Photo: Tuomas Laitinen

PORTALS

HAROLD & SINHA & LAITINEN

 

Portals combined three work-in-progress pieces: visual artis Jesse Harold’s Terra Toma, vocal artist Samita Sinha’s Cipher and my Black Square. We brought these three pieces to the same space for an intimate encounter at Panoply Performance Laboratory, New York City, on three Thursday evenings in February 2014, exploring how human bodies affect each other through vibration and sound, co-imagination, and presence.

In Terra Toma participants joined Jesse Harold in conjuring undiscovered images, which materialize in the spaces between and within the bodies of participant and artist.

In Body-Sound Etudes for Cipher, Sinha striped the clearly demarcated space between audience and performer to explore the effects of her vibrating, sounding body her audience through various physical and spatial relationships.

I invited the participants to work with the experience of Black Square. I used as my material the performance piece by Reality Research Center called Do-Nothing. Do-Nothing is a character that offers pure, uncompromised presence. I wanted to approach this state of being with the audience – a way to be present to someone in a way that is totally free of content and doing. Through small handwritten black books that the participants could go through during the evening, I guided them towards a place where nothing is done.

Blog entry here.