Descripción de la Exposición
The Gallery at REDCAT presents Chalk Circles, an exhibition and series of related performances and events that consider the ways in which performing and visual arts intersect. Curated by Ruth Estévez and José Luis Blondet, the exhibition Chalk Circles stages a number of ways in which artists think critically about live actions, theater and performance.
The title of the exhibition refers to the well-known play by Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written in Los Angeles in 1944. Brecht’s play is a parable about ownership, affection and justice in which two characters must prove who is a better mother by pulling their baby out of a chalk circle. The chalk circle determines the place of the body within impermanent but accurate limits. The classic geometric shape speaks also of the fragility of such limits: to act/to be, inner truth/public mask, actor/character. A chalk circle can also question overlaps and coincidences of the gallery, the theatrical and the civic space.
Artists in this exhibition document, reimagine, and rearticulate acting methodologies to investigate performance as a form of production, not just as an event-based form. Their projects center on mixed traditions of movement, acting and gesture, as well as pedagogic models. The role of the actor, the figure of the performer, and their different perspectives in the construction of a character inform several projects in the exhibition, while others focus on the frictions of a body in a fictive—theatralized—space.
Chalk Circles features works and commissions by local and international artists who engage in theatricality and performativity as a tool to feed the instability of such terms. Artists included in the exhibition: Carola Dertnig, Dora García and Peio Aguirre, Adrià Julià, Joachim Koester, David Levine, Emily Mast, Silke Otto-Knapp, Santiago Roldós and Pilar Aranda (Muégano Teatro), Catherine Sullivan and Kerry Tribe.
Public Program:
Dora García and Peio Aguirre
Performance, 2016
June 17th, 4 pm
The performance will happen each Wednesday during the duration of the exhibition from 5-6 pm
Readers: Oscar David Alvarez, Peter Kalisch, Georgia Lassner, Juliana Luján, Kat Sayarath and Catherine Scott
Performance is a collaborative work between Spanish artist Dora García and Basque Country based writer Peio Aguirre. The script written by Aguirre is based on conversations that he and Dora García have been having on performance, acting, actors, representation, characters and fiction since 2009. The texts written for five characters and a narrator is based on the characters of the British film “Performance" (1968), starring James Fox, Anita Pallenberg, Mick Jagger and Michale Branton. The performance takes the form of a staged reading, with six characters reading their parts in the script.
Emily Mast
Hold Your Tension, a performance in three parts.
In collaboration with Mikaal Sulaiman
Saturday, June 17 at 6 pm
Sunday, July 16 at 5 pm
Sunday, August 13 at 5 pm
For Chalk Circles, LA based artist EmilyMast presents a new performance in collaboration with Mikaal Sulaiman, a former actor trained in Lecoq technique. Mast uses the duration of the exhibition to develop a performance with Mikaal in which he recounts and performs his own personal history with performance. Sulaiman will retrospectively and subjectively consider his own career inside the institution of theater and share it with the audience. Three iterations of the piece will be presented: one at the earliest stages of its inception, one halfway through, and one “ finished” piece at the end of the exhibition. In this project, Mast “directs” Sulaiman in the telling of his own life’s story. She functions as an ethnographer and biographer interested in learning about what theater means to someone who has had success with it and pointedly chooses to refuse it.
Carola Dertnig
Double Me Double You, 2017
Thursday June 22nd, 7 pm
Collaborators: Lisa Dring, Joshua Morrison, April Totten and Rachel Yezbick
Vienna based artist and professor Carola Detnig presents a new commissioned performance Double Me Double You (2017) in which she analyzes techniques of copying, appropriation, and reenactment in her own work.
Dertnig asks: “What are the differences between a double and a reenactment, copy, or appropriation? In my view, doubling causes a transfer of one’s own ego onto the other ego, enclosing it in a new way. What happens to the ego when one doubles? Does one take possession of the person doubled, appropriating the original artist? Does one become her? Does one take possession of the work from the inside? Or is it entirely different—a relinquishing and surrendering of ego? What emerges in this occupation? A hitherto unknown form of empathy, perhaps, because one is obliged to go outside oneself in order to put oneself inside a person and her work in this way”.
Santiago Roldós and Pilar Aranda (Muégano Teatro, Guayaquil)
Lecture / Performance: Juguetes cerca de la violencia / la destrucción de todas las cosas (Toys close to violence / Destruction of all things)
Saturday, June 24th, 6 pm
According to Roldós and Aranda, Brechtian theater is not interested in the evangelization of the public, but the production and spectacle of the exercise of learning, knowledge and wonder, in order to question drama and representation. This theatrical/performative lecture is an opportunity to learn about the idiosyncratic methodologies followed by Muégano Teatro, who borrow freely from their sources, acting on their anthropophagic interest in the Brechtian didactic theater.
Exposición. 13 dic de 2024 - 04 may de 2025 / CAAC - Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo / Sevilla, España
Formación. 01 oct de 2024 - 04 abr de 2025 / PHotoEspaña / Madrid, España
