Dear New Yorkers,
Some of you may have read in Handwoven magazine or on WeaveTech about a performance art piece I did with teh artist Suzanne Bocanegra last January. Suzanne has been invited to repeat the performance, and I am included.
The piece is called "Re-remember-er" and is a recreation of a fabric that Suzanne saw on a Danish farm loom. The fabirc is called "olmerdug, it is a stripe warp faced twill with cotton warp and wool weft. It is the Danish version of mattress ticking. The cloth enjoyed a brief fad as a fashion fabric during WW2 when the Danes were cutting up their old Olmerdug duvets and making clothes out of them, since there was no other cloth available because of the war restrictions.
Suzanne has attempted to make a space so that the audience will feel like they are inside the loom. I am on a spotlighted platform, my 8 harness Macomber is fitted with microphones and the sound of shuttle and harnesses, even my fingernails scraping the reed as I beat is amplified. There is a Danish accordionist, also spotlighted and on a raised platform, who is playing sounds inspired by teh weaving draft of Olmerdug as if the draft was transposed into a musical stanza. Across the front of the room are 50 ametuer violinists who are directed using signals to make sounds on their violins. The remained of the room is dark, but there are stripes of light in a pattern to symbolize the warp, across the audience, as if the audience is included in the threads of the warp.
The performance of RE-remember-er will be October 16, at 9PM at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square south. Admission is FREE. The program lasts one hour. http://www.judson.org/index.html
Here's a YouTube video of my January performance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVIjZrtFJJs