Organized by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO)
DSO Music Director: Jaap Van Zweden
DSO President & CEO: Jonathan Martin
SOLUNA Co-Founder/Advisor: Anna-Sophia Van Zweden
Curator-at-Large: Muriel Quancard
During SOLUNA 2017 “Dreams & Illusions” (May 15-June 4), visual art, sound and performance provided visitors with space and time for contemplation and reverie, inviting them to participate in aural and cinematic environments. The viewer was center stage and often played a role in activating the works. Visual perspective and musical narrative were deconstructed and replaced with new, sometimes fragmentary, often visionary models.
At the Crow Collection of Asian Art, composer Henri Scars Struck presented We Know You've Got Soul, an immersive auditory experience that took the visitor on a journey from earth to eternal rest. Inspired by myths of the afterlife, music and sound led participants through the museum, along with historical artifacts and the landscapes of artists Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney.
Agence 5970 had long explored the complex relationship between consciousness, the body and dreaming. Focusing on the architecture of dreams rather than their symbolic content, DreamSpace engaged the audience in a vibrant experience that combined the acts of listening, reading and seeing within a technologically mediated sensorium. DreamSpace explored the phenomenon of synesthesia — the combination and interplay of images, sounds, colors and other effects within an artwork — in an effort to intensify the viewer’s perception.
Ultra-Seeing: The Mandala Pattern, hosted at the Nasher Sculpture Center and curated together with Light Cone and the University of Texas at Dallas’s School of Arts, Technology and Communication, delivered three disparate cinematic experiences: a screening of abstract films by Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner, Adam R. Levine, Joost Rekveld, and James Whitney; a live performance by Martin Back; and an immersive installation by French collective Nominoë. Belson’s kaleidoscopic images were set to music by visionary sound artist Henri Jacobs, while the poetic footage of Bruce Conner was augmented by the hypnotic pulse of Terry Riley’s In C.
At the Wyly Theatre, Jessica Mitrani exposed the symbiotic relationship between theater and cinema in her multimedia performance Traveling Lady. This work was conceived as a film with live elements with acclaimed Spanish actress Rossy de Palma physically emerging from the picture and performing on a cinematic stage. At once corporeal and cosmic, this forceful combination of film and theater played on scale and the bodily presence of the actress.
In Mexican artist Pia Camil’s community- based performance at Dallas Contemporary, the audience was invited to interact with a shared structure made of sewn-together second-hand clothes. This group effort hinted at the construction of social ties through the process of participation. An antidote to the individuality of capitalism, Camil’s work appealed to our empathy via collective dream.
The scope of the projects presented throughout SOLUNA 2017 reflected the plurality of the contemporary artistic experience. Throughout the festival, the senses of the spectators were stimulated by a collection of images as the artists invited them to reflect on the nature and value of these images as mental constructs. As Hans Belting wrote in Anthropology of Images, “nowhere are we more justified in speaking of ourselves as ‘the locus of images’ than when it comes to dreams.”
— Muriel Quancard
Muriel would like to extend a special thank you to Anna-Sophia Van Zweden, Jaap Van Zweden, Jonathan Martin, Gillian Friedman, Sarah Whitling, the gifted musicians of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and their dedicated team including Michelle Miller Burns, James Leffler, Kelly Halaszyn, Peter Czornyj, Nathan Lutz, Tom Brekhus, Sean Kelly, Courtney Zimmerman, Denise Mc Govern, Chelsea Norris, Kristi Cooper, Tab Boyles, Debi Pena and Jamie Allen, for their collaboration.
May 16-June 4, 2017
We Know You've Got Soul
Co-curated and produced in collaboration with Jacqueline Chao and Danny Skinner
World Premiere
Crow Collection for Asian Arts
GRAMMY® Award-winning composer and pianist Henri Scars Struck creates a meditative soundscape, confronting tradition and contemporary art practice, and Eastern and Western sensibilities inspired by Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney’s exhibition and the art throughout the Crow Collection.
Inspired by the Sacred Scriptures and the many myths and legends about the journey of the Soul, music composer Henri Scars Struck creates for SOLUNA and the Crow Collection of Asian Art, a multi-room sonic experience that takes you from this life and its gravity on Earth and beyond, till the Soul finds Eternal Rest. The Soul begins its odyssey from Gallery 1 – with the exhibition of exquisite paintings and photography of landscapes and mountainous terrain by Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney – to the passage of death and to Galleries 2 and 3, where good and evil deeds confront each other during the period of mourning, judgement and penitence before being released to the majesty of the last gallery, where the Soul finds peace in Eternity.
This music and sound installation is about meditating on our purpose and actions in this life and the hereafter, asking “what you would change today if you knew that an afterlife exists?”
Via a succession of music and sounds, Struck triggers your memories, some of which will make you smile in contemplation, and will afford you the time to breathe for a few minutes or for several hours, at the final Gallery of "Divine Pathways,” where cushions are provided for personal refection.
May 21, 2017
The Mandala Pattern
Co-curated in collaboration with Frank Dufour, ATEC (School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication at UTDallas) and Light Cone, Paris
Nasher Sculpture Center
“The Mandala Pattern” is the last session of the Ultra-Seeing series, an exploration of experimental cinema from the perspective of synesthesia and visual music, curated by Light Cone, a French organization dedicated to the diffusion and conservation of experimental cinema, and the school of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas. Organized in collaboration with SOLUNA “The Mandala Pattern” proposes a film installation, a live media performance and a screening of abstract films of quasi-psychedelic qualities.
