Projects (16)
Project: The Transnational
Location: Umm Al Quwain for the Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates
Date: March - April, 2019
ARTISTS: Delaney Martin Taylor Shepherd Alita Edgar
CURATOR: Claire Tancons
PERFORMANCE COLLABORATORS: Freek X Monster Crew Over 50 community participants
Emirati Photo and video contributions: Aisha Binsuroor Ameena Al Jarman Taqwa Al Naqabi Hessa Al Ajmani Hashem Al Ajmani Hamoud Mosabih Mouza Al Hamrani
The artists have conceived of a project around an abandoned airplane in Umm Al Qawain, conjuring up thoughts of travel, immigration, destination, visitation, home, territory and borders. At the site of this derelict airplane, Airlift artists consider embodied states of coming, going and existing in between by posing questions about national and personal identity as well as the meaning of home. Informed by extensive interviews and community workshops with Emiratis and temporary residents living in the UAE, The Trans-National (2019) uses the abandoned airplane as an open and indeterminate space of self-projection, collective gathering and reflection. The installation presents UAE residents’ messages, lullabies and imaginings of home in traversable portals under the wings. In the plane’s cockpit are photos and videos contributed by members of the Emirati community. In some cases, these personal histories date from times before the country’s unification in 1971. An opening ceremony processional for the installation was conceived in collaboration with a number of UAE-based collaborators, including Freek, a UAE-born Somalian rapper; X, a UAE-born experimental singer and composer of Filipino descent; Monster Crew, a choreographer of South Asian descent; and dozens of other participants from South Asian communities. A programme of workshops, gatherings and talks continued on-site throughout the Biennial.
Music Box Village created a first-of-its-kind traveling
musical structure with support from Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and the band
The National for Eaux Claires Fest. "Porch Life" has crossed the country,
turning up at locations including the Coney Island boardwalk, The Kennedy
Center, The Momentary Museum and more!
New Orleans Airlift celebrated 10 years of
collaboration and community at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center in
November 2019
A new hour-long work for hundreds of musicians, fusing new and traditional music, procession, water culture, and pageantry while galvanizing listeners to save Louisiana’s coast.
Project: New Water Music
Location: Seabrook Boat Launch, Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans
Date: April 8th, 2017
Project Description:
This free, public performance on Lake Pontchartrain debuted composer Yotam Haber’s “New Water Music.” It was performed from the water by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and hundreds of community musicians in a spectacular choreographed visual presentation, conceived and executed by New Orleans Airlift.
As the sun began its descent on April 8, the musicians took their positions on land and on water-bound staging for a grand event against the endless backdrop of Lake Pontchartrain. Conducting with naval semaphore flags and in occasional Morse Code, Haber’s score will flowed across the water, paying tribute to traditional Louisiana music including Cajun accordion and African-American spirituals. In the regatta beyond, a procession of fishing boats and vessels will unfold under the artistic direction of Airlift’s Delaney Martin.
“New Water Music” took inspiration from Handel’s “Water Music,” famously performed on the River Thames for King George I in 1717, but also for the wider city who watched from shore and from boats - public concerts did not enter the musical tradition until the late 18th century.
“New Water Music” paid homage by connecting exceptional music to a diverse public audience, but also used this performance to illuminate Louisiana’s coastal crisis of receding wetlands and changing lifestyles for fisherman and coastal residents, with repercussions for New Orleans residents and beyond. According to Bob Marshall of Scientific American, “Louisiana loses 16 square miles of land a year, the fastest rate of land loss in the world.” This project explored critical issues of water and land use in the Gulf region as well as the growing crisis of coastal erosion. “New Water Music” strived to inspire participation and leadership in residents whose voices are essential to catalyzing change.
Participants included fisherman who performed a shrimp boat ballet, a range of coastal advocacy organizations who brought the facts and the messages to audiences from within an installation of fishing nets created by local architects, neighborhood fish fryers who depend on the coastal catch, and a variety of speakers including
The Houma Nation photographer and activist Monique Verdin, Pointe-au-Chien tribe member Therese Dardar, fisherman and activist George Barisich.
