I recently collaborated on the script segment of BUFFER, an expansive performance art and dance piece by artist Xavier Cha. 'Buffer' is schedule to have its world premiere as a part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Performance dates are Nov 1 – Nov 4 at 7:30pm.
Book your tickets here.
NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL, BAM, 2017
About Buffer
From the BAM website page for the performance:
A man and woman deep in conversation, their intimate dialogue glitching and dropping out. The razor-sharp movement of a contemporary dance company, lagging just seconds behind an operatic score. Two sweaty men in the middle of a sexual encounter, bodies freezing in an ecstatic loop. Buffer is a perception-altering new work by Xavier Cha (Body Drama, Whitney Museum), the 2017 Harkness Foundation Artist in Residence at the BAM Fisher, as part of Performa 17, the citywide festival of performance art. It draws on the astonishing physical and vocal control of an ensemble cast of actors (Babs Olusanmokun and Cassandra Freeman), dancers, and adult film performers to replicate the experience of digital consumption through strictly analog means. Comprising three scenes that toggle back and forth like browser windows in a state of perpetual buffering, it lays bare the intimate yet alienated relationships we have with the bodies on our screens.
About Xavier Cha
From her Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship page:
Xavier Cha’s performance-based work revolves around modes of accessibility, exchange, and hierarchies of space and perception. Collaboration is often at play in her performances: Xavier has invited actors, dancers, musicians, programmers, cults, and clowns, among many other non-artist performers, to not only participate in her projects, but also to become protagonists in the work. Through these events, Cha formalizes subjectivity within contemporary culture, isolating elements of production, perception, and communication into bare, abstract, and often illogical experience. In stripping away extraneous content, Xavier reveals phantasmic qualities of consumption, trends, and cultural engagement. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, The Kitchen, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (U.K.), the Sculpture Center, Asia Society Museum, and the Hammer Museum, among other galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe.
Xavier’s process and work is often intensely collaborative – here are all the people involved in Buffer, under Xavier’s direction:
Musical score by Aaron David Rosse; male soprano Michael Maniaci; Librettist Julianna Huxtable
- Sound design by Aaron David Ross
- Lighting Design by Joe Levasseur
- Stage design by Paul Kopkau, Felix Burrichter and Michael Bullock
- Screenplay by Xavier Cha and Robert Moulthrop
- Babs Olusanmokun (actor)
- Cassandra Freeman (actress)
- Cori Kresge (former Cunningham dancer)
- Dylan Crossman (former Cunningham dancer)
- Joshua Tuason (Stephen Petronio dancer, performed with C. Kresge for Ellen Cornfield)
- Stanley Gambucci (NYU graduate and student of Rashaun Mitchell)
- Nicholas Grubbs (NYU graduate and student of Rashaun Mitchell)
- Male Adult Film Actors Cutler X and TBC