maya + rouvelle’s figure ground (performance)

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