High school students Amia Cole, Aerionne Gilmore, and Shawnae Alexander joined the Flaming Flagettes Miss Reptile and Miss Bernadette Weatherly bore flags in a musician procession. Seabrook boat launch pole fisherman Terence Williams and Engle Washington and the bird feeding family of the Barrow/Myles were also part of the production that featured over 300 participants.
Many thanks to Kari Morehead, who coordinated the fisherman and the advocacy participants, Effie Michot, for her outreach to the New Orleans East community, organizing neighborhood food vendors and staging a live fishing and cooking performance, producer Paulina Trujillo and production coordinator Durado Brooks. Shout out to all our volunteers!
Sponsoring Partners for this project included the Coastal Marine LLC, DC Mooring and Rigging, Gulf States Dive and Rescue, GNO Marine, Non-Flood Protection Asset Management Authority and Waggoner and Ball Architects.
This project is funded with generous support from MAP Fund, the Eugenie and Joseph Jones Foundation, the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking, Waggoner and Ball Architects, the Edward T. Cone Foundation, and the Adele & John Gray Endowment Fund.
COMPOSER/CONDUCTOR
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
FISHERMAN
Costume Department
Art Department
Net Installation
Fabrication Department
Presenting Organizations
Photographers
Project: Tulane Architecture Weekend
Location: Tulane Campus, New Orleans, LA
Date: Weekend of January 16th, 2015
Project Description:
Airlift was honored to be invited to participate in Tulane's Architecture Weekend in January, 2014. Architecture Weekend is hosted by the Architecture Student Government and each year, a handful of architects lead various projects, each with a different focus. This year Airlift was joined by Brooklyn Design Firm, Matter; and California based Faulders Studio.
Architect Michael Glenboski and Tulane Professor of Music Technology Rick Snow led the project. Working with Airlift staff, Michael and Rick developed a flexible system of telescoping hinges to create modular enclosures and frames for hanging 12 metallic sheets of copper and steel. Rick worked with students to map over 720 resonant frequencies from these sheets and develop a custom synthesizer routing audio signals to the sheets. Transducers (essentially the magnetic portion of a speaker) placed on each sheet of metal resonated vocals, percussion and other sounds within the enclosures. The reverberation from sheet to sheet created a highly controlled and surprisingly dense area of sound. The Audience was able to manipulate the type, intensity, and locations of the sounds across the installation through hand tracking software. As luck would have it one of the architecture students, Haley Lindsley, is a classically trained Opera singer. She surprised us with an impromptu concert at the end of the weekend making the sheets of metal reverberate so strongly that it felt like you were in a concert hall when you closed your eyes.
Rick has taken this project further by bringing his Music Technology class in after A-Weekend and further refined the sound control systems. This project will be included in Airlift's Roving Village Residency in March, 2015.
Lead Artist
Location: New Orleans
Date: September 2014
Description
Chateau Poulet is collaboration between New Orleans artist Andrew Schrock and Berlin-based artist Klaas Hubner. This musical house has been designed to become one of Airlift’s transportable musical houses that will join the Roving Village.
Both Andrew and Klaas had worked with fans previously and Airlift decided it was a perfect match to bring their ideas together. They had never met, but it did not take long for us all to see that this was love! Their personalities, their ideas, and their talent created this fantastical house that uses tubes attached to handmade fan blades to create a unique and deeply harmonic sound. Pulling on ropes allows the player to change the speed of the fans and their tones. Fan blades slicing through the exterior of the house give this instrument of musical architecture a visual thrill that matches its sonic wonder.
Halfway through the build local musicians Aurora Nealand, Brad Benichek and Paul Thibodeaux performed a concert with the house that was unbelievably epic. After the house was completed Marshall LaCount (Dark Dark Dark), Mirah, and Todd Chandler performed a lullaby-like dreamscape that perfectly complemented the house’s “sounds of heaven,” as described by local youth from Make Music Nola who attended workshops with the artists.
