Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?): Catch Cinema Cabaret Film with Live Performance Poetry Accompaniment This Week at Hallwalls

Monday, March 15

Catch Cinema Cabaret Film with Live Performance Poetry Accompaniment This Week at Hallwalls

Wed, March 17, 7:30. The UB Poetics Program Poets' Theater presents KONRAD STEINER & JEN HOFER: The Cinema Cabaret, a film with live narration by performance poets from San Francisco, Los Angeles, & Buffalo. FREE

Writers' engagement with popular cinema has long been limited in the popular imagination to the industry of screenplay writing leading to film production. Recently an inversion of this mode of production has captured the imaginations of poets and audiences. Using a form of live film narration inherited from practices in Japan and Korea during the silent film era, scenes from popular films are shown muted and re-narrated live with new language. These hybrid performances are satirical, critical, poetic, and analytic ways of "talking back" to the talkies. Konrad Steiner (SF) and Jen Hofer (LA) will present some background and conceptual framing about this new take on the movies and perform their own work along with writer/performers from Buffalo who will premier their own live cinema narrations.

Filmmaker and curator Konrad Steiner lives in San Francisco. His engagement with the writing community includes video collaborations with Leslie Scalapino (text from way) and Mac McGinnes (with text by James Schuyler), producing live film narration events in SF, Los Angeles, New York and Portland, OR, and his own performances in SF's Poets' Theater.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, and urban cyclist. Her most recent books are a series of anti-war-manifesto poems titled one (Palm Press, 2009); sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a translation from Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008); The Route, a collaboration with Patrick Durgin (Atelos, 2008); and lip wolf, a translation of lobo de labio by Laura Solórzano (Action Books, 2007). She teaches at CalArts, Goddard College, and Otis College, and works nationally and locally as a social justice interpreter.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?)

Choose Your Own Adventure

Monday, March 15

Catch Cinema Cabaret Film with Live Performance Poetry Accompaniment This Week at Hallwalls

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive

Family and Friends

Contributors

Followers

Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

Search This Blog