Performances Archives - longlistshort

NYC Art Shows- Charles Atlas at Luhring Augustine

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Dance, Films, New York Art Shows, Performances, Video and Film

Mar 092023

It often feels like we are oversaturated with images in today’s world, but the energy at the Charles Atlas exhibition A Prune Twin at Luhring Augustine gets the balance right.

From the gallery’s press release-

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce A Prune Twin, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with pioneering film and video artist Charles Atlas. The presentation will mark the American debut of this major multi-channel installation with sound that was originally commissioned by the Barbican Centre, London as the centerpiece of their 2020 exhibition, Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer; which traveled to the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, Scotland in 2021.

The collaboration between the two artists began in 1984 when the young dancer, Clark, performed in two single-channel films by Atlas: Parafango and Ex-Romance. However, it was not until the groundbreaking Hail the New Puritan in 1986, that the relationship between the two artists was deeply cemented. Originally commissioned as an arts documentary by Channel 4 of the BBC, Hail the New Puritan turned the genre on its head, presenting a highly stylized and fictionalized version of a typical day in Clark’s life – an “anti-documentary”, as Atlas has called it. The two artists also worked closely together on another Channel 4 production, Because We Must (1989), which was full of extreme theatricality in its dance, choreography, scenery, costumes, and directorial position.

In A Prune Twin, Atlas pulls material from these two major films to create an immersive eight-channel installation of sound and moving image. He extends the idea of choreography to camera and sound, flowing across and throughout screens and monitors; in this sense, Atlas choreographs his own past material into a new and compelling dance all of its own. Evident in this work, and many others by Atlas, is his strong affection and attraction to exceptionally creative collaborators, his sensitivity to movement and how to capture it on film, and his novel skills as both a storyteller and observer. Much like MC9, an immersive installation that compiles Atlas’ extensive work with Merce Cunningham, A Prune Twin surrounds the viewer in a beautifully choreographed spectacle. The work captures the spirit and passion of a 35-year collaborative relationship, one that continues to this day – currently realized through the lighting design that Atlas produces for all of Clark’s live performances, an endeavor he has undertaken since the 1980s.

Murals of La Jolla- Alex Katz’s Portrait of Bill T. Jones

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Street Art, California Travel, Dance, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performances, Places to Visit, Public Art, San Diego Art Shows, San Diego Street Art, San Diego Travel

Jan 202023

Artist Alex Katz created this mural, Bill 2, a portrait of modern dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, in 2019 for Murals of La Jolla in San Diego. Murals of La Jolla is a project started in 2010 by The Athenaeum and the La Jolla Community Foundation. It commissions artists to create work to be displayed on buildings around La Jolla. A map of all the murals currently on view can be found here.

From the Murals of La Jolla website about the work-

Alex Katz’s mural, Bill 2, celebrates Bill T. Jones, one of the most noted and recognized modern-dance choreographers of our time. Executed in Katz’s bold and simplified signature style, Bill 2 depicts Jones’ visage, through a series of distinct expressions. The repetition of his face has a cinematic and lyrical quality, reinforcing his place in the world of dance, music and film. Portions of the face are dramatically cropped, giving the viewer only quick and gestural glimpses of Jones. Bill 2, is a striking homage to two artists, Katz and Jones, both renowned in their respective fields of visual and performing arts. The mural’s proximity to the new Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center gives a nod to the interconnected worlds of art, music, and dance.

The Guggenheim museum in NYC is currently showing Alex Katz: Gathering, a retrospective of the artist’s work from the late 1940’s until the present. The exhibition will be up until February 20, 2023.

From their website about the exhibition-

Emerging as an artist in the mid-20th century, Katz forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen. Throughout his practice, he has turned to his surroundings in downtown New York City and coastal Maine as his primary subject matter, documenting an evolving community of poets, artists, critics, dancers, and filmmakers who have animated the cultural avant-garde from the postwar period to the present.

Staged in the city where Katz has lived and worked his entire life, and prepared with the close collaboration of the artist, this retrospective will fill the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. Encompassing paintings, oil sketches, collages, drawings, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works, the exhibition will begin with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from the late 1940s and will culminate in the rapturous, immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company has numerous performances every year. Conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones, and choreographed by Jones with Janet Wong and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, the latest work, Curriculum II, will be performed at on March 10, 11, and 12, at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.

Jones also hosts the series Bill Chats at NYC’s The New School. On January 30th, he will be in conversation with Bessie Award-winning theater director and performance artist, Niegel Smith and curator, producer, and director, Kamilah Forbes. For more events check out the New York Live Arts calendar.