Airlift cannot wait for Chateau Poulet to join the other transportable houses we built this year in 2015 for the Roving Village Residency and our permanent village down the road.
Lead Artists
Musicians
Community Partners
Special Thanks
Project: Resonant Memory, a musical house exhibition and performance
Location: Atlanta, Georgia - The Georgia Institute of Technology and Goat Farm Arts Center
Date: January - December 2014
Project Description:
Resonant Memory is the culmination of Airlift's partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology. The partnership began with a multi-disciplinary course in Musical Architecture that brought together the graduate students from Architecture, New Music Technology, Human and Computer Interaction, and Industrial Design in Spring 2014.
In the fall of the same year Airlift brought local Atlanta artists George Long and Justin Rabideau into collaboration with a committed group of Georgia Tech students including architecture students Takuto Osawa, John Stenzel and Tyler Smith, Industrial design student Mauricio Uruena on our design team. Recent graduates Andy Pruett and Ziwen Fan were on the music technology team along with Atlanta geniuses Myron Lo and Hiron Roy. Together they realized some of the spring's muscial architecture prototypes into a fully-fledged musical house. Also joining the partnership was Goat Farm Arts Center, who hosted the build of the project and the debut of Resonant Memory at their annual art induced Halloween extravaganza. The house then moved to the Georgia Tech campus for student interactions and on campus concerts. Ben Coleman acted as musical director, working with our tech team to create samples, and as conductor of the intitial concerts at Goat Farm and Tech.
Resonant Memory uniquely combines acoustic sounds with digital technology to create loops, play samples and generally burst froth with noise from its doors, windows, and kiosk-like wings. As a musical instrument it can host one person or 10 people as players. It was wonderful to see the commitment of so many people bringing this house to life. George Long was a team leader, working with the design, music and technology collaborators to realize a fantastic new edition to our musical architecture project. Built to be transportable, Resonant Memory will return to New Orleans to become an inhabitant of 2015's Roving Village Residencies.
Lead Artists
Musical Director
Project: Public Practice: An Anti-Violence Community Ceremony
Location:1342 Franklin Ave., New Orleans
Date: October 25, 2014 3-4:30PM
Project Description:
Public Practice is a spectacular street performance of New Orleans diverse public ceremonial culture that seeks to counter common representations of crime-ridden neighborhoods. This people-powered event shows alternatives to guns and violence by highlighting creative and nurturing community practices coming from within. Collaborators include horse riding clubs, motorcycle clubs, juvenile bike clubs, a high school drill team, city rappers and Mardi Gras Indians queens. This processional performance is concurrent with the opening weekend of Prospect.3, New Orleans' third international contemporary art biennial.
This project is artistically led by artist Delaney Martin and curator Claire Tancons. They worked with over 100 participants encouraging them to largely self-direct their roles for this choreographed display along Franklin Avenue, the fractious border of the St. Roch neighborhood. For example participants picked their own songs or sounds that were turned into a soundscape for the unfolding event by hip hop producer Paulus. Highlights of the day included the Caramel Curves all-female motorcycle club's pink smoke, multi-colored dove releases by Big Chief Delco and his Serenity Peace Birds, rap performances by 5th Ward Weebie, Miss Tee, Sess 4 5 and Keedy Black who rapped from a convertible surrounded by her KB dolls youth dance troupe, and an amazing routine by Boss Status Beauty Salon featuring the local shop owner Lynette and her models.
A delegation of Black Indian Queens supported recently released inmate, Taece Defillo, as she read a poem about her incarceration directly underneath Deborah Luster's stark black and white portrait of her as the Shepherdess in Angola Penitentiary’s annual Passion Play. Luster’s photos of Taece and other cast members remain installed on the outside of the Abiding Temple Ministries with their characters names and sentences printed below - a complex statement on the nature of redemption and transformation.
