Music, Dance, Performance

Artists:

Tamara Alegre (CH/ES), Antonia Baehr (DE), Latifa Laâbissi(FR) & Nadia Lauro ( FR), Pedro Barateiro (PT), Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz (PT), Alexandre Estrela (PT), Vasco Mendonça (PT), Nguyen + Transitory (DE/SG) and Kat Válastur (GR).

Joan Jonas is a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts.

Jonas' investigation of subjectivity and objectivity is articulated through an idiosyncratic, personal vocabulary of ritualized gesture and self-examination. Often performing in masks, veils, or costumes, Jonas uses disguise and masquerade to study the personal and cultural semiotics of female gesture and symbols. The layering of mirrors and mirrored images is one of her most powerful metaphorical devices. Among Jonas' signature formal strategies are the manipulation of theatrical and video space, the use of drawing to add a rich density of texture and content, and objects that convey meaning as cultural icons, archetypes and symbols. The overlap of mirrors and reflected images is one of its most remarkable and presences in your work.

In relation with the exhibition "Joan Jonas" at the Serralves Museum, the performing arts program will present the reconfigurations of the Mirror Check (1970) and Mirror Piece I & II: Reconstrution (1969/2018-19), at the Serralves Park and Auditorium, in the context of the inauguration and in the XI Edition of the Serralves in Festival.

Mirror Piece I & II was first performed in the program BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights, curated by Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance), Isabelle Maidment, Assistant Curator of Performance, and Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator of International Art (Film), 16-25 Mar, 2018, Tate Modern.

Mirror Piece I & II and Mirror Check reconstruction and presentation at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art is realized by Joan Jonas together with Nefeli Skarma.

Mirror Check is performed by Catarina Marcos and Mirror Piece I & II is performed by Catarina Marcos, Catarina Vilar Marques, Diana Oliveira Vieira, Douglas Melo, Guilherme de Sousa, Helena Martos, Jessica Guez, Josefa Pereira da Silva, Leonor Mendes, Liliana Oliveira, Magda Almeida, Sancha Meca Castro, Sara Santervás, Teresa Queirós and Valentina Parravicini.

Image: Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece I, 1969, performance, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1969. Photo by Joan Jonas  © 2019 Joan Jonas

Company marks the re-encounter of João dos Santos Martins with the team from Continued Project (2015), giving continuity to the processes of collaboration and research begun at that time, then marked by relationships of labor and affection. Company invests aesthetically in the idea of dance as work, using, for this purpose, case studies that examine the systematization of the movement of factory workers in relationship to machines, from which emerges a concept of choreography as technology or as prosthesis. In parallel, it echoes on how certain dance aesthetics, with libertarian and democratic ambitions, are involved in the reduction of stress points in the body, implementing techniques of efficiency in the performance of a gesture and the use of energy that release effort as an alternative to the rigid "modernity”.

Company deals both with work and well-being by considering the way in which dance — as a production canon of reciprocal pleasure (of the spectator, but also of the dancer), and thus difficult to identify socially as labor — interacts with its ways of doing. And while the idea of "company” invokes an hegemonic form of structural and administrative organization in dance, it also implies a common mode of labor: company as a fact or a condition of existence and of being with the other, as a way of providing friendship or pleasure to a group of people in a society.

[Image: José Carlos Duarte]

[Image: Alice Ripoll]

[Image: José Carlos Duarte]

[Image: Marco D'Agostin]

Controversial and provocative choreographer, Robyn Orlin has continuously pushed the boundaries of performance and dance in the 20 years that she has been creating work. Orlyn has worked in diverse media including film, theatre, dance and opera to analyze and reflect open issues around culture, history and identity. For her latest creation, this series of images reveals a blue-skinned figure, dressed in a robe, floating like a meditative divinity against a backdrop of landscapes and deserted architectures. This silhouette and its "search for a place”, like a naïve art icon embedded in the midst of the ruins of different landscapes, is that of Albert Khoza, a young South African performer whose condition cristallizes the questions that Robyn Orlin puts, unrelentingly, to post-apartheid society in South Africa.Controversial and provocative choreographer, Robyn Orlin has continuously pushed the boundaries of performance and dance in the 20 years that she has been creating work. Orlyn has worked in diverse media including film, theatre, dance and opera to analyze and reflect open issues around culture, history and identity. For her latest creation, this series of images reveals a blue-skinned figure, dressed in a robe, floating like a meditative divinity against a backdrop of landscapes and deserted architectures. This silhouette and its "search for a place”, like a naïve art icon embedded in the midst of the ruins of different landscapes, is that of Albert Khoza, a young South African performer whose condition cristallizes the questions that Robyn Orlin puts, unrelentingly, to post-apartheid society in South Africa.

