Thursday June 24th 7:30 PM CDT. Streaming on cotfg's youtube and twitch .
Ghost Play is a cycle of 5 pieces for dancer, electric guitar, and electronics. Each piece utilizes a unique conceptual system for improvisation that was developed over several months. The aim was to create a practice that unroots traditional, hierarchic aspects of creative interaction between dance and sound, and to create an improvisational work that is endlessly in communication with itself.
Each piece is a performance/ritual that serves as an analogy for the way we experience time; specifically the idea that a life or existence is created through the layering of perception as memory over time––and action (and the future) is informed by the essentially unstable, limited nature of memory.
By utilizing non-notated, non-formalized development of themes and gestures, we rely on our memory to guide us from past performances into new iterations which reveal fresh turns and digressions. This interaction reflects our experience of the present––action informed by our innately limited, fragmented, distorted perception of the past through memory. Each iteration is recorded and sampled for use in subsequent performances in the form of processed/distorted audio samples which are played live (randomly generated, outside of the performer’s control) for the improvisers to hear and incorporate into their immediate creative choices. In this way, the piece and the improvisers are in communication with ghosts of themselves. This interaction reveals unexpected developments and directions, symbolizing our inability to fully control what we think of as the future. Combined, these processes become an endless cycle of interactions with fragments or ghosts of our own experiences and actions, and each present moment becomes itself an unreliable figment in communication with future presents.
In addition to this thematic material, we have also developed a wide ranging system of conceptual prompts to inspire our thinking and action for each piece. Some of these ideas and directives include: disintegration, stasis vs momentum, contrast, repetition, divergence, waiting for your 2nd or 3rd impulse to act, moving with the first physical impulse to act, speed, density, working with negative space, visual architectural thinking, etc.
To name and develop individual pieces, we wrote random ideas and inspirations onto little strips of paper after each rehearsal and dropped them into a jar. These strips were then pulled randomly out of the jar and used as the creative impetus for a subsequent performance. Of the many strips of paper we created, we ended up choosing the five pieces that are presented here.
Egg, Seed, Smoke, Lip by Isabel Eatherly Legate
Performed by Isabel Eatherly Legate and Anastasia Vayner. Camera by Nevin Martin.
Isabel Eatherly Legate is a cross-disciplinary artist whose artworks explore shadow feminisms and sensations of (un)becoming. Legate works across drawing, sculpture, video and choreography to animate the ways in which ‘manufactured’ or ‘plastic’ desires move through the body and congeal within our physical anatomies. Legate received her BFA from The Cooper Union (New York, NY) in 2015. She has participated in Darsena Residency (Venice, IT) and Rupert (Vilnius, LT), She has had a solo show at Motel (Brooklyn, NY), and And Now (Dallas, TX), and has exhibited at the LUMA Foundation, Galleria Massimodeluca, The Power Station and MX Gallery. Legate is currently based in Mexico City.