Category: maya.rouvelle

Complete interview

10:37 Bill Buschel’s poetic introduction

18:32 Interview begins, discussion of our respective beginnings as artists

32:48 Brief continuation of early days, introduction to Catalyst Euterpe.

47:32 Brief excerpt of the music, featuring Carlotta Buiatti, continuation on the specifics of the project.

Lili and I are working on an upcoming project inspired by the Seikilos Epitaph, an ancient funereal Stele, and the Antikythera Mechanism, considered to be the oldest computer/orrery. Both the Stele and the Mechanism are believe to have originated in roughly the same time and location. The project will launch in November with two installations and a live performance in both New York and Trieste, Italy.

In advance of this work we were interviewed on Cosmos Radio, Hellenic Public Radio based in New York, by host Bill Buschel (Poet, Radio Host). Here is Bill’s blog post on us and the interview.

Catalyst Euterpe is a meditation on the paradox of the ephemeral and eternal – and how this paradox permeates life and culture, how it transforms and survives, and how it is embodied in the Stele itself – its inscriptions and history. Our project traces this paradox across time and media – beginning with the original, hand carved, marble stele, through various incarnations into a presence both within networked, digital culture, and as sculptural objects, music, poetry and performance.

The Antikythera mechanism, perhaps the original computer, embodies a change in mindset at end of the BC era. Together, the facts/empiricism of the mechanism, together with the paradox and poetic wisdom of the stele present two methods of approaching truth and meaning.

This edition, our first installment of this project (a second installment is scheduled for March 2019) will feature virtual/physical sculptural objects, a music composition, video and a live performance.

The sculptural objects will be exhibited as virtual artifacts in New York (locations to be determined soon), and in Trieste, Italy between November 17-28. In Italy the objects will be part of the Festival of Robotic Arts at the Hydrodynamic Station at the Old Port of Trieste, curated by Maria Campitelli – a founder of Trieste’s Gruppo78 and a leader in the curation of media art over the past half-century (!). We will be using Wave Farm’s transmission app for the performance.

We have also collaborated with mezzo-soprano Carlotta Buiatti and video artist/curator Fabiola Faidiga, both of Trieste, on a performance that will occur during the exhibition and feature music we composed based on the original composition, and will include video shot and edited by Fabiola, entitled Through the waves – a reference to the travels of the concepts and media of the work, and how they have spread and transformed across an expanse of time and space, and the connection, across water of us in New York, and they in Italy.

The title of the two works, in the US and Italy is: Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves

flickr set

This video is from the second performance at the Shanghai Theater Academy and was recorded and mastered by Grammy nominated recording engineer Matthias Erb.

This video is from the first performance at the Mercedes-Benz arena and was recorded and edited by Shanghai Television

Conceptualized by maya+rouvelle, with a composition by Weilu Ge, Woven was created for the Shanghai New Art Festival 2017, whose theme was “East/West, Scenery in a Mirror”.

The piece was performed twice in Shanghai at the Mercedes Benz arena and twice at the Shanghai Theater Academy in October, 2017.

Scored for Glass instruments, Bass, Percussion, and Pipa. The staged version included an actress and live video.

Description:

Throughout the performance the actress is accumulating wearable artifacts that embody the binaries of past/present, male/female, east/west. These artifacts are arranged in specific groupings at different locations on stage. Each group of artifacts embodies a different mix of binaries and the performer is tasked with integrating the materials and their concepts into her evolving character throughout the performance.

The audience is understood by the performer as a mirror upon which she tries to organize and understand her multilayered persona.

At the conclusion of the piece the actress joins the audience, takes a seat, and photographs the scene that she has recently departed.

Program note from the festival:

We change as we adapt to our environments, and through that process we become amalgamations of each other. If we allow ourselves to see and be seen as these unusual reflections across space, time, and cultures we allow ourselves to learn through empathy, and cultivate wisdom. There is an essential human force that connects past and present, male and female, East and West, the known and the unfamiliar. Its goal is to weave us together into a stability of change.