Com Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza.

Juliana Huxtable is a writer, poet, multimedia artist, DJ and LGBT activist. Her works explores the intersections of race, gender, queerness and identity. Originally from Texas, Huxtable moved to New York where she is a founder of the transgender inclusive parties Shock Value and member of the collective House of Ladosha. She is the published author of two books where we can find poems, performance scripts and essays. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum and New Museum in New York and at the ICA and Frieze Projects in London. At Serralves, she presents Triptych, a music performance for electronics, voice, harp, drums and video. Triptych is an assemblage of sounds rooted in Huxtable’s workshopping with frequent collaborator Joe Heffernan and the harpist Ahya Simone, exploring the experience of a subject dissolving into their flesh through fear, joy or excitation.

Image: Juliana Huxtable. Photo by Nathan Bajar (New York Times)

Image: Maria Hassabi, Staging (2017) — undressed. Installation view at Aarhus City Hall, Denmark, as part of Aarhus 2017. Photo © Thomas Poravas.

Guests performers: Volmir Cordeiro, Latifa Laâbissi and  Stephen Thompson

The convergence of interests and respective research on the question of the motif and the ways in which it is perceived have led Zeena Parkins and the scenographer Nadia Lauro to jointly develop the visual installation and musical performance ‘Stitchomythia’.

‘Stitchomythia’ is an anamorphic carpet designed for performers, whose optical motifs, the topography in anamorphosis - and the perceptual disorder that emanates from them - constitute a musical score unfolded at the scale of the space.

On one hand, ‘Stitchomythia’ follows the paths of ‘Anamorphic Rug’, a visual installation created by Nadia Lauro and inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Shining’, a film in which the Hotel Overlook, the film's main character, becomes a landscape, a threat, an organism. Lauro snatches the famous geometric carpet from the film’s original fiction and re-thinks it in a space even more constrained than that of the corridors of the hotel. A fictional shift that builds a trompe-l'oeil topography. The two-dimensional carpet gives the uncanny illusion of folds, hollows, waves, hills and ground movements. An anamorphic fiction, this carpet constitutes an optical device governed by the laws of "the art of the secret perspective". Lauro created two versions of this device, first for ‘Augures’ of E.Huynh and then for ‘Chut’ of F. de Chaillé, resulting in a perceptive ambiguity for the viewer, between the visual illusion of a landscape in relief and the bi-dimensional reality on which the performers evolve.

On the other hand, ‘Stitchomythia’ relates to ‘Lace’, an ongoing project that Zeena Parkins begun in 2008, based on a collection of lace fragments from, to date: Scotland, Turkey, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and France. It is a multi-movement composition for improvisers, that proposes lace as a score which viewed from varied distances is perceived as picture, with patterns flip-flopping between near and far illusionary points of view. 

The result is a multitude of readings suggested by the shapes of the patterns e by the patterns of the shapes - here juxtaposed, layered, overlapped, adjacencies side stepped; actions forming and re-forming, with the supreme joy and possible grounding orientation of the groove. Here is a loop/in a loop/in a loop, a picture of itself, within itself, mise en abyme; shapes to gesture, a gossamer web sounding.

‘Stitchomythia’ offers a space / partition disquiet in its extreme visibility, oscillating between dangerous obsession and bewitchment.

With: André Alves, Marta Ângela, Nicholas Bussmann, Marcos Cavaleiro, Lucile Desamory, Yusuf Ergün, Michael Guggenheim, Margareth Kammerer, Rudi Katholnig, Eduard Mont de Palol, Leonor Narciso, Rico Lee, Aaron Snyder, Helga Utz

Coming from improvised music, Berlin composer, improviser and conceptual artist Nicholas Bussmann has been developing concepts and algorithms for collective performances. Sets of simple rules make it possible to let amateurs and professionals be part of the creative process. 

