Time & Date
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Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends & General Presale: from 24 AΡR 2019, 14:00
Full price & Neighborhood residents: 7 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 €
People with disabilities, Companions, Unemployed & Groups 10+ people: 5 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
Information
Language: in English with Greek subtitles
Introduction
What is the relationship between the live and the pre-recorded? Director Wu Tsang – together with a cellist, a dancer, a poet, an electronic musician, and an interdisciplinary artist – presents a collage of words, filmic images, movements and sounds.
“Sudden Rise” is the latest piece of work from Moved by the Motion, the performance group founded by artist/filmmaker Wu Tsang and performance artist boychild. The performance is co-created with their collaborators, cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, DJ and electronic musician Asma Maroof, and poet Fred Moten. The words and actions of activists, poets and influential essayists (including Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois) engaged with civil rights in the 20th century meet the lyrics of Jimi Hendrix, the musings of Hannah Arendt, and the “mantic phenomenology” of Oskar Becker, to create a performance that gives the impression of a living collage.
The performance, which is formulated like an “exquisite corpse” (a Consequences-like game developed by the Surrealists during the interwar period), references the 18th-century “phantasmagoria” horror theater form, with projections and scrims used to echo stories of trauma and resistance across, through and out of time. Josh Johnson and boychild perform a duet in multiplication – that is, live and in pre-recorded images – in a reimagining of the early days of cinema, when projections still shared the stage with theatrical performers. Patrick Belaga’s cello and piano are interwoven with the electronic repetition of looped voices manipulated by Asma Maroof. Lighting reminiscent of that used in Baroque portraiture is diffused against digital architectures, spatial grids and test patterns – elements that continually re-form time and perspective on stage.
Exploring the interplay between the live and the pre-recorded, “Sudden Rise” stands in opposition to group hierarchies and presents a continually transforming improvised whole. An incessant shifting between voice and image makes us wonder what remains stable in a world in constant motion.
Photo: Paula Court/EMPAC
Moved by the Motion is an ongoing, iterative performance project. Initiated in 2013 by director Wu Tsang and artist boychild, it features a shifting group of collaborators, including cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, electronic musician and DJ Asma Maroof, poet and scholar Fred Moten, and others. The ensemble explores different modes of storytelling through improvisational structures. Each performance is a series of translations between text, movement, film, theater, and music.
“Sudden Rise” marks the European debut of the Moved by the Motion ensemble. The performance was newly commissioned by EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) as part of their ten-year celebrations.
The “exquisite corpse” technique, similar to the game of “Consequences”, was an imaginative and collective game of chance developed by Surrealists during the interwar period. Each player could pick any word or name they liked to fill a set structure. The infinite possible combinations of words and names constitute the game’s creative challenge.
Credits
boychild is a movement-based performance artist whose work operates through improvisation as a mode of survival. Her performances have been presented at MoMA PS1; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Sydney Biennial; and Berghain, Berlin. boychild has toured with Mykki Blanco and collaborated with Korakrit Arunanondchai, Wu Tsang, and the streetwear label Hood By Air.
Josh Johnson is a Frankfurt-based performer, dancer, and choreographer. He joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in 2009 and has subsequently worked with the Forsythe Company (2010- 2015). He is co-founder of SAD collective, which has created performances, DJ sets, video works, and installations throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. He has performed and collaborated with artists Anne Imhof, Kandis Williams, Wu Tsang, and boychild. Johnson’s performance works include “Piety” (2018, with Total Freedom; The Shed, New York), “Allegory” (2018, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin), and “Anthony”, (2018, Philipp Pflug Contemporary, Frankfurt).Asma Maroof (aka Asmara) is a Los Angeles–based electronic producer and DJ who tours internationally and has worked with M.I.A., Kelela, Tink, Princess Nokia, Venus X, and is a member of the musical groups NGUZUNGUZU (Fade to Mind) and Future Brown (Warp Records).
Alena Samoray is a freelance lighting designer currently working on her Master’s degree in lighting design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Recent past work includes “You Sad Legend” with the Moved by the Motion ensemble and “The Rape of Lucretia” and “November Dance: Moving Forward, Looking Back” at UIUC, as well as a multitude of work completed at EMPAC in Troy, New York with Andrew Schneider, France Jobin, Kate Super, Charles Atlas, and many more.