Our project is about this energy. Spanning binaries, it is a force that builds social cohesion as it fosters individuality.

But we must do our part, to both weave and to allow ourselves to be woven, to permit the process to live within and around us. Without it things unravel, and we become lost in a pile of tangled threads.

The ensemble:
Actress, Ni Yingying (Mercedes-Benz Arena)
Actress, Wenling Zhao (Shanghai Theater Academy)
Pipa, Yiming Feng
Glass Instruments, James Rouvelle
Electric Bass, Jiawei Zhang
Percussion, Tianyi Zhang
Live video/PTZ Camera, Lili Maya
Electronics, composer, Weilu Ge
Recording Engineer, Matthias Erb
Concept, Maya+Rouvelle
Composition, Weilu Ge

FIGURE GROUND is a movement and media work performed at Eden’s Expressway in SoHo NYC as part of movement research’s Open Performance Series. This video is documentation of its first performance.

The work is based on the Second Tableau (The Sacrifice) of the Joffrey Ballet/Millicent Hodson’s 1987 reconstruction of the “original” Nijinsky choreography/Roerich costume and set design for the 1913 Ballet Russe production of Le Sacre du Printemps.

At the core of this piece is a cyclical dynamic of transitioning figure and ground relationships. Ritual, sacrifice, mystery, earth, the heroic, politics of gender and technology, death and renewal are embodied by the integration, camouflaging, and collision of different musics, times, materials, cultural forms, and media.

Materials: original and found sound and video, paper, string, choreography and dance.

Found Video:
Festa Della Bruna

Les 100 ans du Sacre du Printemps par le théâtre Mariinski

My second best SuperHyperCube run, so far

US soldiers getting manicures

Len Lye’s Tusalava

Found Audio:
Beethoven Op. 132, Budapest Quartet

Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles

Burial, Come Down to Us (Hyperdub 2013)

Ambient music for Len Lye’s Tusalava by Andrew Pask

Realized in a re-purposed bank in Detroit, Place and Borrow is an interactive performance work for actor and media. The piece was developed for G. Louise Cooper, who gave the performance and installed the work in the multidisciplinary art space Grand on River as part of MicroMacro Art Biome (catalogue pdf). The video was shot by Remi Slade-Caffarel.

The basic premise of the piece is that somehow, through the process of installing the exhibit, the formerly abandoned bank has woken up to find itself an art space. It channels its dual nature through a head teller/performer and attempts both to continue its business as a bank and performance venue. This is America, 2016.

The media includes bismuth, lead, paper, string, bio-plastic, a wireless, head-mounted camera, projector, and a remote control vehicle.

A detailed description of the piece, script, and other relevant materials can be found here.

Photos of the piece can be found here.

original footage.

Poetry: John Berryman reading (University of Iowa in 1968) Dream Song #16, excerpt, from 77 Dream Songs.

Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls
where it did much resemble Henry and
them persons was delighted.
Especially his long & glowing tail
by all them was admired, and visitors.
They whistled: This is it!

Golden, whilst your frozen daiquiris
whir at midnight, gleams on you his fur
& silky & black.
Mission accomplished, pal.
My molten yellow & moonless bag,
drained, hangs at rest.

Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,
in Sealdah Station some possessionless
children survive to die.
The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room
and one told the other a lie.

Music: Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen from Rückert-Lieder, Gustav Mahler | LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA | Claudio Abbado | Magdalena Kožena (mezzo-soprano)

Recorded August 2009 in Lucerne, Switzerland. Published by Euroarts on DVD and Blu-Ray.

lucernefestival.ch/en/shop

Based on a text in German by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) , no title, from Liebesfrühling, in 4. Vierter Strauß. Wiedergewonnen, no. 29

Lyrics:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world’s tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

[ The video is a composed of found footage from various sources ]

Footage captured by Selina Doroshenko during a Maya + Rouvelle artist talk/performance at MICA’s Graduate Studios Salon in Baltimore. Audio: John Berryman reading Dream Song 14.