3 years of interdisciplinary processes theorizing that “any size mirror is a dictator.” A collaboration between PPL and drearysomebody (Lindsey Drury).
Emphasizing and intentionally highlighting the paradoxes and problems that arise from attempts to reflect, we practice futile and tragic acts of construction. We play out inevitable decays of social groupings into fascistic systems as the result of any closed mirror for “a” culture, regardless of its methodology for closure.
Music composition is by Brian McCorkle, Choreography by Lindsey Drury, Libretto text and direction by Esther Neff, project conceptualization and production in collaboration. Performances/processes during Governor's Island Art Fair, chashama's Harlem Art Factory Fest, at CORA dance, Gibney Dance, Dixon Place, ISSUE: Project Room during the Movement Research Spring Festival, 2014, during AUNTS, at Flux Factory, Firehouse Space, and in sketch form as duo performances by Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle at IV Soldiers, Grace Exhibition Space, songs written for and through performance practices 2012-2014.
In culmination, 7 weeks of processes were performed at Momenta Art, September 5-October 19, 2015, all free and open to the public:
WEEK 0 sept 5-7: ACCEPTABLE OBJECTIVES FOR ART
--Friday Sept 5th: Opening Party with lectures and roundtable
--Saturday and Sunday: 3pm-9pm lectures and special previews
(GUESTS: Joanna Spitzner, Michael Newton, Igor Rodriguez and Carolyn Agis)
WEEK 1 sept 11-14: CONFUSE MEANS TO POUR TOGETHER
Open 3-9pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Opera performance
(GUESTS: David Grollman, Flin van Hemmen, Cory Bracken)
WEEK 2 sept 18-21: COGNIZING SELF
Open 3-9pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Opera performance
(GUESTS: David Ian Griess)
WEEK 3 sept 25-28: SIGNIFICANT FORCES OF FEELING
Open 3-9pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Opera performance
(GUESTS: Brian Questa, Valerie Kuehne, Sean Ali, Jason Anastasoff, Tom Swafford)
WEEK 4 oct 2-5: I AM ROOTING FOR HIM
Open 3-9pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Opera performance
(GUESTS: Ryan Krause, Colin Self)
WEEK 5 oct 9-12: WHY DO THERE NO MORE HAPPENSTANCE
Open 3-9pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Opera performance
(GUESTS: Dave Ruder, Erin Rogers, Jen Baker)
WEEK 6 oct 16-19: AGENCY
Open 3-9pm, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Opera performance
(GUESTS: none)
PERFORMED BY: Jessica Bathurst, Lorene Bouboushian, Lindsey Drury, Paige Fredlund, Matthew Gantt, Brian McCorkle, Kaia Gilje, Rene Kladzyk, Thea Little, Sarah McSherry, Butch Merigoni, Ellen O'Meara, Esther Neff, Matthew Stephen Smith and guest musicians each week.
Any Size Mirror is a Dictator is 156 hours of new music and text entwined with task-based choreography. Transposing ideation directly into performance as learning processes, decision-making procedures, and theory-to-form actualizations, Any Size Mirror is a Dictator is a structure about structures. The work is accompanied by a Book containing scores, systems, and notes.
The space is de-hierarchized; audiences are free to come and go and to roam the gallery over the course of each 6-hour performance. Two teams of performers work towards construction of each live performance. The first team, a “rehearsive” ensemble of musicians and performers, uses the opera Book, 41+ fragments and memorized choreographic tasks, text, and through-written music. The performance of this material is an object comprising many smaller objects and attempts to close itself aesthetically around nothing but itself, becoming “Totally Relational Art” in its dedicated attempts to “accurately reflect” auto poetic cultural components, including definably cause-and-effect (Totally Relational) relationships between bodies, objects, perceived contextual frames, and concepts as scores for best practices. The second team, a “recursive” cast, refracts the material of the first team's rehearsed opera through a lens of analysis, explication, and contextualization derived from their own enculturated methodologies.