InhaleExhale: An Experiment in Creative Collaboration
InhaleExhale: An Experiment in Creative Collaboration
Saturday, February 29, 2020
6PM Artist Reception + Interactive Activities/7PM Show
Capitol Theater, 206 5th Ave SE, Olympia
Sliding scale tickets $0 to $60. Suggested ticket price $20. Help us make this event accessible to all by buying an extra ticket or two in addition to your ticket. If the suggested ticket price is a hardship, pay what you can or come for free!
InhaleExhale is a multimedia, multidisciplinary conversation series about death and dying curated by Window Seat Media in collaboration with local artists, organizations, and groups.
Our project continues with an experiment in creative collaboration. We invited (mostly local) visual and performing artists to share their questions, ideas, and stories about death and dying through the creation of original works. What resulted was a mosaic of voices and expression. The malleability of memory, the possibility of queer kinship, the interdependence of human and nonhuman, sound and body as conduit and connector, life as celebration...are some threads that weave these works together.
We’re excited to share our experiment and their stories with you! Join us for food, interactive activities, and opportunities to share your story throughout.
Onstage
Into Your Light | Short Film
Fandangoe Kid + Tara Darby
A film about dancing and movement as ritual for survival. Watch.
I'm Ready to See You | Dance
Lucien Spect, Shani Banai, V Hoy, and Hillary Adler, with live music by Z Santos accompanied by Matt Summers
Practicing committed collaboration is one way to prepare ourselves for loss within our communities; in death, we are expected to know how to come together. Without practice that expectation alone can be debilitating.
Our experiment has been to make a dance together, and in doing so explore possibilities of committed queer kinship. The four dancers have been part of other collectivities, but are amateurs in creating collective movement. We met together weekly for 6 months and developed a practice of performing and witnessing our own “authentic movement.” We took turns teaching each other these movements, which over time became our choreography. Together we move joyfully, playfully, intuitively, trusting one another with our movements and development. We continue to dance, committed through disagreements, misunderstandings, frustration, and exhaustion. These are the ways we begin to imagine our commitment to one another in times of struggle, death and life.
In our performance we assemble as a collective body which meanders between two worlds. In one world, intuitive practices of affection and care are stuck; people perform rituals to have done them. In the other world, caring for one another is relieved of preoccupations with perfect reciprocity, and love is expressed rather than displayed; here, both moments of desynchronization and synchronicity are experienced with grace, understood and okay. What does it look like for our collective body to maintain integrity as it moves between these worlds?
Loop | Performance + Dance + Film
Shannon Brooks
Loop is an ongoing duet between a Super-8 film composed of home movies originally taken by my great-grandfather Fredrick Endeman, and my dance with it. The performance is an experiment investigating memory and how it intertwines and manifests in the present performance of the body.
While rephotographing my great-grandfather’s home videos, I invited Frederick’s images to manifest in my body and direct when I captured an image. My body knew when to press record. My grandmother, Jan Taylor, Frederick’s daughter, appears throughout the montage and anchors my relationship to the film. Jan passed away after suffering from Alzhiemer’s for 4-years. Her loss of consciousness runs parallel to my family’s compulsive digital archiving of her life, resulting in a 4-hour, unchronological collage of Jan’s childhood: flashes of the countryside, Labor Day picnics, cheerleading practice, Easter Dinner, or prom illustrate a facade of Western New York Americana. By rephotographing the original footage, I work to transform this history to personally heal the trauma of the slow deterioration of my grandmother’s consciousness, and to challenge the personal and social traumas evoked by the footage.
In the performance, as projectionist and mover, I feed my film into the projector and splice it into a continuous loop and use my body and movement to directly manipulate the speed and direction of Fredrick’s reworked images. Loop invites ghosts into the room and reweaves them into the present, leading to the film’s physical destruction and metamorphosis.
Sanctus | Short Film
Barbara Hammer
Sanctus is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisible, visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems. Sanctus portrays a body in need of protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate.
Well of Souls + Beauty | Choir Performance
Nomy Lamm & the Sacred Fragments Ecstatic Choir
These songs were birthed in a lake in the summertime, and have yearned to be sung by many voices. Well of Souls is a reference to the Jewish custom of Mikveh, or Ritual Immersion; the idea is that when you submerge in the water, you melt back into the well of souls that you came from, and emerge renewed. Beauty is a celebration of life, the spark of manifestation that lives inside each of us and seeks its time and place to be expressed.
