Last night at sunset, just as the province was experiencing the twilight and eventual eclipse of Christy Clark's Liberal government, I was gazing up into the open bay windows at the front of the James Black Gallery on East 6th Avenue in Vancouver, luxuriating in the warmth of a gorgeous summer evening and the proximate haze of pot smoke, and thus somatically primed to receive the healing trans-dimensional message of love delivered by the bewitching lounge singer Linda Foxx.
Foxx is the creation of multi-talented performance artist Layla Marcelle Mrozowski, who in collaboration with musician and mixed-media artist Dave Biddle--and accompanied by back-up dancers Justine A. Chambers, Alex Mah, and Andrea Cownden--stageed an hour-long virtual or conceptual concert/house party called Battle Your Demons in Dreamspace. Lipsynching to a clutch of "synthetic" voice-altered songs created and played by Biddle through vocoder technology, Foxx/Mrozowski, sporting a bright orange wig and wearing day-glo blue lipstick, invited us in the most sinuously seductive manner possible to throw off any remaining inhibitions we might have and indulge in the myriad pleasures afforded by an apocalypse that is not just imminent, but that has already arrived.
In a world where the earthquake is here, where fear can be buckled into a car seat and sent on its way, and where caged goats patiently offer up their necks to the impress of our newly sharpened incisors, the only thing we need to do to prepare for the time of love, Ms. Foxx instructs us, is to get in touch with our bodies: feel the earth underneath our feet; breathe in through our noses and out through our mouths; rub our tongues along our teeth (and taste that goat's blood). And, above all, unloosen our hips and groove to the music she is carrying to us via her other-worldly voice.
Maybe it's because I'm currently watching The Leftovers on television, or maybe it's just that in this current socio-political moment nothing seems out of the ordinary any more, but I found Foxx's strangely unsettling message just the narcotic of belief that I needed on this particular evening.
P
Showing posts with label Layla Marcelle Mrozowski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Layla Marcelle Mrozowski. Show all posts
Friday, June 30, 2017
Saturday, January 30, 2016
XXXX Topography at SFU Woodward's
The Party (Kyla Gardiner and Layla Marcelle Mrozowski) are throwing their latest fête, XXXX Topography, at SFU Woodward's Studio T this weekend. The bagheaded women from Fake Gems are back, but this time they're grooving inside a black box instead of a white cube, and to an improvised electronic score by Paul Paroczai. Their cryptic discourse with each other is more clearly audible to us in this iteration of The Party's process, but that doesn't mean we're included in the circuit of communication. These (gendered) subject-objects supposed to move for us reverse the standard pattern of transference between analyst and analysand, or spectator and performer; we can hear but don't necessarily understand what they are saying to each other, and furthermore I for one was unsure if the amplified voices were emerging directly from the bodies wearing the bags (via head mics, as in Fake Gems), or from audio channels filtered through the four freestanding speakers behind them--a stereophonic version of the stereoscopic method that is The Party's modus operandi.
Just as I was settling in against the wall for a long spell of vicarious movement pleasure, our hostess for the evening, Beta Pink, arrived to take a call, and then to lead us all on to the Space Bar, where, it seemed, The Party's real party was taking place. This imaginary elsewhere, this theatre of possibility turned out to be a parallax version of where we'd just been, the curtain behind the bagheaded women having been removed to reveal neither an ersatz wizard nor a fantastical Oz, but rather a landscape that was simultaneously strange and familiar, red and blue, material and metaphorical. And like so many sisters of Dorothy, we were left to explore this world and its artifacts for the next hour or so (or until last call), queer spelunkers in search of transformative alien encounters between ourselves, other selves, and things.
And what things! Rocks and adding machines dancing a tango with each other. Phallic bits of creosote edging across the floor. Smoke machines. Wooden beds to lounge on next to spongy bits of fabric in the shape of octopi. An aerie loft with a softer bed for group spooning. And a series of landline phones that sing songs of syllabic transposition to us, providing us with a metonymic vocabulary of association as we grasp for words to describe our progress through this sexy terrain.
As we exit, another surprise: party favours, including a pair of 3D-glasses, The Party's official manual, and a translucent printed insert outlining the conditions of possibility for an imaginary theatre of the sort we have just experienced.
P.
