering observations, with Nami moving seamlessly between the roles of director and collaborator. Nami makes her way over to Leah as she gently places both of the puppet's paper feet between her first and second toes, holding the torso between her knees. She then picks up two small plastic breasts in the equally small hands of the puppet. Leah has been working on dribbling two balls at once, and after a few attempts, she finds her rhythm.

Trooper's Brother will be performed at Brooklyn's Roulette Intermedium in June, and Nami feels good about the headway that week. "The performance space will have three levels and be deeper than what we've been working on within the studio," Nami stated as the dancers took their places for the top of the piece. What follows are tender moments of duets, solos, and group sections that are, all at once, funny, absurd, and heartbreaking. Sounds of crushed paper and plastic balls hitting the floor punctuate the silence, and some badass rock moments of resilience. The classical interpretation of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" provides the setting for an epic duet between Takemi and Nami, moving with fast-paced synchronized chugs, giant leaps to the floor, and marching defiantly forward with intense commitment and handheld plastic boobs. The music fades out, and we get a moment of repose as Takemi ponders what to do with the two grapefruit-sized plastic breasts she is holding. Finally, she looks forward, places them on her upper torso, and slowly bashes them together. The pat-pat-pat-pat of the plastic starts subtly and builds with intensity.

At one poignant part, Anna gently places a paper puppet down on the floor and lowers herself beside it. Watching her gazing at the paper doll, careful and unsure but full of support, stayed with me. She reaches into her pocket and reveals two disc-shaped plastic boobs, the perfect size for the puppet, and places them on its torso. There is a matter-of-factness in how she does this and these intimate moments of care (perhaps the doctor-patient relationship?) are easy to pick up on. I was surprised that the work tapped into a pretty deep and mysterious place for me. This shared sorrow, best illustrated in the section with the passing of the gigantic beach ball-shaped breast between the dancers, permeates throughout. Leah takes it on first, noting the softness and lightness of the ball as she tosses it into the air. The dancers pause to watch and move closer to take turns with it. They find a rhythm, shuffling on their knees in a circle, careful not to let the ball drop.

Within this work, Nami explores the universal theme of trauma with absurdity, humor, and some heartbreak. How do we reckon with what’s been lost? We begin by acknowledging these new parts/extensions of ourselves and discover what it teaches us about resilience, our power, and our capacity. The consequences of what happened to the body and the mind push the work onward. However, things that were lost remained cared for and remembered.

Later, in the program notes for the Roulette performance, Nami shares, "If the first half of the piece is about what happened in our body, the second half is about what happened in our minds. The objects that we were manipulating begin to haunt us. The puppet becomes dissected into a piece of bundled-up paper. We obsessed about pieces of puppet parts that have no shape, no life, or no meaning anymore. The shape of our body changes with time and age. But, we are still living, breathing, surviving, and celebrating our lives."

Nami begins to run in a circle, repeatedly, arms outstretched, perhaps ready for salvation. Watching her, I remember that yes, we can do this. "We are the champions, my friends. And we'll keep on fighting till the end."

Remi Harris is a performer, choreographer, curator, and arts programmer. First trained as a dance artist, she has developed an approach that combines a cross-disciplinary perspective with an intuitive sensibility and deep love for developing art-based relationships. Remi was born in Barbados and raised in Brooklyn, and remains closely connected to and curious about her own roots.

Kayla swings her arms to herself, stomps, and steps to a deep crouch before swirling against where gravity would’ve taken her. As I watch these dancers watch something, shape a swath of air between their eyes and their arms, I wonder about the space they fling away from and find again, again.

Before the door to the studio is fully open, the music is louder than anything. The steady bass drum in The Chosen Gospel’s Singers’ “Prayer For The Doomed” treads on for most of my visit. Marjani Forté-Saunders’ and Everett Saunders’ son Everett Nkosi Zaire Saunders tours the studio, stopping to consider the dancers before continuing on, giving me a thumbs up as he passes.

Before offering me this prompt, Marjani speaks to Kayla and Roobi individually, who return to notebooks, records or mirrors of something they’re building towards. From a recent history of primarily choreographing works for one performer, Marjani expresses excitement about composing a work with these first-time collaborators. With Kayla and Roobi, Marjani offers guidance not just through words, but through her own dancing as well. As she watches them take these questions into their own bodies, she keeps dancing, keeps speaking. “Yes!” she exclaims.

