Soul Leaves Her BodyPeter Flaherty (Creator/Director) is a video artist and director whose work has been seen in theatres, galleries, and museums internationally. His most recent large-scale video installation, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Select theatrical video design work includes: Francois Girard's Flight of Lindbergh & Seven Deadly Sins at Opera National de Lyon; The Builders Association's Continuous City, SuperVision, Alladeen, and Avanti (international touring); Chen Shi-Zheng's My Life As a Fairy Tale at Lincoln Center Festival; Bang On a Can's Lost Objects at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Basil Twist's Dogugaeshi at The Japan Society (NY); and Complicite's The Elephant Vanishes (international touring). Recent video installations have been shown at: Nexus Gallery (Philadelphia), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA, NYC), and MIT Media Lab. In 2000-1 he was a Harvard University Artist-in-Residence. He has taught Directing for New Media at Yale School of Drama (Fall '05), as well as intensive new media workshops at NYU, CalArts, and Carnegie-Mellon.
Jennie MaryTai Liu (Creator/Choreographer, Performer, & Film Actor – Chien–nu) is a dance-theater maker whose work has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop, Joyce SoHo, PS 122, Galapagos Art Space, The Bushwick Starr and the now defunct Red Humor Salon in Bushwick. She has had the pleasure of performing with Big Dance Theater, Witness Relocation Company, Cathy Weis Projects and Nellie Tinder. She trained as an undergraduate at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at Hollins University/American Dance Festival.
Soul Leaves Her Body is an integrated-media performance synthesizing theater, dance, live video, music, and cinema. Inspired by a thirteenth-century Chinese story about a young woman who rips her soul from her body in order to pursue her destiny in the city, this original, contemporary work explores the soul-body relationship in today's networked, electronic culture. A team of international film, theatre, electronic music, and visual artists create a multi-channel film live onstage, mixing pre-recorded film with a multitude of onstage cameras. Lush cinematic visuals appear on ghostly moving panels, reshaping and obscuring the glass stage, while outside the cameras' frame we are drawn into a highly-integrated folk dance for modern life.
Sounding A multi-media ensemble performance loosely inspired by Ibsen's Lady from the Sea, Sounding synthesizes cinematic POV and live feed video with original dialogue, songs and music. Leda – once New York City's art rock goddess — is now wife to a psychiatrist on Cape Cod. But a Dionysian figure from her past, a musician known as The Stranger, refuses to release her. As she mourns the death of her infant child, Leda confronts the disorder and outsized desire The Stranger brings.
Written by Jennifer Gibbs and directed by Kristin Marting, Sounding is a collaboration with Maya Ciarrocchi (video designer), Kamala Sankaram (composer), David Morris (set designer) and Raquel Davis (lighting designer). Performers include Okwui Okpokwasili, John Gould Rubin, Todd d'Amour, Lathrop Walker and Maureen Sebastian.
Sounding has been incubated in the HERE Artist in Residence Program (HARP) and developed thanks to additional support from the New York Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts & Media Collaboration Award, LMCC and Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater's Digital Performance Institute. Collaborators are working toward a Spring 2010 premiere production at HERE Arts Center.
The grantees will use the Swing Space to workshop video and song sequences in rehearsals with the actors, exploring deep integration of live action and text with video and music, in preparation for a workshop showing in
CULTUREMART at
HERE Arts Center, January 26 – 28 at 8:30 p.m.
Up-and-Coming Artist: Ash LaRose, Photographer
