33 Swoonings: a multimedia performance
This performance is a gathering of images, music and choreography that express the eternal longing for the sacred and a disarming of language, ancient and digital. Featuring musicians, dancers, including a stilt dancer and video projections, 33 Swoonings draws from Haitian vodou, postures of the Tantric yogi, and mudra in animating/provoking glimpses of ecstasy. Each of the five movements is identified with an element. Ice, the first movement, opens with a collection of cosmograms drawn from diverse sources, ancient to current day. The fifth movement ends with Air. This is the empty heart and the perfect representation of impermanence, dance.
With musicians Ken Butler, Marie Afonso, Rufus Cappadocia, JoJo Kuo and dancers, Vado Diomande, Heathyre Mabin, Belinda Becker, and Lisa Karrer.
Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, 2001;
Tishman Auditorium, New School University, NY, 2002.
Protean Bodies/Circe's Body: a sculpture installation
These sculptures explore the restless human form assembling and dissembling in a ritual space. An installation of small figural sculptures shares space with a whispering and murmuring sound work, "Another Body". The figures are mutations of generative boundaries in frozen moments. The porous boundaries, productive of meaning and possibility, are where fantasy and organism are siblings. We are seeing double in a world that has become the theatre of a coding trickster.
Florence Lynch Gallery, New York, NY, 2003.
With Thanks to Ken Butler, artist/musician and Miguel Frasconi, musician and sound engineer.
Parabolic Arc: a solo performance
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A solo performance with choreography, projection screens and spoken word. Harwood Museum, Taos, New Mexico, 2005. Thanks to the Harwood Museum, Siena Sanderson and Mark Goldman. |
Sewing Songs: a multimedia performance
Voices and images of an oracle, bees, and the sea are stitched together in a live and digital mix which meanders through and is projected upon a 100 foot garment.
This performance, interweaving live music, video and choreography is a variety of contrasts facing off in noise and silence. Chaos in a tango with the honeyed order of bees creates strange elastic couplings between corporeal and incorporeal things. “Sewing Songs” first evolved during time spent with beekeepers and with both fairytales and science fiction in mind. It is a meditation on the place of touch in the disembodying matrix of technology and science.
The footage incorporates excerpts from four different performances of “Sewing Songs” in Lacoste, France (2001), Palazetti Gonfalone, Rome (2003), Bard College (2003), and New York’s Tishman Auditorium (2003).
This work is a precursor to “Precise Breathing”, a large scale installation about the honeybee.
Special Thanks to: Lisa Karrer, Ken Butler, Miguel Frasconi, Sokhna Heathyre Mabin, Marie Afonso and her Wata Voices choir, Hap Tivey, Bard College, The New School University, Robert Pardo, Galerie Le Bateleur, The William T. Hillman Foundation, and Pratt Institute development
Grupo Cuerpo: an international call and response
Grupo Cuerpo, a multimedia collaborative call and response between people across cultures, is an homage to oral culture. Initiated in a community in France in 2001, people were invited to introduce themselves using gestures only. The varied expressions of the face and body were integrated into projections during live performances. Communities in Tunisia, France, Brooklyn, and New Mexico “introduce” themselves, responding to previous participants from other societies. During workshops with each community, participants curated imagery and music engaged in their performance.
This project brings together people of all ages and nationalities encouraging a sense of our common humanity.
Jenny Lynn McNutt, Director / Producer
Special Thanks to: Martine Robin, Mohammed Ali Essaadi, Kaouther Chennaoui, Laghmani Foundation, Tunisian Ministry of Environment and Culture, Yaxche Foundation, The Harwood Museum, Siena Sanderson, and Talissa Mehringer.
France, Yaxche School, Taos, New Mexico, Brooklyn NY, The Laghmani Institute, Tunisia 2001-2006
Archive: Performance