With "Wandering Dunes” again the collective process itself is the topic for proposing the involvement of the audience in an active position, as they can decide if they just want to watch or play. Inspired by the sandbox games, the performance traces links between territory maps and frontiers, strategy and war games, kindergartens and imagination fields in a performance featuring several game leaders and a wandering small choir and musicians. While the multi-language choir Cottbusser Chor performs "The News Trilogy” (of which the first and second parts were presented at Serralves Museum in 2015), the other musicians’ performances refer to nomadic communities still existing in Europe.

Therefore, the piece sets in motion a dialogue between three cornerstones: territory, power and creativity. On one side stand the power games and imagination rooted in the past and envisioning the future and, on the other side, the vanishing nomads anchored in the present and resisting settled ownership rules. 

This is the second iteration of "Wandering Dunes” which was premiered in Innsbruck, at Taxispalais/Kunsthalle Tirol on June 2018, in the context of Nicholas Bussmann’s solo show, ‘Amelica’. 

Image: Nicholas Bussmann, Sandbox game WANDERING DUNES, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, 2018. Photo: Günter Kresser

Support: Goethe Institut

Netherlands / Australia / Brazil / Finland / Austria

Spain / Germany

Curator: Rui Eduardo Paes 

Portugal / United Kingdom

Image (c) Locus Athens

Julie Nioche

Aprox. duration 1h

Age rating > 12

Imagem: Nos Amours © Pierre Grosbois

It is a work based on the study of anatomy—on its history and on the perspective of Chinese medicine, physiology and palaeontology—, on iconographic or literary crossings, as well as on empirical experience. Delirium appears so as to destabilise and rename the parts. It is caused by rubbing facts and fiction, by attacking the organs and the tasks they were assigned. The goal is to trigger crises and revolutions that may allow for more freedom when creating the body, and thus to redesign its shapes, gestures and functions in order to broaden its way of being and existing. The first choice is to isolate a body part and cold-heartedly place it in an empty studio. The studies focus on the orifice—the orifice as a passing place, since the transit between the inside and the outside generates delirium. To be delirious is to lose it. Given that anatomy is the discipline that names the constituent parts of the body, "Delirious anatomy” also explores the symmetry between the writing process and the choreographic process, between word and gesture. • Ana Rita Teodoro

The early 2000s marked a major turning point in the work of the French composer, Éliane Radigue. After a career almost exclusively dedicated to electronic synthesizers, Radigue began to produce a set of works dedicated to acoustic instrumentation. The first is Naldjorlak I. The inspiration for this work came after Radigue attended a recital by the American cellist, Charles Curtis.

In its Portuguese premiere, Serralves presents the three parts of the Naldjorlak cycle. The title is a compound word invented by Radigue that includes references to the Tibetan language, evoking spiritual Buddhist concepts of unity and respect. The cycle was developed between 2004 and 2009. It is always based on a relationship with virtuoso instrumentalists, and is built through interaction and play with the subtle properties and fragile acoustic phenomena of the musical instruments.

The cycle is played by Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez. Curtis is one of the world’s leading cellists. He has worked with Radigue and also with other leading composers such as La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier.

Robinson is a composer and clarinettist, whose multi-faceted musical life has included performing in the world’s leading classical music concert halls, collaboration with leading composers and choreographers and also more experimental contexts. Martinez is the principal clarinetist-bass at the Paris Opera since 1992, and has played under the direction of composers and conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslawski, Yehudi Menuhin or Esa Pekka Salonen. He also frequently performs as a soloist and chamber musician in France and around the world.

Programme*

17:00 Naldjorlak I

(for solo cello)

18:00 Naldjorlak II

(for two basset horns)

19:00 Naldjorlak III

(for two basset horns and cello)

* members of the public will only be allowed to enter before the start of each part of the cycle, in accordance with the programme.

Photo © Yves Arman / Fondation A.R.M.A.N.