For something worked on and studied to translate, even if just for this one witness this one day, is an easily satisfying feeling. As an artist, I get to trust process again. They get it, they see something. As a viewer, I can follow the thread. The artists are leading me places and we can go there, even with me in the seat of a plastic chair.

A week later, Everett asks the audience at the BAC Space Studio Showing, “How do you recognize an Emcee?” In a monologue that cites artists from Raekwon to Pharoahe Monch, Everett jabs at the air with pointed fingers to show the different textures emblematic of these figures’ rhythms. Embodiment, he tells us, is everything.

Beside him, Marjani wears on her head a sculpture from Memoirs of a... Unicorn (2017). The wooden horn sprawls more than the length of Marjani’s body as she makes the same gestures. When she stands, the horn waves from the crown of her head towards the ceiling, its weight changing how she could direct our sight through the studio, how her hands had scrawled on the studio just before.

This articulation finds still new dimension at the border of Roobi’s hands when she takes center stage. Marjani and Kayla take turns circling in short solos, idiosyncratic but not isolated. Everett raps, his voice fading and amplifying as he loops with them. Having pushed in one direction, Marjani whips her torso around to face another. Kayla floats, evoking vapor elusive but dense.

Marjani, Kayla, and Roobi prop up three plastic tables to reflect back Meena Murugesan’s projections, images of people spliced across imperfect surfaces. The floor’s spike marks had to be moved each time, Meena tells me after the show, each rehearsal a revision of catching photons in space at the angle they want us to see it. I won’t call it the right angle.

We’re asked to consider one’s natural response when approached with opposition or aggression. Even when dancing in unison, Marjani, Kayla, and Roobi don’t arrive at a singular right answer. A jump that propels the leg around the hips to turn the body unfurls together but creates three flashes of limb through space. Marjani tumbled through this move when they were marking through the material with audiences still entering. Laughing, she said, “I can’t do it.”

Of course she could. She did the move. “When teaching one to heal, you must also teach them how to fight,” Everett tells us.

To be able to see the work at this stage, after just a couple weeks of working all together, makes me wonder how this connection between them, the fluency in speaking and moving together, might evolve as the work grows.

For now, Everett picks up another monologue, germinated from last week’s rehearsal. Everett had worked to recapture the spirit of the original story he had once told Marjani. The details, the motifs, the gradual revelation of a spine, an unknown history of a place holding the heart of a community of Emcees/Lyricists, is revealed to us with smooth suspense. “We found God on that cold winter block” in North Philadelphia, Everett tells us.

What is a natural response? What is authentic storytelling told for a stage, rehearsed again and again? How can a private conversation keep its unceremoniousness in the ceremony of a performance scheduled for public engagement? What does it mean when white people are witnessing this work, when I, a Vietnamese-American writer, am writing about this work?

I don’t task the artists with answering these questions but they cross my mind as a viewer and as a writer.

Last week, in Roobi’s entrance following Everett’s section, Marjani asked Roobi to keep experimenting with the dynamics of her procession down the diagonal of the studio. To the opening notes of "Prayer for the Doomed," Roobi’s head could appear to be shaking, wondering or wandering somewhere we can’t know, each gaze switched nearly before being sent. Marjani had said to keep the motion in the body nice and small. Focus on the thing that keeps eluding you rather than any distraction, growing not on a linear progression but through another path.

And in the showing, this movement grows in the space outside Roobi’s skin as she turns around the place on her forehead where a unicorn horn would be. To have whipped the horn at Roobi’s velocity would have whipped it off.

But the way she was moving differently, echoing back to the horn on Marjani’s head, illuminated spaces between what I could see and what I could imagine, what I know and what I don’t. But beyond these vague invocations of the unknown, there is specificity. There’s texture to the movement of Emcees/Lyricists, history to the stories of Emcees/Lyricists, sounds richer than this text alone can convey.

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Benedict Nguyen is a dancer, writer, and curator based in the South Bronx, NY. Benedict has recently performed in the works of José Rivera Jr., Sally Silvers, and Monstah Black. Their writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Culturebot, Dance Magazine, and Shondaland, among others. As the 2019 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at ISSUE Project Room, they developed a multidisciplinary platform soft bodies in hard places. They're sometimes online @xbennyboo and compile essay-memes for their newsletter, first quarter moon slush.

