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The third event in the 2009/2010 season of the Los Solos series continued the series’ tradition of challenging audiences to accept performances beyond the realm of the ordinary as worthwhile art. The Los Solos series, which began September 2008, is bound by only the loosest of requirements: each event will have two female artists, one national artist and one who is working out of Charm City. The flexibility of the series allows for a wide array of artists to be presented, ranging from dancers, to performance artists, theater artists, video, and writers. However, it also means that two seemingly radically different artists have to be presented in the same night, in the same space, and to the same audience.
Bonnie Jones, who curates the series along with Jackie Milad, explained that she and Milad dedicate extensive amounts of time to choosing the right artists, and ensuring that they are paired as well as possible with the artist with whom they will be sharing the stage. Jones explained: “We look for resonances between each artist’s work. We want to create an interesting dialog between the artists and the audience. We hope that each piece informs and broadens the understanding of the other.”
This past Friday, November 6, the series presented local writer Merrill Feitell along with New York City’s avant turntablist Maria Chavez. Both artists interacted with sound, presenting it as art that the audience would hear, rather than see.
Merrill Feitell started the evening with readings from her book of short stories Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes. The selection read aloud was from the piece “Bike New York,” which focuses on a 30 year-old man working his way through a month of bachelor party events towards his wedding. The main character was in a clear state of transition, and was grasping for some sense of self, and a way to understand his relation to others. He was conflicted, and his interior life was believably muddled. The second reading was from Feitell’s upcoming novel Any Minute Now – it focused on a misogynistic father who killed himself, the relationship he had with his children, and the ways in which they cope with his death.
Feitell’s nervous and often awkward reading interrupted her text with fumbles and asides to the audience. However, these breaks from the writing augmented the reading rather than detracting from it – her nervousness and uncertainty gave voice to her characters’ emotions. It allowed Feitell to present the pieces with an honesty that created a bond between the author and her audience; she was self-deprecating and funny, and twirled her hair and fidgeted self-consciously in the same the way that I have seen friends practice reading their work aloud in their living rooms. For this reason, Feitell may have unwittingly transformed her reading into a piece of theater – her performance created a situation that expanded and expounded upon the text, adding immeasurable depth to the original work.
Feitell was followed by Maria Chavez. Chavez served as a foil for Feitell – she is soft spoken and comfortable on the stage. She began by explaining the necessity of Duchamp’s triangle, which establishes a balance between the art, the artist, and the audience. As soon as Chavez started performing, it became clear why she expressed concern for the limits of the audience; the first piece startled us, and several people left before it had ended. Chavez’s work tore a spoken word record apart, starting simply with skipping the record. She interrupted the sound to leave the audience in complete silence, and then suddenly turned the volume up so high that it was physically painful. She didn’t shy away from ugliness or extremes – at one point she turned off all noise but the bass, which was so exaggeratedly powerful that vibrations rattled the entire building, shaking the walls and chairs.
Eventually the distortions in the sound evolved into rhythms, which in turn developed into entirely new works. Chavez began layering records on top of one another – initially this created a monk-like hum over the top of an instrumental track. When she added a broken record to the top of the stack (she had removed ¼ of the record, leaving behind a disk shaped roughly like Pac-Man) the uneven thud of the needle created a drum beat. All the while the needle on the record player sparked and smoked.
Once the audience adjusted to the idea of an artist spinning records that weren’t danceable – in fact, weren’t even “music” in the traditional sense – they loosened up and found themselves appreciating the wall of sound. Chavez didn’t allow anything to be simply beautiful – she challenged the audience to accept noises well outside of their comfort zone.
Jones asserts that this stretch of the imagination is what the series was founded for. She explained: “I like to think of the artists we select as those who are working hard to re-shape, re-think and re-invent the creative forms we have become accustomed to and create ones that we haven’t even conceived of yet.”
Los Solos Series
First Friday of Each Month
(September – March)
http://baltimoreperformance.com/lossolos/
LOF/t
120 W. North Ave
Baltimore, MD 21201
http://loadoffun.net/
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December 18, 2009 6:25 am