May 24, 2017
DreamSpace
World Premiere
Meyerson Symphony Center
Curated by Muriel Quancard
DreamSpace is a site-specific, interactive audio-visual installation. The work is not intended as a linear narrative, rather conceived to be experienced collectively, as a series of short dream sequences, each triggered, assembled and modulated by audience input.
In contrast to focusing on the interpretation of symbolic content, dreamSpace explores the temporal organization of narrations of dreams in order to render perceivable the structure of oneiric Time. dreamSpace assumes that oneiric Time is structured along a flow in which time is not passing sequentially in its horizontal attachment to space, but instead, appears to flow vertically along a percolation of movements through multiple spatial layers. The work aims to translate the process of remembering dreams through the presentation of audio-visual sequences, evocative of this particular temporality of dreams.
dreamSpace seeks to make the viewer aware of the fragile and fugacious sensation of space and movement occurring in dreams by infusing into the performance space a state of reverie, or meditation, favorable to the exploration of the temporal structure of dreams. The choreographic interaction between performers, audio- visual elements and viewers, results in the unfolding of this structure onto space.
In order to unlock and render tangible the dreamSpace, Agence5970 has commissioned fashion designer, Charles Smith II to create wearable poetry for dancers from The Bruce Wood Dance Project. When read aloud, these extracts of poetic texts evocative of dreams are analyzed according to the acoustic and temporal signature of the reader’s voice, thus controlling the visual and musical output. Enter the dreamSpace ....
dreamSpace is created in collaboration with: Charles Smith II, Fashion Designer
Sherri Segovia, Choreographer
Joy Bollinger, Nestor Lopez, Kimi Nikaidoh, Dancers from the Bruce Wood Dance Project
Djakhangir Zakhidof, Contributing Videographer
The School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas
May 27, 2017
Bara, Bara, Bara
Dallas Contemporary
Co-curated in collaboration with Justine Ludwig
In this performance work Pia Camil mines behaviors indicative of consumer culture—addressing Mexico/US relations and Texas, specifically, as the site of her exhibition. Past projects such as Wearing, Watching and A Pot for a Latch invited unexpected involvement from the audience as a vital element of the work. For Dallas, Camil is creating pieces that similarly call for communal interaction.
Camil’s latest body of work involves the reworking of t-shirts purchased at secondhand clothing markets in Mexico City. The shirts sold were originally produced in Latin America and sold in the United States. After wear, the shirts found their way to Mexico City to be sold in bulk. Camil acquires and transforms these shirts into massive textiles by taking them apart and then sewing them back together. The result is massive sheets of multicolored fabrics, punctuated by the neck openings of various shirts. At her Dallas Contemporary exhibition, the sheets are presented as awnings, reminiscent of those at the Las Torres Market in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, where the shirts were purchased.
For SOLUNA, the exhibition is partially dismantled. The work becomes a catalyst for communal interaction. The performance is inspired by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s 1968 Divisor in which participants activated a massive sheet of white fabric in the streets of Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Slits were cut throughout the sheet allowing individuals to stick their head through them. As a result, all participants had to navigate the city together. Pia Camil’s Divisor Pirata functions in a similar manner as the community is invited to inhabit her piece and move in unison—exploring themes of the collective and utopian ideals.
Pia Camil is represented by Blum and Poe and OMR Galeria.
June 1, 2017
Traveling Lady
Jessica Mitrani Director
Rossy de Palma Performer
Alex Czetwertynski Digital
Andres Levin Music
Roderick Murray Lighting Design
ThreeAsFour Costume Design
Wyly Theater
Rossy de Palma embodies the spirit of Nellie Bly in Traveling Lady. Part performance, part film, this one woman show maps a journey that challenges social and gender dynamics. Colombian artist Jessica Mitrani conceives and directs this extraordinary multimedia experience, at once physical and psychological, earthly and cosmic.
Prologue
Nellie Bly, 1889. She is ready for an around-the-world trip with her signature coat, one dress, and a compact suitcase. The largest item in her bag is a jar of cold cream.
I. Traveling Inside the House
In her quests, Traveling Lady has neither a particular METHOD nor a speci c procedure, only her....................................
II. Traveling Around the Block
The PARAMETER of Traveling Lady is that of the degree of intimacy that she allows herself, at each moment of her life, with others.
III. Traveling Across Borders
If Traveling Lady has a PRINCIPLE, it could be said to be an anti-principle: a principle that obliges her to constantly change her principles. For her principle is vital, not moral.
IV. Traveling Through Language
The GRAMMAR of Traveling Lady is neither presumed nor prescriptive. She only concerns herself with semantics.
Commercial Break
The Perfect Brand
V. Traveling in Love
What type of EQUIPMENT does Traveling Lady take when she sets a eld? The Wow! Flutter-meter and Hopelessness Scale.
VI. Traveling into a Plant
What are Traveling Lady’s POLITICS? “Not superior.”
VII. Traveling Behind the Mask
You are who you are.
Notes on the text:
Parts of Traveling Lady have been adapted from or inspired by Around the World in Seventy-Two Days by Nellie Bly, Ida A Novel by Gertrude Stein, and Cartografía sentimental by Suely Rolnik