When poetry becomes music, dance becomes art, painting becomes movement… weaving in and out, we create a new art.
Poetics of Space is an interdisciplinary performance that incorporates original music for strings and piano, contemporary dance, live painting, and spoken word poetry processed as part of the music. Our first performance is Monday, October 8 at 7 pm at Berk Recital Hall, 1140 Boylson St., Berklee College of Music.
The project was born from a dialogue with composer Pedro Osuna Ardoy. Our initial conversations were centered around mediation and eastern philosophy, cross-disciplinary interaction, avant-garde music, dance and art, and how we can make the art with an individual point of view that we wish to see in the world.
We decided to take the project further and joined forces with artistic director and choreographer Brian McGinnis of the Boston Conservatory. Brian is helping to shape our ideas giving the project a cohesive and unique form, helping us translate our individual points of view in a way that can unfold in a theatrical space and coalesce in the live performance. I am expanding my own practice as a painter, considering the element of duration in how the final piece of art will be viewed and digested by an audience. This gives me new insight into my artistic practice, helping me to let go of conceptual grasping and directly delve into the active process of creating, thus allowing myself to be informed by the sensual movement of material in space and the interaction with performing artists and their creative process. New ideas are being born from this experience as I immerse myself into the intensity behind the live performance.
I am also expanding my artistic process with poetry that is incorporated into the musical composition. I have always been a writer in my own way, filling notebooks and sketchbooks with language as a way to articulate my ideas as I give them visual form. Writing is part of my practice as a painter. The ambiguity of poetic statements and stream of consciousness writing is a vital way for me to elucidate the visual imagery coming from my subconscious. I am not seeking to give “meaning” to my work or to explain anything, what I want to articulate is a kind of honest recognition of my lived experience and the terrain of my subconscious that drives my process. In this way, a writing practice helps to do this. And now in this project, I am allowing this to emerge into form as part of the final presentation.
Also informing this process, is the interaction with a talented dancer, Odessa Anderson. The movements are shaping my marks, the energy providing a new space from which to respond, and new meaning is unfolding with the connection and intimacy of two performers sharing the theatrical space, ebbing and flowing, expressing the vision that the music incites.
I’m honored to be part of this journey with this talented group of artists. This project is allowing me to expand artistically, learn from other artists in other forms, engaged as an artist in a new way, through duration, theatricality, and the magic and intensity of the live performance.
Please join us on October 8, and stay tuned for more to come.
Rehearsal, dancer Odessa Anderson and painter Fotini Christophillis / Boston Conservatory
Rehearsal, String Quartet and Piano / Berklee College of Music