Artwork + Activities
For Whom the Bell Toils | Interactive Art Installation
Casey Middaugh
For Whom The Bell Toils is an interactive art installation designed to make space for acknowledging and honoring the grief and work around the end of life. This piece is made of a wide variety of bells, all labeled with some sort of labor required at the end of life and after death. Viewers are invited to ring the bells that resonate with their own experiences, creating a melody of their labor and grief. Additional bells and labels are available for viewers to add new experiences that had not been previously included allowing for a dynamic, collaborative growth within the piece.
Stages:Infernae | Visual Art
At the center of her artistic and sociological practice, Sylvia is interested in what people, animals, and materials do when they are liberated to act and move freely, or become too close to be recognizable. Inspired by patterns found in natural phenomena, Stages:Infernae depicts the meeting of faceless ghosts, investigates the possible symbolic and metaphysical landscape of death, the battle, and convergence between light and darkness.
Reduction Wish I & II | Visual Art
Confronting emotional and survival theory, this work offers two ultimate sentiments which address the way in which both time and health are fleeting.
Veil Between | Art Installation
Eyevin Lucia
A static representation of the transition from one major life phase to the next. Through a suggestion of the physical space in which death occurs. An illustration of a moment.
More works coming soon!
Artist Bios
Anne McGowan
Anne is a visual artist living in Port Townsend, WA. Formerly an athlete, she often experiments in and questions the translation of movement and speed. She studied at The Evergreen State College and now works as a studio assistant and designer in the ancient tradition of mural wallpaper. She is a member of Corvidae Press, a fine-arts printmaking guild in Fort Worden State Park.
Casey Middaugh
Casey is an event producer and community organizer. She has produced, designed, and run events at Figment NYC, The Barbican Centre in London, 12th Ave Arts in Seattle, and more. Casey holds a MMus Leadership from The Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Casey can be reached at caseymiddaugh@gmail.com or follow her on twitter @casitareina
Eyevin Lucia
Early twenties visual thinker. brain which creates pictures most easily. Originally from Minneapolis, with deep ties to the heart of the beast puppet theatre. This is not their first effort of creating puppets but has definitely felt like a fresh moment in creation.
Lucien Spect
Lucien is a writer, dancer, and musician. He volunteers with No One Dies Alone, sometimes sitting vigil with people who are dying, and has facilitated grief support groups for teenagers. He studied literary arts at Evergreen and is ¼ of the writing and theory collective, Sundae Theory.
Nomy Lamm + the Sacred Fragments Ecstatic Choir
The Sacred Fragments Ecstatic Choir is an experiment in group energetics, raising energy through vocal collaboration. Directed by Nomy Lamm, Sacred Fragments Ecstatic Choir sings immersive and expansive songs that invite participation. Their name, SacredFragments, is a reference to the Kabbalistic idea of the broken vessel, the divinity that lives in all things, in everything broken and yearning for communion. This is the choir’s first public offering.
Shani Banai
I am so grateful to get to move with these people. It means a lot to be freaks together, to be weird and vulnerable. I am not a dancer, but these are my friends.
Shannon Brooks
Shannon Brooks' practice is a playful exploration merging the creator with viewer and colliding the real with the imaginary. Brooks works with the body, video, and film to expand art experiences in order to create interactive environments emphasizing dynamic viewership personal and collective engagement.She is also the co-founder of 'Window Room', an art space in southwest Philadelphia dedicated to live and experimental art.
Sylvia Nasreen Chowdhury
Sylvia is a bilingual poet and visual artist.She studies language and power, and works to sustain the transformational and mobilizing qualities of human discourse. She is finishing her first manuscript ,and creating ceramics in her free time.
V Lane Hoy
V Lane Hoy is an interdisciplinary writer, musician, dancer and social worker. They earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Evergreen State College in 2015 and currently work as an advocate for homeless survivors of violence. They’re inspired by enduring collaborations, assemblies, “movements,” and collectives involved in the sticky work of horizontal coordination. In their free time they make dioramas that reenact memories they don’t want to forget.
Z Santos
Filipino worrywart based out of Olympia, WA and NYC. When held up to each other, their songs, poems, and videos form an infinity mirror exploring loneliness, memory, time, all the homes we inhabit and become. This is their first attempt at composing music for dance.