Our conversation loops through his set up, dives down into the personal, flies around “poetry,” into laughter, back to the set up, time travels in a backwards/forwards spiral toward the work he’s making now. Later, at our third meeting, he draws this set up in my notebook. See: he’s got this library of language he’s cultivated through interviews, words spoken and written and read by others, mostly poets and scholars, mostly women of color—words he’s studied enough to treat as a medium; dials for shaping the sounds’ resonances, their emergence into and creation of a physical space; backing tracks he’s composed along with Aon (Pablo Chea); and a looping station, familiar, key to the sense of a live mind responding by returning, by combining, listening through the creation of sound.

In my notes and memory, I realize that my questions about how this set up works are full of bad metaphors, binaries (the human versus the technological) that I don’t believe in, do I? James’ responses are a creativity of patience—guiding me at one point toward Eshu, Yoruban trickster god of the crossroads, the fader, divining with his palm nuts on a platter, stylus reading the groove—mythic and linguistic ancestry for the turntable. In translating the technical aspects of his production of sound and language for Turning Towards a Radical Listening, Sprang’s care feels sacred, feels joyful; this care insists on language (just one way to organize sound) as a constantly and multiply mediated phenomenon, a kind of deadly miracle. His work as GAZR has entered a new stage, moving from speaking to listening, from, he says, “poet-rapper” to “listener, doing the work of a poet.” The complexly musical, social, and psychological space-times orchestrated by GAZR’s deep energy, in word and body, have phased from the exterior toward the interior—though the medium of sound is always playing with the distinction. This performance is a work to practice, to cultivate, to model, to argue for a virtuosity of listening.

To begin, this one time: the looping rhythmic knock of the skip hop of a needle on vinyl; GAZR’s voice asking Google’s Speech API to recognize and display certain words in the document projected on the central screen, take familiar actions (“SELECT ALL!” he speaks then shouts into one mic dangling from the studio ceiling, then the other)—and the failure of his rising voice to be recognized. The audience laughs at the program’s failure to do its job, but, built into the DNA of this performance is the fact of technology’s bias—highlighted by the work of scholar Safiya Noble (i), whose interview he cites and mixes. I hear a primer in the hum throbbing over the skip, maybe a tuning of the body to the dynamics of sound. The shriek up and shred down that shuffles the ears toward what becomes loosened and attenuated in the body as he elevates the frequencies or rolls them low, shifts the balance, alters the kind of space the sound comes from.

And then the words land, bubbling up from a pitch. Words that speak, in my ears, to the problem of having and being had by a colonizer’s language: English, to long for other languages. To need it to survive, and to be historically and systematically misheard. Amber Rose Johnson says, “This language which is the only language that I have, that is mine, is also not, and never will be.” What happens, sonically, is wildly more and less than this sentence, simply rendered in text. GAZR’s live mixing transmits, amplifies, degrades, hones, and mediates these sounds, words from his library—working the levels, weaving tracks like paths and directions toward and away from access, reception, comprehension. All the while Google’s Speech API is “listening,” “translating” the sounds it hears into that projected text behind him, generating its own poetry. Conceptually as well as sonically, GAZR builds toward intersectional lessons in the form of questions: How is listening a kind of mixing? How do we learn by altering what we hear? How can a greater awareness of the ways technology organizes our sound intervene, at the physical level, in how and who we hear?

Words flutter, unfurl, pound, and leap amid crisis sounds, doom sounds, peace sounds. I recognize the voice of Claudia Rankine, reading from the Stop-and-Frisk / Script for Situation video in Citizen. The mix haunts me, haunts itself with “so angry you can’t drive yourself sane.” (ii) The crawling iterations of a looped phrase, ticked below a choral wave—voice against voice, patterned in different increments—the emergence, disappearance, and return of certain words inside of his live mixing: “mine” / “we need.” GAZR tells me mixing codes moves into his physicality, bumping and leaning into small gestures spiraling out. Google’s program wants to turn off because it’s overwhelmed. It shouldn’t be uncanny that there’s something “human” about the computer’s variable ease or struggle, its uneven error. Some voices in the mix are “heard” by the voice-to-text program more accurately than others—specifically mine, emitting from this white body. GAZR’s work suggests the same could be said of us as individual bodies: that a desire to hear, to understand does not outmuscle the structural biases we inherit through language, context, culture. Complicity with the problem is not optional; it is a function of language, of our tools.