Just as I was settling in against the wall for a long spell of vicarious movement pleasure, our hostess for the evening, Beta Pink, arrived to take a call, and then to lead us all on to the Space Bar, where, it seemed, The Party's real party was taking place. This imaginary elsewhere, this theatre of possibility turned out to be a parallax version of where we'd just been, the curtain behind the bagheaded women having been removed to reveal neither an ersatz wizard nor a fantastical Oz, but rather a landscape that was simultaneously strange and familiar, red and blue, material and metaphorical. And like so many sisters of Dorothy, we were left to explore this world and its artifacts for the next hour or so (or until last call), queer spelunkers in search of transformative alien encounters between ourselves, other selves, and things.
And what things! Rocks and adding machines dancing a tango with each other. Phallic bits of creosote edging across the floor. Smoke machines. Wooden beds to lounge on next to spongy bits of fabric in the shape of octopi. An aerie loft with a softer bed for group spooning. And a series of landline phones that sing songs of syllabic transposition to us, providing us with a metonymic vocabulary of association as we grasp for words to describe our progress through this sexy terrain.
As we exit, another surprise: party favours, including a pair of 3D-glasses, The Party's official manual, and a translucent printed insert outlining the conditions of possibility for an imaginary theatre of the sort we have just experienced.
P.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Fake Gems/"Like Lemon" at the Interurban Gallery
Last night I went to a party thrown by The Party, who are otherwise known as the artistic duo Kyla Gardiner and Layla Marcelle Mrozowski. Gardiner and Marcelle Mrozowski are both completing their MFAs in the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU and, uniquely and somewhat amazingly given the normal bureaucracy of university administration, are collaborating on their final project. Gardiner is a director/lighting designer/scenographer (although she is so much more than this); Marcelle Mrozowski is a dancer/choreographer/performance artist (although she too is so much more than this). It might be best to call The Party stage conceptualists or, better yet, sensory fabulists: by manipulating bodies, objects, sound, light, space and time, they offer one an experience that is at once transporting and re-orienting. By that I mean that one is taken somewhere else at the same time as one is made to feel more present in, more aware of, the where of here.
In the case of "Like Lemon," the piece being premiered by The Party in the sweltering white cube space of the Interurban Gallery on the corner of Hastings and Carrall, this oscillating bodily and spatial perceptivity is initiated when four female performers already wired with head mics (Marcelle Mrozowski, joined by Deanna Peters, Rianne Svelnis and Lexi Vajda) gather together in the centre of the room, place white, semi-translucent sacks over their heads, and begin to move. Their motion is largely confined to their pelvic areas. They rock back and forth on their heels, or sway their hips from side to side, or drop to their haunches on the floor and rotate their bellies slowly and deliberately in a circle, or simply stand and undulate their legs and thighs. Occasionally the performers change levels and direction (although Peters always remained standing because, as she later told me, the floor was too dirty), responding to each other's bodily proximity--despite the fact, as I also later discovered, they couldn't see each other through the sacks on their heads. What the performers don't do is take any "steps," or worry about keeping time to the music--a deeply atmospheric electronic score by DJ Phoebé Guillemot. They move without moving per se, and it is this trick of relational being--or, rather, being in relation, both to each other, and to us--that is so mezmerizing and, dare I say, contagious. Over the course of the work's 45+ minutes, as one transfers one's gaze from pulsing body to pulsing body, watching in fascination as darker and darker holes seem to appear in the sacks where each performer is desperately sucking in air, one slowly and simultaneously becomes aware of the other bodies around one, and of how different pockets of the audience are moving in relation not just to the performance (it's hard not to begin some rocking or swaying motion of one's own), but to each other: leaning in, bending away, stretching up, ducking down and, yes indeed, actually touching. All those manifestations of besideness that constitute our being in this world together.
Not that there isn't also a score to "Like Lemon." It's just that it's a largely conversational one. Those head mics are affixed for a reason, as over the course of the piece's duration the performers don't just move together, but also talk to each other. It's not always easy to follow what they're saying, but constructing a narrative is hardly the point. To quote Gardiner and Marcelle Mrozowski's program blurb, the conversation is less about making sense than "sense making." Hence the one phrase--uttered, I believe, both near the beginning and end of the piece--that stuck with me: "sound is so hot." As coloured and shaded and stippled and, above all, warmly illuminated by Gardiner's lighting projections, the sound of this performance--by which, in the sensorially redistributive premises underscoring the work as a whole, I take to mean a total acoustic environment that encompasses not just Guillemot's music, the performers' voices, noises seeping in from the street, but also a synesthetic way of seeing-hearing-feeling--created a heat that superseded the actual physical temperature of the room.
