Saturday, March 5, 2022
3:00pm CT
Streaming on YouTube
In celebration of two current exhibitions, CvsD is pleased to present a special live-streaming event titled Sequesterfest Vol. 8: Emilio Cruz & Dick Higgins. This three-part multimedia broadcast will feature a special staged reading by a troupe led by Hannah B Higgins of Spring Game: an opera for shadow puppets, written by Dick Higgins in 1974, based on the 7.7.73 works that are on display in the gallery. The second segment will consist of an audio drama called The George Project: A Liberation Through Hearing, based on Emilio Cruz’s 1975 play When This War is Over, You’re Going to Get it George, created by Juli Crockett and produced by CalArts Center for New Performance. Closing out the live-streaming afternoon will be a set of live improvised music by the quartet Rempis/Abrams/Ra + Baker, featuring saxophonist Dave Rempis, bassist Joshua Abrams, drummer Avreeayl Ra, and pianist/synthesizer player Jim Baker. Sequesterfest Vol. 8 will be streamed live as part of CvsD’s ongoing contribution to the Sequesterfest series in collaboration with Experimental Sound Studio. In-person attendance is limited to invitation only.
Program
Dick Higgins
Spring Game
Kicking off the event is a special staged reading by a troupe led by Hannah B Higgins – art historian, Fluxus scholar, and daughter of Dick Higgins and Allison Knowles – and featuring Simon Anderson, Chris Reeves, and Lauren Sudbrink, of Spring Game: an opera for shadow puppets, written by Dick Higgins, based on the works that are on display in the gallery. Spring Game was originally published as a chapbook on Unpublished Editions. "Dick played with the ambiguity of read, spoken and seen letters," explains Hannah in her text for the exhibition 'zine. "In his opera, Spring Game (1974), he imagined the bodies and body parts of 7.7.73 in dialogue. Big Head (the Bass) responds to another character's advances, Cock (tenor). 'Sorry, my friend,' laments Big Head, 'I'm not into that.'"
Emilio Cruz | Juli Crockett and Michael Feldman
The George Project: A Liberation Through Hearing
The second segment will consist of an audio drama called The George Project: A Liberation Through Hearing, based on Emilio Cruz’s 1975 play When This War is Over, You’re Going to Get it George, directed by Juli Crockett and composed by Michael Feldman. Previewing the first episode from an ambitious seven-part audio play, Crockett adapts Cruz’s anti-war, Artaud-inspired text into an immersive sonic experience. Crockett and Feldman place Cruz's text in an enveloping, spatialized soundscape that conjures a mythic battlefield of mind and body, where sound is both a tool for healing and a weapon of war. Veering from ASMR stimulations and soothing sound baths to echoes of sonic brainwashing and low-frequency attacks, this sonic play offers a ritualized mediation on the brutal logic of war and on humankind's capacity to endure – or exploit – the most depraved and hopeless of circumstances. Produced by CalArts Center for New Performance.
Rempis/Abrams/Ra + Baker
As a celebratory way of closing out the afternoon we will feature a set of live improvised music by the outstanding Chicago-based quartet Rempis/Abrams/Ra + Baker, featuring saxophonist Dave Rempis, bassist Joshua Abrams, drummer Avreeayl Ra, and pianist/synthesizer player Jim Baker. Working as a band since 2012, this intergenerational ensemble has performed across the U.S. and at many international festivals, and along the way they have released three records available through Aerophonic Records: Aphelion (2014), Perihelion (2016), and Apsis (2019). Their next release is due out in June.