Premiere World Premiere
Production Language English
Country of Origin United States
Description BAM and Recess are pleased to present a new performance piece by Brooklyn-based artist Molly Surno, featuring twenty men performing a choreographed soundscape, using hand-crafted musical hair brushes. The performers, arranged in the center of BAM’s Lepercq Space, will prepare their hair with the amplified brushes. Surno and Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) will then mix the sound in real time as it is generated. These distortions will result in a meditative, repetitive, and layered composition.
The piece takes its title We of Me from Carson McCullers’ novel Member of the Wedding, in which the protagonist describes her desire to unify and fantasy to belong. In Surno’s piece, the performers’ bodies will double, refract and merge as each enacts his part and relinquishes his subjectivity to the larger composition. Audio cues from the brushes, coupled with the intimate, repetitive grooming gestures, will tie each performer to the other, while the dissonance of the sound will create a rupture between the illusion of unified bodies and the reality of isolation. Recalling La Monte Young’s Dream House, the Theatre of Eternal Music, and Edward Van Tassel’s Integratron, Surno’s composition will activate and complicate the physical and emotional effects of sound on the individual and the collective body.
Identifier 2015f.SE.01123
