A Gardener at Roulette Intermedium Tuesday, June 29 + Wednesday, June 30, 2021
A Gardener is a new performance created by Ayano Elson in collaboration with lighting designer LD DeArmon, composer Matt Evans, video designer Hyung Seok Jeon, and writer and dancer Lydia Okrent. From a position at the center of the world’s oppressive imperial power, the piece explores a new future we can reach through democratic and egalitarian collaboration, through active participation and consensus-building. Ayano and Matt’s collaboration analyzes and questions the historical relationship of music and dance and its complexities. They work to construct a new language from these fragments, generating a whole that celebrates desire, pleasure, and conflict.
Their process begins in rehearsals where they video and audio record improvisations based on Elson’s text-based scores that question the expressive qualities of impossible transformation and paradox. Later, both on their own and in each other’s company, they watch the video playback. Through improvisation, repetition, documentation, and digital manipulation, the ensemble arrived at a set of tones, sculptural forms, and step sequences that are the product of collaborative composition. The result is a complex lattice of interdisciplinary communication, where each sound or movement cues a response in the other. A Gardener examines the specifics and potentialities—colors, sounds, and scripts of text—that exist when the hierarchy between maker and performer disappears, revealing pieces of textures, patterns, and rhythms that are deeply human and connected.
“During the course of this performance’s creation, Lydia Okrent (writer, dancer, and dramaturge) wrote a text. This writing grows out of conversational narcissism, Anne Boyer, landscape design, Alain Badiou, Wikipedia, and the choreography involved in developing a point of view through distance and difference. Matt Evans (composer and percussionist) put together a playlist with music that inspires tomorrow’s show. Lydia, Matt, Hyung Seok, and LD are the most imaginative people I’ve met and these objects are part of their creative practice in making A Gardener.” – Ayano Elson
