VIRTUAL EVENT

Mixing ritualistic and visceral movement, sound, video, and text, Jessica Emmanuel’s new solo dance workˈkwirē/ considers a dystopian world where the majority of historical and ancestral information has been destroyed. The wealthy have left the planet and few humans survived. A dance and sound retrieval system has been created to help us restore our connection to our memories and the history that is stored in our DNA. Guided by Emmanuel’s ancestors, she gathers and collects information, nurtures the soil and roots that are used to restore the earth for those left behind. kwirē/ connects Emmanuel’s history with contemporary culture in a dialogue and reflection on meaning and understanding.

Filmed on the REDCAT stage, ‘kwirē/ takes place within a sculpture installation created by Emmanuel in collaboration with artist Trulee Hall, depicting an underground world centered around the roots of a tree.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jessica Emmanuel is a Los Angeles based dancer, choreographer, performance artist, educator and curator. She studied Dance & Choreography at the BOCES Cultural Arts Center in New York and is a graduate of The California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Performance & Choreography. Jessica is the founder of HumamStages and a co-founder of the theater based artist collective Poor Dog Group. Her work has been presented internationally at the Bootleg Theater, Live Arts Exchange Festival, the New Original Works Festival at REDCAT, Montserrat DTLA, Highways Performance Space, Zoukak Studios (Lebanon), The Getty Villa, Interferences Festival (Romania), Baruch Performing Arts Center, The Curtis R. Preim Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and The Contemporary Art Museum Santa Barbara. She has choreographed/performed for Poor Dog Group, Heidi Duckler Dance Theater, The MOVEMENT Movement, Ania Catherine, Genevieve Carson, Bryan Reynolds, Paul Outlaw, No)one. Art House and Stacy Dawson Sterns.

Trulee Hall’s work presents a surreal geography drawing on motifs of the domestic, the decorative, and the erotic. The artist’s creative practice spans video, sculpture, painting, audio composition, and choreographed dance. Hall integrates these mediums into immersive installations. These vignettes offer multiple representations of a non-narrative visual subject, replayed through painting, sculpture, and video amalgams of CGI, claymation, and live action performance. Hall received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1999 and her MFA from CalArts in 2006. Her work has been shown at the Rubell Family Collection, Hammer Museum, Deitch Projects, The Armory Show, Paramount Studios for Frieze Art Fair, Redcat, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Barrick Museum of Art, Maccarone Los Angeles, Michael Benevento Gallery, and the Billy Wilder Theatre, among numerous other exhibitions and film screenings internationally. The artist recently premiered Tongues Duel the Corn Whores, an Opera at the Zabludowicz Museum in London. In September 2020, the Zabludowicz Museum will also premier a solo exhibition of Hall’s work.