Mai-Thu Perret's Performances | Presented by Nasher Sculpture Center and SOLUNA Music and Arts Festival
This June, Nasher Sightings artist Mai-Thu Perret will stage two performances in collaboration with the Soluna Music & Arts Festival. The first performance will be a restaging of a work entitled Figures, originally performed at the 2014 Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva. Perret’s second performance is a newly commissioned, world premiere entitled o that will function as a series of happenings throughout the Nasher’s building and garden.
For the past 16 years, Perret has been making work born
from a fictional feminist art commune she created called The Crystal Frontier. Under
the aegis of the various inhabitants of this imagined world, Perret collaborated
with her many fictional selves to make works in a variety of media and
disciplines: ceramic, papier-mâché, textiles, literature, and song lyrics. In
recent years, Perret has turned to performance as a way to collaborate with
others outside of The Crystal Frontier, working with friends who specialize in
the various disciplines of dance, choreography, song writing, theater, and
music. With performances such as The
Ballad of a Russian Doll (2010), a musical collaboration between Perret,
singer-song writer Tamara Barnett-Herrin, and musician Nigel Doyle, or Love Letters in Ancient Books (2011),
the artist’s first dance project for the stage that was inspired by George
Herriman’s famous comic book Krazy Kat,
Perret is able to move out of the world of her creation to realize performances
that are relatively self-sufficient and explore her interests beyond her
long-standing work The Crystal Frontier.
With her two performances at the Nasher, Perret presents
works that represent both her recent past, as well as her current areas of
interest. Figures reflects the
artist’s research into woman’s role in the development of computer technology
and the writings of Indian author and former computer programmer, Vikram
Chandra, whose 2013 book Mirrored Mind:
My Life in Letters and Code describes the aesthetics of code writing and
the connections between art and technology. Further influences include Perret’s
readings on meditation and the tantric practices of Kashmir Shaivism, as well
as her fascination with American Utopias and the various religious and
non-religious movements in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th
centuries. These wide-ranging and diverse interests culminate in Figures, which features a life-size
marionette, whose body is animated by dancer Anja Schmidt. During the
performance, the two figures (dancer and puppet) enact an elaborate narrative
that involves an Indian mystic, a 19th-century American Shaker, a 1950s
computer programmer, an Artificial Intelligence, and a journalist. The
performance begins with the dancer and puppet as separate entities, and as it
goes on, the two gradually merge then disappear, to be replaced on stage by a
character with a typewriter (the journalist, played by Perret), who is typing
text that describes the Artificial Intelligence. The staging of the piece
recalls the Japanese style of puppetry known as bunraku, in which
the manipulators appear on stage alongside the puppets, providing a parallel
performance of real and artificial bodies in motion. Vocals sung by
Barnett-Herrin relate the script of the performance that is set to percussive
beats played by musician Beatrice Dillon.
While Figures is
a complex stage performance that focuses on language and movement, o will shift the focus away from
language and lyrics to the juxtapositions of movement and stasis, attack and
decay, amplified and disjointed sound, and pageantry through collective
procession. In a two-week residency in Dallas in May 2016, Perret, together
with Barnett-Herrin, Schmidt, and Dillon, will create the parameters and musical
score that will comprise o to be
performed by students of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist
University. Unlike Figures, which shares
its script with the audience and is performed on a proscenium stage, o will remain largely unscripted and will
disrupt the traditional space between performer and viewer with unexpected
sounds, music, and movements loosely choreographed by Perret and Schmidt. In
this way, o falls into the context of
happenings, a type of performance art coined in 1957 by American artist Allan
Kaprow.
The lineage of happenings can be traced through the various
avant-garde movements of the 20th century: Dada, Surrealism,
Abstract Expressionism, and Fluxus, as well as the deconstruction of
traditional dance as found in the work of dancers Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, and
Steve Paxton. Blending artistic media and incorporating elements of chance, temporality,
and the mundane, happenings revolutionized performance and theater when Kaprow
began staging them in 1957. Artists such as John Cage, who experimented with
musical happenings as early as 1951 at Black Mountain College, and Claes
Oldenburg, who staged Dallas’ first happening in 1962, along with many other
visual artists who developed interests in movement and working with the body (such
as Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and Carolee Schneemann), likewise contributed
to the evolution of dance, theater, and the breaking of the fourth wall. Performance
was no longer confined by a clearly identifiable setting or framework, but it
was now limitless in terms of activities, locations, performers, and audiences.
Perret’s o assumes
the mantle of happenings and experimental performance. During two hours, musicians divided across galleries and throughout the garden will play
intermittently with live and recorded sound, percussive beats, and a range of
musical styles and scales. Dancers will speak and create vocal sounds as they
lead pageants and carry effigies reminiscent of the marionette in Figures, that here relate to images
Perret saw of Roman Catholic processions honoring the Virgin Mary. The title of
the work relates to Perret’s and Barnett-Herrin’s shared interest in speaking
and semiotics: “o” can be a sound, a
discrete word (“Oh!”), as well as a symbol for a circle or the integer zero.
The simple title also refers to primitive languages that begin with sounds and
utterances that are subsequently assigned meanings and become the words of a
developed language.
Blending visual arts with dance,
music, and theater, SOLUNA provides opportunities for international artists
to connect with the broader network of musicians and performers in the Dallas
area. Likewise, the collaboration directly ties into the Nasher’s mission of
challenging traditional notions of sculpture and further promoting the study
and display of sculpture in all its various forms.
—Leigh Arnold, Nasher Sculpture Center Assistant Curator
"Figures": June 2, 2016 at 8:30 p.m. in Nasher Hall | Free with advance registration
"o": June 4, 2016 from 2 to 4 p.m. throughout the Nasher Sculpture Center | Free to members/free with admission