Witnessing this performance, GAZR invites you to feel into what you do with sound, to attend to yourself as you listen for what you hear when a sentence becomes a word, becomes a phoneme, becomes a beat, becomes attenuated into a string digitally plucked: Can you hear (in yourself) the stakes in what moves you? Do you want to dance (with me)? Who gets to make meaning (inside you) when they speak?

In Cold Enough To Levitate, Christina Masciotti—herself both American language wrangler in a long humanist tradition and forward-looking manipulator of material elements towards a naturalism of reverberation—brings her sniper-like attention to the effects of this cheap trance on Frankie, a war veteran, cop, and accused embezzler, as a window onto a vast societal ping pong of malady and self-medication. 

At the beginning of her BAC residency process, Masciotti and her director Mallory Catlett, along with their light and sound designers, were experimenting with deconstructing the slot machine’s functions as a means of washing play and audience in its staccato rhythms as mood stabilizer and saboteur. By the time I visited the rehearsal room in mid November, a few days before their showings, her focus had shifted to Frankie—constructing in the sharpest of detail the human being in front of the machine, the man at the center of the play. 

Walking into the rehearsal room mid-scene, I found Frankie facing a machine that would be made manifest in light and sound, talking to himself, through himself, his lawyer George behind him, shuttling between George’s questions and the machine’s lull.

One quick, quiet beat after the scene breaks Masciotti looks to the actor playing Frankie, and says simply “guiltish.” He nods, understanding. I am confused. 

They work through a few scenes again. “I’d feel less guiltyish if it didn’t affect them so much,” Frankie says of his parents in response to a question from George. Suddenly I understand too. The actor had accidentally changed Masciotti’s phrasing with a “y” that belonged to the word in the wider world, but not in the vocabulary of the man who had presented himself in her mind as protagonist.

Again the scene breaks. A beat. Again Masciotti says “guiltish.” The actor takes a moment, nods. The next time through he gets it right.

What differentiates Masciotti from the majority of language-attuned American playwrights is that fundamentalist precision, underpinned by an unabashed attentiveness to particularity of place; what differentiates her from almost every playwright attentive to particularity of place is that she is most often focused on places (in this case her native Reading, Pennsylvania) that don’t frequently command art’s attention; what differentiates her from the few living playwrights sharing both of these attentions is that her attention to individuality is equally sharp. She writes people, not functions in plot, but discreet individual human beings shaped not only by the sounds of place, but by their own idiosyncratic circumstances, genetics, fascinations, and tics. Thick, textured American people who do boring, shitty, regular things. Masciotti’s characters don’t live in Brooklyn or Portland, or any of the vaguely interchangeable revitalized industrial districts or exurban clumps of capital threaded between them.

Roughly a century ago, in 1921, Luigi Pirandello had this audacious formalist idea to put six characters in search of an author onstage, to make the major conceit of an evening at the theater the suggestion that the characters themselves had lives, that all they really needed was a medium, a channeling ringmaster with an eye towards coherence to arrange them into circumstance. Pirandello raised the curtain on the playwright’s mind; in so doing he also exposed the confessional booth in which character and playwright had been communing secretly at least since Ibsen and Chekhov began attempting to put life as they saw it on stage.

Playwrights have been figuring out how to negotiate the demands of their characters and the awareness of their audiences ever since. In contemporary American theater, from the most radical formal experimentation to the tightest Broadway cause and effect dramas, we are for the most part awash in authors ignoring characters. For some, it is a point of pride; for others there is simply little recognition that characters are people too.

And then we have Christina Masciotti.

When I see her work I have the sense that she waits with ceaseless patience in bus stations and doctor’s offices and anterooms of bureaucracy for anyone with a sharp, particular voice, a small story not being told, a pay grade lower than the typical theatergoer, and too many mounting concerns to recognize their place in a larger system.

