Gerard & Kelly

Looking Back: Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild (1972).

The iconoclastic performer and artist, Meredith Monk, who challenged notions of musical composition and discipline-specificity when she first emerged in the late 1960s, is making a retrospective glance in “Education of the Girlchild Revisited,” a “reconfiguration” of her 1973 work “Education of a Girlchild, an opera.”  This work, performed as a solo by the artist, is itself a look backwards through the life of an aged woman to her childhood.  In recent years, the 68 year-old artist has spent a lot of time considering the backward reflection that age and mortality provoke.  In 2006 she created “Impermanence,” a multi-disciplinary work that incorporated passages from the diary of her then recently deceased partner of many years.  Monk has said of this time, "There was something raw in my musical response; it puts your entire life in perspective." At the beginning of the process for “Impermanence,” Monk worked with a group of hospice patients. She observed that what was important to them at this significant moment of the end of their lives was the dependability of their old habits.

Reusable Parts/Endless Love

 

The cycle of works known as Reusable Parts/Endless Love is a project that questions how representations of intimacy and narratives of love are produced, re-produced, circulated and exchanged.

This three-part project is realized as a performance installation adapted specifically to the exhibition/performance space; a multi-channel video and audio installation; and a photographic series.

The project began when Gerard and Kelly encountered Tino Sehgal’s Kiss in an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In Kiss a man and a woman perform a slow, languorous embrace. Struck by the ephemerality of the piece and its consistent boy/girl casting, they returned a number of times to learn its choreography. Under the watchful eyes of museum guards, they spoke the couple’s movements into hidden voice-recorders. This resulted in a twelve-minute audio recording of the artists’ observations of the Kiss dancers’ movements in real time. (“His hands on her lower back…her arms around his shoulders…they turn ooooone huuuundred aaaaaaand eiiiiiiiighty deeeeeegrees.”).  Gerard and Kelly used this audio recording as a score for movement in their attempt to reconstruct Kiss with critical differences. The languorous embrace of the couple becomes a series of solo performances, with each dancer enacting both male and female roles on his own body.

Reusable Parts/ Endless Love                       

 <performance installation>

 

Gerard and Kelly, Reusable Parts/Endless Love (2011)

Performance view, Danspace Project, New York, November 2011

 

 

 

Kiss Solo                                                                                 

<video installation>

Gerard and Kelly, Kiss Solo (2011) 

Multiple channel video installation, dimensions variable

Installation view, University of California, Los Angeles, December 2011

 

 

Score in Four Parts                                           

 <photographic series>

Gerard and Kelly

Score in Four Parts (2011) 

Digital chromogenic prints mounted on museum box, 16" x 24"

 

Digital chromogenic prints, mounted on museum box, (4) 16" x 24"

 
Production Credits:

Danspace Project, New York City (November 2011): Performed by Niv Acosta, devynn emory, Yve Laris Cohen, Ryan Kelly, Todd McQuade, Roger Prince, and Jose Tena.  Scenic and lighting designer: Marcus Doshi. Costume designer: Camille Assaf. Sound engineer: Trent Wolbe. Co-production Moving Theater.

University Art Gallery, UC-Irvine (Februrary 2011): Performed by Ryan Kelly, Politeia Le, Todd McQuade, and Jose Tena. Costumes and styling by Aaron Valenzuela. Sound engineering by Trent Wolbe. Co-production Moving Theater.

Video production: Editor: Javo Basques. Camera: Eugene Wasserman.

Moving Theater's programs are made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties. Moving Theater's 2011-2012 projects are supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Press in OC Weekly

Click for full article HERE >>

Stacy Davies of OC Weekly reviews our video Park Avenue...Shit..., part of the exhibition "Cult of the Ruin: Strategies of Accumulation" at the Universiy Art Gallery, UC-Irvine: 

"Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly transport us through the halls of history in their video installation, Park Avenue . . . Shit; I’m Still Only In Park Avenue Every Time I Think I’m Gonna Wake Up Back In the Jungle,a play on the opening lines of Apocalypse Now. The video is an exceptional split-screen trip through what appears to be a Southern gentlemen’s club circa the Civil or Revolutionary War. Hallowed halls where straight, white soldiers danced with straight, white ladies are quickly taken over by a co-ed team of performance artists of various ethnicities who prance, dance and play off the décor while an elderly woman narrates the history of the site. Far from desecrating the landmark, these young people (sometimes wearing military uniforms) are more like visions of freedom and progress transported backward from the future—and while they are no doubt visions that would have scared the beejezus out of our ancestors, they are, in fact, the very results of our forefathers and mothers giving up their lives."

 

Closing Night Performance: Feb 5

UCLA Open Studios!

We presented an hour-long performance as part of the UCLA Department of Art Graduate Open Studios on December 4, 2010. Two performers “literalize” a 12-minute audio score, a denotation of the choreography of Tino Sehgal’s Kiss. The  score describes a man and woman slowly moving through the mechanics of a continuous embrace. Our re-performance translated this “kiss” into a set of choreographic directives, enacted as literally as possible. Performed five consecutive times in blindfolds, the two performers made the description of an erotic encounter between a man and woman an exercise in automation and autoerotics, avoiding any physical contact between them save the occasional, unavoidable bumping into.

Performed by Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly. Photos: Kelly Kleinschrodt.

Boxes (2010)

Gerard and Kelly in collaboration with Chelsea Knight, Boxes (2010)
Single-channel video, 6 minutes
Production still 
 

 
Production Credits: 
Featuring Benjamin Asriel, Ryan Kelly and Jose Tena
Camera work and Editing by Chelsea Knight

Impermanent Collection (2007)

Gerard and Kelly, Impermanent Collection (2007)
Performance, 60'
Performance still, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, December 2007.
Pictured: Charly Totterwitz
 

Impermanent Collection is a personal and subjective response to the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Created as a performance and video installation for the museum’s Lower Gallery, the project attempts to bring attention to the diverse affective relations individuals experience when looking attentively at works of art. Gerard and Kelly collaborated with Brock Labrenz to develop a series of films, each capturing a single performer alone in the museum’s gallery performing near a chosen work from the permanent collection. These films were animated in two live events that included a musical performance by ICE | International Contemporary Ensemble.

 

Gerard and Kelly in collaboration with Brock Labrenz, Impermanent Collection: Emilio (2007)

Single-channel video, 7 minutes

Production Credits:

Whitney Live at the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York (

December, 2007)

Produced by Moving Theater and An Films in collaboration with ICE | International Contemporary Ensemble

Performed by Emilio Martinez Lopez, Thea Little, Marion Ramirez, Natalie Thomas, and Charly Totterwitz

Music by Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis, performed live by ICE | International Contemporary Ensemble

Stage design by Josef Asteinza

Production Manager: John Martinez