Rec, Center, Stage (2024)
Imagine using theater as schooling; as a tool for the transfiguration of everyday life: what imaginations could it help access, what positions could it help embody, and what relationships could it help define?
Through the program Rec, Center, Stage, we invited a group of 20 open call members to meet at the Chelsea Rec Center on a Saturday afternoon, and to collectively conceive of a public performance that draws from personal experiences and relationships with public space. Together, we generated an outline for string of performances flowing from one to the next across the Rec Center’s various rooms (such as the pool room, the pantry, weights room, etc.), in which all the participants would act as characters, while also as versions of themselves.
‘I take a deep breath. I steel, center, and ground my body. The key card comes in contact with the device on the wall. The bleep on the device signals ‘it’s showtime!’. On paper, all fronts and for appearances sake I’m just a Black mother with a few degrees. A Creatrix in the Matrix, patiently awaiting her direct deposit every 2 weeks.‘ (Turquoise Juanita Martin, urban planner and burlesque dancer)
Attention to how a stage is set gives us a way to put at a distance, and thereby be able to get a grip on the roles we are asked to play in everyday contexts. Understanding a theater of the everyday grants an agency towards when to participate, when to resist. Is it possible that how we position ourselves within it can open up places of respite, from which to make entryways for thinking and acting on richer, more majickal ideas for a future?
Staged as part of the Dia Foundation for the Art’s program Activations.
Choreography Facilitation: Gillian Walsh
Curator: Stephen Kwok
Camera Documentation: Connor Sen Warnick
Illustration & Animation (Documentation): Jak Ritger
Role Models (2023)
Role Models is a film about everyday photo habitués who traverse the streets of New York and Paris in pursuit of models to snap pictures of outside fashion shows. They are frequenters of an outside, birdwatchers of female beauty, gleaners - picking up images at the margins, at the gates of patronised culture
Driven by adoration and loneliness, the men in the film aren't in it for the money, but are spurred on by the prospect of capturing transient interactions with the models to collect, in a hunt for images to take back home to their off-season hibernacula. In this image-coded world, they exist in ways that are equally social, para-social, and anti-social.
The film is about Longing in a culture of distantiating transparency and the mediated image, about the desire that got misplaced along the road somewhere. It’s a phenomenology of the outside: about those who don’t get to (and perhaps don’t even want to) exist on the inside—who don’t wear the badge of officialdom or the wristband of admittance.
Operationally, it is a verité documentary that is turning itself upside down; a patchwork of characters; about men who look at women, men looking at women. It would not pass a reverse Bechtel Test. Retired after 30 years, one of the characters assesses his current passion like this: ‘They ask John Dillinger why do you rob banks? And he told them, ‘because that’s where the money is. And why do you photograph female models? Well, that’s where the beauty is.’
Premiered at SARA's, September 2023
↗ Screenslate
↗ Visions du Réel
Comte Des Cierges (2023)
Written by playwright Carlos Cotto and directed and organized by artist Salome Oggenfuss in collaboration with The Working Theater, Comte des Cierges is a play that draws from Cotto’s decade-long experience as a former doorman.
Presented as part of Montez Press Radio’s year-long residency with The Kitchen, Comte des Cierges is the first in a series of performances with Montez Press Radio across the Winter/Spring 2023 season. This short play featured professional and amateur doormen and actors, featuring a cast of Jim Fletcher, Anthony Delfi, Emily Davis, Sophie Becker, Gordon Landenberger, Lluca Huatuco, Timothy Allan, John Ayala, Nile Harris, Pamela Mondezie.
Producers: Thomas Laprade, Stacy Skolnik
↗ The Kitchen