The way Frankie drew her back from sound and light is not surprising. It separates Masciotti as much from Pirandello as from her peers. Without full people along for the ride, audience has little to take away from formalist adventure. If the particular is the pathway to the universal, Christina Masciotti is the medium of which the contemporary American character is most in need.

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Ben Gassman is a playwright from Queens. Sam's Tea Shack, a piece he co-created with Sam Soghor and Meghan Finn, was presented this past fall by The Tank in NYC and by Barker Room Rep in Los Angeles. Gassman, along with director Brandon Woolf, is a 2018 Artist-In-Residence at the Performance Project of University Settlement, where they will be launching their new collaborative endeavor, Culinary Theater. bengassman.com.

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Known for the technological sophistication of his performances, working in a studio at BAC with its large, open space, floor-to-ceiling windows and relatively spare tech set-up presented a new opportunity. “I had gone on some writing residencies – I told myself I was ‘writing by programming’ but I wasn’t. I’d bring all my gear, set it up, make sure it was all working and all of a sudden the time was up.” So he decided to take this time at BAC to investigate storytelling techniques and dramaturgy, do some writing to explore the major ideas of the piece with collaborators sound designer/composer Bobby McElvor and performer/choreographer Alicia Ohs.

“I don’t really know exactly where the idea for this show [FIELD] came from,” he tells me. “I started making sketches after YOUARENOWHERE was in COIL [Performance Space 122’s January festival] but that was about it.”

One of the origin points for FIELD, was Robert Irwin’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a book he had encountered previously. “I had always liked the Light and Space art movement, but I didn’t know why. Reading Irwin I realized I liked the work because the ideas he was investigating are ideas I’m interested in investigating too.”

Schneider’s newfound insight and renewed interest in Light and Space was further stoked by seeing the James Turrell retrospective at LACMA while he was in Los Angeles performing in The Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals.

“I became fascinated by the idea that there is a point when you become aware of your own perceptions. When you’re perceiving your own perceptions, seeing yourself see, this is where the experience happens. And making a show about that would be an incredibly hard thing to do – so I thought I should do it.”

Hearing Schneider describe his creative practice, he is part magpie, part explorer: he surrounds himself with books, images, digital media files, notebooks, laptops, software and sketches – anything  that captures his eye and imagination – then starts to arrange, edit, accrete, re-arrange and edit again, worrying at the edge of an idea until things start to come into focus.

Schneider takes what one might call a “rapid prototyping” approach to making performance. His “writing” technique involves both writing in the traditional sense – at BAC he kept an always-growing Google doc for writing new text and tracking ideas – as well as programming, assembling and editing digital media in Ableton Live.

This approach proved useful when Schneider and collaborators had the idea for what he jokingly refers to as FIELD’s “hallucination ballet” sequence, and then realized they needed more performers to see how the piece operated.

“I didn’t need the people, I just needed people!” he laughs. He reached out to Rosemary Quinn at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing who sent over some students. “Basically I wanted to set up the parameters for the sequence and then ‘run the simulation’.”

By giving the performers in-ear microphones to feed them text and direction and having the scenes cued and played through the Ableton Live software, Schneider could have the performers up and running, literally, with little to no rehearsal or preparation. “We ended up with this crazy 15 minute scene with the kids just running all over the place.”

This phase of development was about building material that will work in conjunction – and perhaps opposition – to other pieces of the work already created. Schneider’s most recent work, YOUARENOWHERE, was in some ways a barrage of sensation; a pulsing overwhelm of light, sound and fractured text moving at high velocity. Schneider intuited he had to do something different. “The metabolism of YOUARENOWHERE was that I was always five steps ahead of the audience, so for this show, I started wondering how do we curate the audience’s attention with the opposite of sensory overload?”

Curious about how sensory deprivation – a lack of perceptual input or change – can give rise to hallucinations, Schneider eventually found himself surrounded by Oliver Sacks books, books about mountaineering and about collective hallucinations in explorers. A new series of questions began to arise: “Can we stage hallucinations in a way that isn’t like a realistic play?” “What would storytelling through hallucinations look like?” “Can we make a shared hallucination?” “Is it possible to induce hallucinations or at least get people to think they’re hallucinating?”

