Play > Play > PLAY

Thursday January 27, 6:30-8:00pm
360 Court Street (main green church doors)
Brooklyn NY 11231

Join us on Thursday, January 27 for a live performance program at RU. In Play > Play > PLAY, RU resident artist Kate Birch will improvise music (violin and voice) through a direct engagement with Eva Davidova’s two-channel video projection featuring Garden for Drowning Descendants and a live stream from a webcam installed on Kate’s body. Birch’s music and body movement will enter into a layered dialogue with Davidova’s digital environment whose roots can be found in Cyber Feminism, Glitch Feminism and a broad register of ancient visions, seeping into the present through the digital.

Set in the ruins of San Joaquín sugar mill in Nerja (Spain), the video work Garden for Drowning Descendants features a free exploration of a scene taken from the game engine Unity with the avatars of the performers Mx. Oops and Thisby Cheng, combined with a motion capture by the choreographer Kristen McNally. The avatars perform a deconstructed duet on top of a giant HorseWoman set for self-destruction. The text for Garden for Drowning Descendants is a poem by Zhivka Baltadzhieva: La realidad / se agota tan rápido / que para respirar, / imagina.

This program is organized by Maryam Ghoreishi, RU Program Manager.

Click the image below to see images from the performance. 

About
RU artist Laura Schuler/Kate Birch is a multi-instrumentalist (voc, violin, synths), composer and songwriter, who is active across Europe. As a solo artist she performed in numerous concerts. Since May 2020 she has produced and performed live under the name “Kate Birch”. Schuler, leads the Laura Schuler Quartet with Tony Malaby, Hanspeter Pfammatter and Lionel Friedli. She is part of the trio Esche (with Luzius Schuler and Lisa Hoppe), and plays with the trio Kwestia ( Ronny Graupe and Alfred Vogel). From 2014 to 2017 she worked with the quintet Kronikor, and from 2013 to 2016 with the band Aberratio Ictus ( Rea Dubach and Ronny Graupe). Between 2015 and 2019, Schuler performed with Das Seltene Orchester and composed several pieces for the 12 person ensemble. Schuler has contributed to several dance productions such as “Blue Marks, Red Spots” by Rahel Maria Neuenschwander, “Spiel der Wandlungen” with Annemarie Kaufmann, and for the collective Bufo Makmal. With her brother Luzius Schuler and trumpet player Nicola Habegger, Schuler is a co-founder of the Färbi-Jazzfest, a festival in Langenthal Switzerland dedicated to the creative, young music scene.

Eva Davidova is a 2017 RU Alum and an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on new media(s). Her work addresses ecological disaster, interdependency, and the political implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. She questions what we give for granted, and explores possibilities for agency through uncertainty and play. Davidova often deliberately “misuses” technology in order to disturb its acceptance, and that of the prevalent emotional manipulation that both physical and informational architecture exert. She is interested in the immersive and emerging technologies as a way to explore the cultural norms, implicit biases and forced limitations encoded in the technology itself, and work with new media as not only a novel form of storytelling and beauty, but as a frame to explore our changing cultural conditions and the urgency we face as the makers of new realities. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the Everson Museum, the Albright Knox Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, Instituto Cervantes and La Regenta among others. She was an artist in residency at RU in 2017.

This program benefits from the support of the Canton of Berne Office of Culture / Cultural Promotion.