INTER-ACTIONS

PERFORMANCE ART  x  ART THAT PERFORMS

July 18-19, 2015
Channel Center Garage
Fort Point, Boston

Most pieces were also performed at various times on July 16-17 during the 2015 Outside the Box festival on Boston Common.

Designed and Curated by Rick Dorff

Click here to view photos by Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano.

When the Channel Center Garage opened its gates to INTER-ACTIONS, dozens of musicians and actors, poets and performance artists collaborated with an inter-active art installation that responded to their movements and sounds. A plus is that Fort Point’s new Channel Center Garage is also a monumental work of art to be appreciated.

INTER-ACTIONS centered on a three-piece, kinetic installation created by Fort Point Theatre Channel artistic co-director Rick Dorff. Performers manipulated, rearranged, rotated, and interacted with the installation’s sculptural pieces, each of which was activated by motion and sound sensors. The installation was constructed from fabric, mirror, wire mesh, wood, lighting, and various other materials.

INTER-ACTIONS included a wide breadth of artistic genres, such as drama, dance, conceptual performance, music, film, video, opera, acrobatics, etc. Each piece was brief, ranging from a minute or less to ten minutes.

INTER-ACTIONS was #14 in FPTC’s free Exclamation Point series of short new works.

Here's the line-up, which varied from day to day.

• Awkward Instrument: Improvisational dance by Nicole Pierce, accompanied by Mitchel King Ahern on instruments that he makes using industrial materials and electronics and plays using traditional techniques for resonant sounds
• Betrayal & Lies: Kevin Price played bass clarinet while moving among the Inter-Action sculptures, coaxing them into reacting to the tango music of Mark Warhol.
• Billows: The sea billowed, the whales crashed into each other, and the lilypads got all tangled up, all in Olivia Brownlee’s tale for children and adults. With Kimberly Mae Waller, Rebecca Lehroff, Jaime Carrillo, and Hana Pegrimkova; directed by Hana Pegrimkova and Mario Avila.

• Catfishing: A virtual social experiment in which Heather Kapplow attempted to force the appreciation of public art on people who would prefer to have an extremely casual sexual encounter, hopefully answering the age-old question of whether an art experience is a good substitute for a sexual one. Click here for documentation for this piece on Kapplow's website.

• Conversation: Jason Fitz-Gerald, an actor, director, photographer, writer, and artist, joined poetry, drum, harmonica, and himself in a musical, verbal, and movement conversation. 

• Duck That: A jazz quartet that improvises all sounds on the spot as each member employs game calls and animal noises in addition to reeds, brass, voice, electronics, and many extended techniques. Steve Norton, Angela Sawyer, and Jesse Collins have performed around Boston since 2007.
• Forked Road: Rae Marie Luna’s performance poetry told the story of an overgrown graveyard at the fork in the road, where a repository of those without a path in life ended up. The hiker (audience) bore witness to long-lost voices of outcast women during an enchanted moon.
• Holding On: A Marriage of Poetic Verse, Music, and Movement: A synthesis of excerpted text from OWLL projects interwoven with the Sarabande from J.S. Bach’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Flute in A Minor, to express the pain and resilience of youth who live in the shadow of incarceration. Compilation and narration by Mary Driscoll, musical performance by Peggy Friedland, and choreography by Zahra A. Belyea.
• Il était une fois: Susan Dorff presented an original narrative poem by bicycle about a visit to the prehistoric alignments in Carnac, France.
• inner EXCHANGE: Improvisational music joining classical and world music, with Molly Exten (violin), Nicolas Sterner (cello), and Keiichi Hashimoto (cornet), in a group newly formed for this project.
• Internal Organs, danced by Junichi Fukuda, abstractly depicted the process of food digestion as the organs (the installation) digested the food (the dancer). 
• My Name Is Art: In Peter Snoad’s short play, people reacted to an art installation—with a twist, of course. With Matthew Zahnzinger as Anthony, Kimberly Mae Waller as Gloria, and Kevin Paquette as Art; directed by Liz Adams.
• Planet Egnarts: Two souls found themselves inside of a David Bowie song.  What became of their connection and relationship under this extraterrestrial circumstance? The entire text was comprised of lyrics from David Bowie songs. With Kathleen Lewis, Jaime Carrillo, and Adam Baratz
• Soul Tapping: Kria Sakakeeny laced up her tap shoes to provide the exclamation and punctuation to The Prison Cell, by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Mahfouz.
• Two Trumpets and a Tuba, with Eric Dahlman, John Baylies, and Keiichi Hashimoto

• What You Seek Is Seeking You: The ensemble of Amelia Lumpkin, Melissa Nussbaum Freeman, and friends generated two short plays joining the spoken word, movement, and percussive stomps, snaps, claps, vocal sound, and gibberish. With Kristin Rybeck, Johnny Quinones, Mal Malme, Cristina Dones, Jason Jedrusiak, and friends.

INTER-ACTIONS was presented FREE, thanks to the generosity of our donors, including CV Properties.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a local agency that is funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, administered by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture.