Performance

Ruler of My Heart, 2023.

Fowlentines Cabaret at the Deep End Studios, Queen Memorial Building, Philadelphia, PA. Live Performance featuring copper wire, magnets, mp3 player, cotton, polyester.

During the performance, I created a quiet speaker by wrapping copper wire around a long tube made from fabric and polyester and neodymium magnets. Then I wrapped the copper-clad fabric tube around my body. The copper connected to an mp3 player programmed to play Irma Thomas’s 1962 Ruler of My Heart on loop, allowing the whole structure to function as a speaker. Audience members had to get very close to me to hear the music being projected from my body.

I developed the performance after making a series of speakers with copper tape and paper, inspired by the intimacy that a low volume sound necessitates. I also became obsessed with the spiral and coil forms that speakers have. I wanted my body to be physically entangled in the form and used the performance to realize a one-to-one size ratio between my body and the speaker. This one-to-one ratio was repeated in the modesty of the speaker’s volume: only one person could be close enough to me to hear the song.

Motherboard, 2019.

Live Performance with Custom Electronics at the Paper Box, Brooklyn, NY.

Motherboard explores the way that trauma and emotional intimacy can be stored and transmitted via electronics. I used my costume with embedded electronics as a physical interface to play with a custom max/msp environment. This entailed live sampling from an fm radio broadcasting local radio sounds, a radio transmitter and receiver that I used to manipulate standard dual-tone multi-frequencies standard in domestic American telephones and recordings of messages written by my mother and grandmother.

not mine, 2022.

not mine is a performance featuring recorded machine and animal sounds that are manipulated and triggered through different “patches” and connections made from conductive play dough. The performance engages with the psychoanalytic concept of the transitional objects, specifically the process of organizing and making sense of one’s surroundings, and how play" can help create a narrative for many things that feel connected but aren’t overtly ordered. not mine was performed at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in November of 2022.

Score

in the time of the blue ball, 2023.

In the Time of the Blue Ball is a participatory table read in which audience members read a script based on a short novel of the same name by Manuela Draeger/Antoine Volodine directed by Ollie Goss at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. After discussing the role of an audio operator in the script, I composed the score in max/msp and then recorded it on three cassette tapes (one for each act) so that it could be played slightly differently for each performance.

About in the time of the blue ball:

In the story, an out of work detective, Bobbi Potemke, and a wooly crab navigate a not-so-distant future in which government systems have failed, police are no longer and infrastructure has succumbed to the natural world. The duo sets off to save a noodle named Auguste Diodon but soon ask the question—did the noodle even want to be saved? Through engaging with the text directly, audience members are implicated in the world-making, and animate the story collectively, while still obeying the formalities of a new work table read. More information about the performance

This performance was part of the Philadelphia Cannonball Fest. More information about in the time of the blue ball can be found at the Philadelphia Fringe Fest website.