Year: 2018

Oct 1st, 2018

We the People

This July 20th,  we were joined by poets, musicians, and visual and sound artists from across the globe as we collectively consider: How can we expand our understanding of “we” and imagine new, more inclusive ways of being together?​ This communal gathering on Montalvo’s grounds featured poetry, performance, sound works, installation art, and participatory engagement activities. This event was also an opportunity to experience three newly commissioned works for Montalvo's grounds by Lucas Artists Fellows, all of which prompted timely conversations around processes of othering and the politics of belonging and home. ​​​See clips from the various performances of the evening…
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Mar 19th, 2018

Alva Rogers and The Uses of Enchantment

Playwright, performer and composer Alva Rogers is deeply versed in the uses of enchantment, drawing inspiration for her plays from the Surrealist painters and magic realist writers. Dramaturg Christine Sumption calls Rogers “a visionary playwright whose rich poetic language and kaleidoscopic theatrical aesthetic challenges audiences to reexamine their understanding of what theatre can be and do.” ​ Rogers, a Lucas Literary Arts Fellow, has been in residence at the Lucas Artists Programs twice in the last year, and will return in August. In the brilliant morning light on the patio of her LAP studio, Rogers’ days begin with the rich…
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Mar 29th, 2018

Interview Between RADIOEE.net and Lucas Artists Program Curator Donna Conwell

RADIOEE.net. Aguas Atlas . Miami, Florida. 2017 Donna Conwell: What is RADIOEE.net? RadioEE: RADIOEE.net (Radio Espacio Estación) is an online nomadic multilingual radio station. We travel the world hosting 24-hour marathon broadcast events on mobility and movement. Often transmitting while on the move, our broadcasts open a channel for local conversation, music, storytelling, and sonic experiments, which are then shared with a network of over 5000 global listeners. Each broadcast generates an audio portrait of a place in time. RADIOEE.net. Aguas Atlas . Miami, Florida. 2017 DC: RADIOEE.net's broadcasts always focus on some aspect of mobility. For example, in April…
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Sep 2nd, 2018

Marilá Dardot: Saudade (Our Flags)

In her first exhibition in the United States, Brazilian artist Marilá Dardot premiered a large-scale installation of flags created by immigrant and refugee community participants during a series of public workshops. The flags, which represent in text or visual form something their maker misses about the country where they were born, were raised on Montalvo’s grounds on Sunday, July 15 at a communal flag-raising ceremony. With this work, Dardot seeks to amplify the voices of our varied diaspora communities, and honor the complexities and challenges of their experience in the midst of a divisive national conversation about immigrants and the…
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Jul 27th, 2018

Preston Lane: Appalachian Theatricality and the Future of American Regional Theater

By Margarita Kompelmakher, PhD ​ Photo: Triad Stage Over the past year, the Lucas Artists Residency Program welcomed an inaugural group of playwriting Fellows. It has been my pleasure to spend time with this talented and diverse group of artists and observe how the discipline of theater makes a home for itself at Montalvo. The following is Part 1 in a series of audio-blog portraits that discuss their playwriting projects and topical questions about the theater—past and present, here and elsewhere. ​I am struck by a number: 15. The number corresponds to the years that Preston Lane has served as…
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Aug 2nd, 2018

Howard Hersh: Four Bridges

Four Bridges is a site-specific sound work by award-winning composer Howard Hersh designed to be heard by listeners over mobile devices as they walk through Montalvo’s woodland environment. The work coordinates space, sound, and motion into a unique immersive ambulatory experience: as listeners follow a meandering woodland path on Montalvo’s grounds, they are taken on a sonic odyssey that leads them through redwood canyons into oak-lined meadows. Four Bridges’ narrative is inspired by our primal memories of the forest and the mythology that depicts it as an enchanted, mysterious place. It also explores the woods as a metaphor for our common journey and what it…
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Jul 2nd, 2018

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Imole Blue II (Field of Memories)

One of the most significant artists to emerge from post-Revolutionary Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons created a garden for Montalvo’s grounds with participation from the community. Taking inspiration from an aerial photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile installation taken by a US Air force plane during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, this garden is part peace memorial and part living sketch. Campos-Pons is interested in the uneasy juxtaposition of the visual beauty of the photograph upon which she based her garden plan—which looks like blooming flowers set inside a hexagram shape--and the horror and destructive capability that the image…
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Sep 20th, 2018

Simón Adinia Hanukai: Sparking Discussion About Data Ethics Through Art

By Margarita Kompelmakher, PhD ​ Photo (left, right): Simón Hanukai, DATAPRINT (Kaimera Productions) In this second installment of a series of interviews with Lucas Artists Fellows working in performance, I chat with Co-Artistic Director of Kaimera Productions Simón Adinia Hanukai about his new installation project, DATAPRINT , which will premiere this weekend at the Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose, California. Working with a group of collaborators across the disciplines of data science, video game writing and data ethics, Simón is taking some major risks with a project that sits on the cutting edge of new media installation work. Listen…
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Jul 1st, 2018

Don’t Look Away

On February 23, 2018, Montalvo’s Carriage House Theatre was the venue for an inspiring evening of poetry and performance featuring Lucas Artists Literary Fellows Danez Smith, Monica Sok, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and two-time Grammy winning musician and co-founding member of the genre-busting rock band Living Colour, Will Calhoun. Moving effortlessly from spoken word to song, Julian read from their 2017 book of poems, Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017) and Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), among other works. In poems and songs that synthesize and meld experimental and traditional voices and forms, Julian “breaks language open from the inside.”…
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Oct 1st, 2018

Jennifer Johns: Looking a Police Officer Straight in the Eye and Other Rituals for Finding Love

By Margarita Kompelmakher, PhD ​​ Photo (left, right): Jennifer Johns. LIV: A Ritual for Humanity. 2018 . ( 2018 Art on the Grounds: We the People ) ​Photo: David Gonzalez In my third installment of interviews of artists at the Lucas Artists Programs working in performance, I interview singer-songwriter-performer Jennifer Johns before the premiere of her new performance work LIV: A Ritual For Humanity at the Art on the Grounds: We the People event in July 2018. One month later, we meet again to discuss how it went. Listen along in this before-and-after audio-blog journey as we discuss Johns’ courageous…
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