An earlier residency at EMPAC was focused on lighting, stage effects and sound spatialization using High Order Ambisonics (HOA), a technology for 3D audio spatialization that is every bit as space-age as it sounds. “Right now I think the first part of the show will not be presenting the eye with a lot of visual information, we’re going to work mostly with the 3D soundscape.” He cites Elevator Repair Service’s Room Tone as a major influence.

At a moment where so much of live theater is captivated by the so-called “immersive” and “interactive”, and where the media world has become enamored of Virtual Reality, few artists are so thoughtfully, rigorously, playfully and successfully interrogating the nature (and location) of human experience itself. Schneider uses sophisticated digital age tools alongside the traditional practices of stagecraft (he started his career in musical theater!) to create visceral, engaging performances that leave audiences questioning reality and the authenticity of their own experience without ever leaving their seats or donning goggles. He nests layers of ideas and information together and delivers them in unexpected but accessible ways.

One of the great thrills of experiencing Andrew Schneider’s work – whether in development or in its final form – is the exhilaration of entering into the unknown followed by the joy of discovery. We might not be able to articulate what we’ve found, but we know we’ve been through something extraordinary.

I ask him if FIELD is likely to have any surprises as startling as YOUARENOWHERE and he laughs. “Right now there are no spoilers – but I don’t know if that will stay the same.”

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Andy Horwitz is Director of Programs at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. From 2010-2013 he worked as the Director of Public Programs for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council where he curated The River To River Festival, a free, month-long multidisciplinary arts festival at sites throughout Lower Manhattan. Previously he worked as Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Foundation for Jewish Culture, Producer at Performance Space 122, and, from 2007-2009, as co-curator of the PRELUDE Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center at CUNY. A well-regarded critic as well as an administrator, Andy is the founder of the website Culturebot.org and a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for his project Ephemeral Objects: Art Criticism for the Post-Material World.

And yet it does. Navarra Novy-Williams rolls across the stage, out of her unbuttoned white shirt, under which there is a blue shirt, and then rolls out of the blue shirt, under which there is another white shirt. Denisa Musilova tracks her movements, close by, perhaps even initiating them, her steps and Navarra’s rolling hard-synched, while upstage, Sara Gurevich tracks them both, more frenetically. The process of disrobing and tracking iterates, until Navarra has rolled everything off except her own clothes.

A body adorned with costumes--these colors signify characters--becomes a body that is uniquely itself. We strip the character out of the player and then the playing stops. Mark reminds us that this work is made of real people with real stories; that myth, narrative, opera, all targets for his grinding up and subsequent reassembly, are themselves the fixed forms into which we pour our own ideas, not the other way around.

Orpheus Unsung is a work about words from which all words have been excised. Based on and composed from a text, moving across physical space in the ways that language moves, it derives its power from work that words are tasked with performing but that movement, costume, image, and sound are challenged to do, charged with doing, representing and signifying in a spider’s web, inhabiting an idea but never fully containing it. This is what the music does, Steven Mackey’s extraordinary counterpoint and color built out of looping, alternate tuning, and an orchestral approach to the guitar, and Jason Treuting’s physiological lock into these complex rhythmic strata ranging from whisper to roar.

This is what white and blue shirts, purchased earlier from the Salvation Army store, are doing. Eurydice is white and Orpheus is blue, that much we know, but when three dancers share two garments, one of each color, in the wedding scene, what are we seeing?  As they move each others’ bodies, folded together, entangled, who is doing the positioning and who is being positioned? Which body? Or which character, or which human being standing in the Baryshnikov Arts Center on a particular evening in March, taking direction?

This work meditates on the failings of words by asking mute languages to speak. We can read Ovid’s “thin story,” as Mark describes its length, but also perhaps the quality of its veiling, and understand the operations. Orpheus Unsung offers us those operations but takes up their subsequent embodiment, in culture, as a living text, a co-author. Then it radically dismantles this text, subverts every co-author who has ever played Orpheus one-to-one: a character, a costume, an actor linked to particular deeds, particular words. Here Eurydice and Orpheus are free radicals, energies that sound and bodies conjure but never ground.

This lightness is palpable in the room, a real space inhabited by real bodies but brought into weightlessness by the building of collaborative community, the “innocent place” Mark describes, “where everyone is your friend.”