While I unfortunately can't do them justice here, I should note that "Like Lemon" was preceded by two other engaging works that also played with space, time, and sensory perception. Daisy Thompson's "The Ongoing Wonder of..." featured Katie DeVries, Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Michelle Lui, and Ashley Whitehead moving to their own distinct rhythms and personal body scores, but also intersecting with, taking on, and sometimes taking over the movements of the others--all to the improvised violin and vocal sounds of Alex Mah. "Infinite Digressions" was a collaborative performance installation by Diego Romero and Jessica Wilkie that among other things juxtaposed successive mass manipulations of hundreds of tiny coloured figures from the board game Risk with the stationary dropping of one cigarette butt after another.
The Party definitely knows how to throw a great party.
P.
In the case of "Like Lemon," the piece being premiered by The Party in the sweltering white cube space of the Interurban Gallery on the corner of Hastings and Carrall, this oscillating bodily and spatial perceptivity is initiated when four female performers already wired with head mics (Marcelle Mrozowski, joined by Deanna Peters, Rianne Svelnis and Lexi Vajda) gather together in the centre of the room, place white, semi-translucent sacks over their heads, and begin to move. Their motion is largely confined to their pelvic areas. They rock back and forth on their heels, or sway their hips from side to side, or drop to their haunches on the floor and rotate their bellies slowly and deliberately in a circle, or simply stand and undulate their legs and thighs. Occasionally the performers change levels and direction (although Peters always remained standing because, as she later told me, the floor was too dirty), responding to each other's bodily proximity--despite the fact, as I also later discovered, they couldn't see each other through the sacks on their heads. What the performers don't do is take any "steps," or worry about keeping time to the music--a deeply atmospheric electronic score by DJ Phoebé Guillemot. They move without moving per se, and it is this trick of relational being--or, rather, being in relation, both to each other, and to us--that is so mezmerizing and, dare I say, contagious. Over the course of the work's 45+ minutes, as one transfers one's gaze from pulsing body to pulsing body, watching in fascination as darker and darker holes seem to appear in the sacks where each performer is desperately sucking in air, one slowly and simultaneously becomes aware of the other bodies around one, and of how different pockets of the audience are moving in relation not just to the performance (it's hard not to begin some rocking or swaying motion of one's own), but to each other: leaning in, bending away, stretching up, ducking down and, yes indeed, actually touching. All those manifestations of besideness that constitute our being in this world together.
Not that there isn't also a score to "Like Lemon." It's just that it's a largely conversational one. Those head mics are affixed for a reason, as over the course of the piece's duration the performers don't just move together, but also talk to each other. It's not always easy to follow what they're saying, but constructing a narrative is hardly the point. To quote Gardiner and Marcelle Mrozowski's program blurb, the conversation is less about making sense than "sense making." Hence the one phrase--uttered, I believe, both near the beginning and end of the piece--that stuck with me: "sound is so hot." As coloured and shaded and stippled and, above all, warmly illuminated by Gardiner's lighting projections, the sound of this performance--by which, in the sensorially redistributive premises underscoring the work as a whole, I take to mean a total acoustic environment that encompasses not just Guillemot's music, the performers' voices, noises seeping in from the street, but also a synesthetic way of seeing-hearing-feeling--created a heat that superseded the actual physical temperature of the room.
While I unfortunately can't do them justice here, I should note that "Like Lemon" was preceded by two other engaging works that also played with space, time, and sensory perception. Daisy Thompson's "The Ongoing Wonder of..." featured Katie DeVries, Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Michelle Lui, and Ashley Whitehead moving to their own distinct rhythms and personal body scores, but also intersecting with, taking on, and sometimes taking over the movements of the others--all to the improvised violin and vocal sounds of Alex Mah. "Infinite Digressions" was a collaborative performance installation by Diego Romero and Jessica Wilkie that among other things juxtaposed successive mass manipulations of hundreds of tiny coloured figures from the board game Risk with the stationary dropping of one cigarette butt after another.
The Party definitely knows how to throw a great party.
P.
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