Many meetings and workshops occurred in the lead up to the event, including mentorship opportunities for neighborhood kids at a trick-your-bike workshop with Twon, president of a car club, and a trip to a horse riding stables to learn how to care and ride horses with the 504 Boyz. Not only did the youth have prominent roles in the performance of Public Practice, the lasting effect of these workshops can be seen on the streets where the newly formed "St. Roch Scrapers" regularly ride with their mentor Twon on weekends, dazzling the city with their pageantry and pride. Grades need to be kept up if they want to roll out.
Public Practice was proud to be the opening ceremony for partner project, The Embassy, an historic gun buyback program organized by Kirsha Kaechele and The Museum of Old and New Art, in collaboration with the New Orleans Jefferson Parish Gun Buy Back Committee (NOJPGBC) and the NOPD.
Press: Artforum, BurnAway, ArtNews, Frieze
Project by
Photographers
Participating Artists
- The 504 Boyz Horse Club
- The Lousiana Whipz
- Caramel Curves
- Lil' Man
- Ms. Tee
- Richie Kay
- Mandy Stahl
- Corinne Loperfido
- Boss Status Beauty
- 504 Animal Walkers
- The Reader
- Ro
- Big Chief Delco
- Taece Defillo
- Cherice Harrison-Nelson
- Ausettua Amor Amenkum
- St. Roch Scrapper Bike Club
- Betty Squad Gumbo Dancers
- McDonogh 35 Majorettes & Flag Twirlers
- Keedy Black and the KB Dolls
- Deb Luster
- Mr. Okra
- Sess 4 5
- Cinnamon Black
- Twon
- 5th Ward Weebie
- Rusty Lazer
- Ellery Neon
- Anna Cerretani
- Tora Lopez
Special Thanks
Space Rites: An Interactive Art Installation & Community Performance Series
Location: St. Maurice Church, 605 St. Maurice Ave. New Orleans, LA
Date: October 26, 2014 - January 2015
Check out a video of the event: https://vimeo.com/139244903
New Orleans Airlift presented Space Rites, a wildly diverse concert series, at the deconsecrated St. Maurice Church in the Lower 9th Ward. Inside artist Taylor Lee Shepherd's interactive sound installation, Altarpiece, made from over 50 rewired televisions, formed a giant, sound-responsive altar. Acting as invented oscilloscopes, the televisions reflected every sound that passed through the space in hypnotic patterns of light.
There were six performances in the Space Rites Series featuring diverse performers in front of theAltarpiece. Master percussionist Tatsuya Nakataniand hisGong Orchestra, comprised of eleven local musicians who trained on the day of the performance, created a hallowed sound that got the oscilloscope TV’s buzzing. Weather Warlock, C-Section 8 and Mountain of Wizard brought down the house with smoke filled sets and epic soundscapes.
In traditional Airlift style their were a number of out-there collaborations beginning with an incredible opening performance by theLower 9th Ward Senior Center Choirwho were joined by the Murmurations Choir, a youthful ensemble singing polyphonic harmonies. Guitar giants Nels Cline, of Wilco, and local avant-garde powerhouseRob Cambre,were mesmerizing in their first ever collaboration. While the Bitchin Bajajs'(Chicago) dreamy drone accompanied a photo retrospective of legendary musical moments culled from years of punk shows by Guggenheim-award winner, Bill Daniel.
The final performance brought members of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra brass section into collaboration with the Van Hahn Lion Dance team from New Orleans East.This traditional Vietnamese dance team features two-person performers in Lion costumes alongside drummers. Guggenheim-award winning modern composer Yotam Haber created a piece especially for the performance entitledSpace Rites 6 and conducted these unlikely collaborators in what was an unforgettable experience.
