Keep-Sake

Watch a youtube video excerpt from the performance

Project Description

Keep-Sake is a new interdisciplinary, collaborative work involving visual arts, sound and performance. The projects lead artists are Barbara Kilpatrick, a visual artist who is creating and directing the project, and Elise Kermani, a sound and multimedia artist. This site-specific work was premiered at the Ancram Opera House, located in the small town of Ancram in Columbia Country, New York, in September 2008. The creation of the work involved three steps. The first was a residency at the theater in which we photographed and filmed sculptures in a series of four related acts or poems. The second consisted of editing these images into a video DVD, creating a performance before the camera. The third was a public installation, at the Opera House, which introduced the video together with live, interactive sound and light.

In this new work, sculptures made by Kilpatrick take the place of human dancers. As she photographs these, in motion, still images become choreography. Kermani's music combines the sounds of everyday life with citations and erasures from Scarlatti, invoking our vernacular and formal auditory memories and arising anew from the performance's movements.

The musical instrument is the LumenTar, a new electronic instrument, whose sounds are triggered by the stimulation of light sensors. The LumenTar descends from the theremin, one of the first electronic instruments, which is played by a musician who modulates an electronic field by moving his/her hands without touch. The LumenTar extends this concept by adding light sensors that create sound in response to optical stimulation.

Keep-Sake references the ways that working women, mothers, daughters, and sweethearts have had to carve out their creative lives in between the lives of others. They have created small, intimate works (lap-work, such as quilts or doilies), which could then be sewn together to make a complete whole. The history of the creative life of women, when it is finally written, will no doubt show a consistent theme of integrating interior life with the community. The performances are poems, not in the sense of recited words, but rather of what Wallace Stevens calls an act of the mind.

To donate to this project email us at: info (at) mishinnah (dot) org, and specify Keep - Sake in the subject.

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