Song of the Day- Machinedrum (tstewart)- “Isle of the Blest”

Dance, Los Angeles Events, Los Angeles Music, Music, Musicians / Bands, Spotify Playlist

Dec 302022

tstewart- isle of the blest

This song is from Elysian, the 2022 ambient album from Machinedrum, released using his alias tstewart. The album draws its inspiration from Elysian Park in Los Angeles.

For New Year’s Eve, Machinedrum will be playing a less relaxing set in Los Angeles at The Echo with Jimmy Edgar, DJ Bianca Oblivion, and Jubilee

Los Angeles Weekend Planner 2-20-20

Dance, Los Angeles Events, Los Angeles Music, Los Angeles Weekend Planner, Music

Feb 202020

Metronomy- Walking In The Dark

Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (2/20-2/23/20)-

Thursday

Hammer Museum is hosting Constitutional Happy Hour a chance to have a few cheap drinks while learning about the US Constitution. This week Loyola Law School professor David Glazier will be discussing the War Powers Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11)

Runnner are playing at The Echo with Beauty Queen

Artist Gala Porras-Kim will be discussing her work and MOCA’s permanent collection with UCLA Professor of Art History and Conservation of Material Culture Glenn Wharton and MOCA Assistant Curator and Manager of Publications Bryan Barcena at the Grand Avenue location

Hip-hop supergroup Czarface (Inspectah Deck, 7L & Esoteric) are performing at Catch One

Little People, Frameworks, and Yppah are playing at The Paramount

Andy Shauf is playing at The Fonda Theatre with Molly Sarle

Pianist Joep Beving is performing at Lodge Room

Friday

Mutual Benefit are playing at the Bootleg Theater with Sonoda and Nicholas Krgovich

As part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s John Sayles series, they will be showing Sayles’ film Sunshine State at Hammer Museum with Sayles in attendance for a conversation and book signing ($9)

Here the Birds Burn: A Phantasmagoria Revival, a horror theater performance, is taking place throughout the Victorian era homes at Heritage Square. “Incorporating working authentic 18th & 19th century magic lanterns with hand painted glass slides, along with being joined by fellow period-era theater guests, this immersive performance, set in the 1830s, promises an evening of frightful delight”. (running Thursday-Sunday)

No Age are playing at The Smell with Würm and Milo Gonzalez

HUNNY are playing at the El Rey Theatre with Bay Faction and Michi

Holychild are playing at Moroccan Lounge with Hollander and Tiffany Stringer

Saturday

Metronomy are playing at The Fonda Theatre with Bodega and Faux Real opening

No Sesso will be presenting their performance piece/ runway show “A Vignette of the Renaissance on 24th Street” at WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (free)

Not From England are playing at The Smell with Moon Fuzz, Poll Tax Riot and Buddha Trixie

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries is hosting a book launch with editors Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney for Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings. The contributors to this volume consider the role of lesbian feminist histories and direct-action aesthetics in contemporary queer and feminist communities, particularly the ways in which political artwork can produce new ways of knowing about the past. The book launch will include readings and performances by Deirdre Logue, Nao Bustamante, Kyla Tompkins, Karen Tongson, Jennifer Doyle, and David Evans Frantz, and a pop-up feminist gift shop by Otherwild.

FEELS are playing an early show at Zebulon with Gustaf, Gesserit and Cumgirl8

Sunday

Zebulon has a free screening of Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) with a performance by Charade to follow

Mamalarky are playing at the Bootleg Theater with Girl Friday and Eyeshadow

The Debbie Allen Dance Academy DADA Ensemble will be performing dances inspired by Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century at the California African American Museum (free)

WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA is hosting a conversation with artist Ivan Morley to launch his new book

Artist Samira Yamin will be discussing work from her exhibition To View A Plastic Flower at LAMAG

Lodge Room’s programming series for Black History Month continues with performances tonight by Lonnie Liston Smith, The Katalyst, and Cut Chemist

Orchin are playing at Moroccan Lounge with Goldcage, Lovergirl, and Drowsy

Ugo Rondinone and John Giorno at Gladstone Gallery New York

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Performances, Video and Film, Writers

Jan 172020

Closing on 1/18/20 at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea is Ugo Rondinone’s thanx 4 nothing, a multi-channel video installation that pays tribute to the artist’s late husband, the poet and performance artist, John Giorno.

From the press release-

Rondinone reconstructs the gallery into a black box theater, creating an immersive environment through the use of black-and-white film, minimalist score, and the rhythmic intonations of Giorno’s own voice. This exhibition is a prismatic paean to the poet, raconteur, muse, cultural icon, and New York fixture.