“Everyone,” he continues, “needs to feel like they’re in a space that honors them.”  In honoring these bodies we honor the story, in a sense, but also the process of making a story, a vessel into which we might discard our costumes, becoming free to inhabit our given space in our own clothes.

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Andrea Mazzariello is a composer, performer, writer, and teacher. His work borrows from both popular and art music approaches, and obsesses over technological intervention, instrumental technique, and the power of language. So Percussion, NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, and many others have performed his concert music. He’s played shows at venues like the Knitting Factory, the Princeton Record Exchange, Galapagos, and Cakeshop. The Queens New Music Festival, Make Music New York, and the Wassaic Festival have presented his songs and spoken word. Active as an educator, he’s taught at Princeton University, Ramapo College of New Jersey, and the So Percussion Summer Institute. He’s currently Visiting Professor of Music at Carleton College, where he teaches composition, music technology, and music fundamentals.

New York–based artist Maya Ciarrocchi has created videos and projection design for Merce Cunningham, Ping Chong, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono, among others, as well as for regional theaters around the country. Most recently, she designed the video projections for Carmen de Lavallade ‘s one-woman show, “As I Remember It” at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Ciarrocchi’s video installations and single-channel works feature interviews, life-sized durational portraits, and environmental documentation; they invite viewers to contemplate assumptions about communities, individuals, and how identity is constructed. Her subjects have included coal-mining communities in West Virginia (“Overburden”), former ultra-Orthodox Jews who have left their religion (“Frei”), and, the New York dance and performance community in “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?”

She first experimented with video portraiture working on “Necessary Beauty” with Bebe Miller. Prerecorded portraits of the performers were paired and then played in conjunction with voice-over text that didn’t necessarily match the individual portrait.

 Ciarrocchi found when shooting these portraits over the course of just a minute, the subjects would subtly shift their emotional response. The more vulnerable they became in front of the camera, the more viewers could begin to create a narrative. She connects this to her background in dance, and how looking at bodies moving in space creates narratives. There is a design aspect—the shapes the bodies are forming in negative and positive space and were the intersections are—and then there’s how each individual dancer embodies the same space.

 For her durational portraiture, she shoots her subjects for 10 minutes, ample time to deal with the comfort / discomfort of having to look at the camera lens directly throughout. Rather then asking her subjects to stare at the camera, she asks them to consider their future viewer.

 In “Gender/Power (composition II),” which Ciarrocchi developed in residency at BAC along with collaborator Kris Grey, a video installation featuring three side-by-side durational portraits precedes the entrance of the performing bodies; they appear to inhabit the same space, unaware of each other. The performance also utilizes a combination of full body video portraiture and a distillation of close-up and re-framings, postural and gestural aspects of gender performance condensed or extracted into performative actions.

 While in residency at BAC, as the team began braiding the text, they returned to an original concept of the work, about transposition—of stories, bodies, and image. Ciarrocchi began to layer the portraits she had shot in a variety of ways so that parts of the image could be seem through other parts, and as subjects move, the image completely shifts. The visuals reflect and offer an unpacking of what’s being said in the text.

 Both Grey and Ciarrocchi are interested in revealing how particular ideologies are lived, performed, or transcribed onto the body. “Gender/Power” examines the subject of gender and authority by making visible the personal narratives of performers who have made specific decisions to disrupt or subvert gender signifiers. At its core, “Gender/Power” is about how we make snap judgments about people because we don’t really take the time to actually look at them, beyond skin deep.

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Brian McCormick’s training in performing and video arts brought him to the School of Media Studies at The New School (TNS) where he earned his MA in 1996 and joined the faculty in 1997. Around the same time, he began working with Nicholas Leichter, whose dance company he managed for 15 years. In addition to teaching media design, Brian developed and currently teaches a seminar on media and performance, and a production course on social media design & management. For over 20 years, he has been working with young people, producing a ‘zine with homeless teens, leading a creative writing and performance meet-up with LGBT poets, and collaborating with the nationally recognized Teen Reviewers and Critics (TRaC) program—for which he has taught arts criticism for over ten years, and developed a media-based workshop in partnership with SONY Wonder Technology Lab. Since 2012, he has led the BAC After School Critical Response program at Baryshnikov Arts Center. He is currently researching how performing arts organizations are using social media for arts marketing and engagement.