Curator Ralph Rugoff said of the work on the occasion of its installation at Hayward Gallery in 2016:

“In elegantly spectacular fashion, Ugo Rondinone’s 20-screen video installation, “thanx 4 nothing “(2015), presents the American poet John Giorno reciting – though ‘performing’ might be a better word – the titular poem. Written on his seventieth birthday in 2006, and framed as an extended and wide-ranging expression of gratitude to ‘everyone for everything,’ Giorno’s poetic monologue looks back over his life with frank insight and humour, reflecting on loves and losses, friends and enemies, sex and drugs, depression and spiritual acceptance. As presented by Rondinone, whose work inventively interlaces the rhythms of his images with those of the poet’s speech, it is also a dizzying meditation on duality.”

It’s a great poem and a wonderful visual. Surrounded by the poet himself on all four walls of the gallery, you are completely immersed in his reading.

If you are curious about the poem itself, below is a video of Giorno reading it for his 75th Birthday Tour at the Words Aloud 8 Spoken Word Festival at the Durham Art Gallery in Durham, Canada, in 2011.

Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum

Art, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Aug 312018

Lauren Halsey- The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture) 2018

Lauren Halsey- The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture) 2018

Currently at the Hammer Museum is Made in L.A. 2018, the museum’s fourth biennial exhibition of artists working in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. The diverse group of artists included range in age from 29 to 97. With so many excellent works in the exhibition, it was very hard to choose which of them to highlight. The following are just a few selections from the exhibition that stood out.

Lauren Halsey’s sculptures (pictured above), won the Mohn Award, a jury award which honors artistic excellence. You can also see another one of her sculptures at MOCA, until September 3.

Selection of works by Luchita Hurtado

The paintings above are from the oldest artist showing in the exhibition, Luchita Hurtado. At 97, she is just starting to get recognition for a lifetime of work.

The youngest artist in the show is Diedrick Brackens (shown below) who uses weaving and textile making to tell stories that reflect on cultural and personal narratives from his childhood in Mexla,Texas.

Diedrick Brackens

The most entertaining of the works in the exhibition is OURCHETYPES, created by Jade Gordon and Megan Whitmarsh. Taking up an entire room, it consists of videos, sculptures, and a publication- all dealing with issues of self discovery, adulthood, womanhood, happiness, and success from a tongue in cheek, retro New Age perspective.

Jade Gordon & Megan Whitmarsh, OURCHETYPES

Two additional video installations also worth taking time to watch-

Gelare Khoshgozaran’s Medina Wasi: Connecting Town, shot mainly in Mecca and Thermal in the Coachella Valley, includes footage from US military bases where sets were created to simulate Middle Eastern towns for troops to practice fighting in. She also includes interviews with US veterans who discuss their memories of the landscape when they were in the Middle East.

Neha Choksi’s multichannel video installation Everything sunbright, examines our relationship to the sun and includes images from nature, a dance performance, and children making drawings of the sun- all tying together themes of birth, life, and death.

This weekend Hammer Museum has programming to accompany the exhibition. On Saturday, taisha paggett will present a series of solo and duet dance performances and on Sunday, composer/performer Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs is assembling a group of mothers to explore the tropes and meanings of motherhood and Von Doog is offering empathic musical readings in the gallery prior to the performance.

This exhibition closes on Sunday 9/2.

Throwback Thursday- Weezer

Dance, Music, Throwback Thursday

Nov 062014

Weezer- Buddy Holly

This song is off of Weezer’s 1994 self titled debut album, also known as The Blue Album. Both song and album were produced by Ric Ocasek, lead singer of The Cars. The video was directed by Spike Jonze and uses remarkably unchanged actor Al Molinaro from Happy Days in a cameo.

Weezer are playing at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles on 11/7.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Miwa Matreyek at REDCAT

Art, Artists, Dance, Los Angeles Art Shows, Performances

Feb 092014

Miwa Matreyek from TED Talks

Miwa Matreyek is performing this piece, Myth and Infrastructure, (shown above) and her most recent- This World Made Itself at the REDCAT theater. An additional show was added for tonight 2/9 at 7pm- the rest are sold out.

http://www.redcat.org/event/miwa-matreyek

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Invisible Cities at Union Station

Los Angeles Events, Performances

Dec 292013

Seeing the opera, Invisible Cities, based on Italo Calvino’s book, was an incredible experience. The audience walked around Union Station, listening on headphones as performers danced and sang around them. At the same time interspersed among everyone, were travelers en route to other destinations who were often taken aback by the performance going on around them.

Artbound on KCET is currently showing an interesting documentary on the opera worth checking out:

http://www.kcet.org/video/artbound/#v67689