However one of the exciting, and radical, things about this project was the joining of this art installation with the booming voice and soaring spirit of Reverend Duplessis, of Mt. Nebo Bible Baptist Church. Every Sunday visitors could hear and see his voiceas he conducted his services through the oscilloscope altar - or what he called "Resurrection Technology." The Reverend's Lower 9th Ward congregation has been displaced since Katrina and currently holds services in his home. As his congregation continues rebuilding their own church nearly ten years after the storm, the Reverend used this moment to reach new audiences from an unusual pulpit.
This project was a satellite of the Prospect.3 international art biennial. Airlift was proud to present his beautiful collaboration between visual art and music in the epic sanctuary of St. Maurice Church, made possible a creative space by the Creative Alliance of New Orleans. Many thanks go to our volunteers and to the neighbors of the Lower 9th ward.
PRESS:
New Orleans Airlift always seems to rise to the occasion, and this year its Space Rites in the Lower 9th Ward explores previously uncharted territory. .…Dubbed "resurrection technology" by Rev. Charles Duplessis, who incorporates (The oscilloscopes) into his Sunday morning services, their metaphysical aura was evident on the evening of Oct. 26, when the Murmurations choir joined the Lower 9th Ward Senior Center Gospel Choir for the first concert of the series Old-time religion met avant-garde innovation as the Murmurations' haunting polyphony interacted with the female gospel group's spirited singing — they substituted "9th Ward spirit" for "old time religion" in the song of the same name. The church, …. is the perfect venue for such festive down-home otherworldliness.
Number 8 in "Top 10 Are Experiences of 2014" "Sound sculptor Taylor Shepherd breathed new life into 30 old-fashioned televisions, when he converted them into sound-sensitive oscilloscopes mounted in the two-story baroque altar of a ghostly deconsecrated church. The choir, guitar and gong concerts that followed were sublime. Periodic performances through Jan. 25, 2015."
The Lower Ninth Ward Church, has become the new home for musical performances breathing new life into the ethereal (though now deconsecrated) space.
Lead Artist
Reverend
Participating Artists
Community Partners
Musical architecture for New Orleans and Beyond!
Project Description:
The idea of Musical Architecture was conceived of by Delaney Martin, Taylor Lee Shepherd and Swoon in 2010. They were inspired by a falling down 18th century creole cottage and New Orleans under-celebrated class of tinkerers, inventors and avant-garde musicians. Seeking to imaginatively reuse of the cottage’s salvaged materials, they combined the two pillars of New Orleans culture, music and architecture, into an idea for a house that could be played like an instrument. Swoon soon dreamt up an idea of what their musical house could look like, sound artist Shepherd thought about how it would work, while Martin imagined how to bring it all to life.
Martin answered this question by conceiving and leading The Music Box: A Shantytown Sound Laboratory in 2011 - 12 as a prototyping experiment for their notion of musical architecture. The installation was made from the salvaged remains of the original creole cottage and created in collaboration with over 25 artists on Piety St. in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. 15,000 visitors came to interact with invented instruments that were embedded in the ceilings, walls and floors of the structures while 70+ musicians from New Orleans and beyond performed orchestral concerts on the structures to sold out audiences. Airlift and our team of artists soon realized that we had outgrown our original site and decided to incorporate the successful village concept into their designs going forward.
Since closing the original Music Box opportunities to create outposts of this New Orleans-inspired project has taken Airlift as far as Kiev, Ukraine and as close as Shreveport, Louisiana where new iterations of the project have reflected local music and culture.In 2015 we had a triumphant return to New Orleans with our Music Box Roving Village held in City Park. In 2016 we opened Music Box Village, our permanent sonic playground, performance venue and laboratory for musical architecture in New Orleans.
Press: NY Times, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR
More...
Synopsis:
New Orleans Airlift and Bounce have a history.
Project Description:
New Orleans Airlift first collaborated with Bounce artists shortly after our inception. New York producer Dre Skull contacted us to locate and coordinate with local legends Sissy Nobby, Big Freedia and Katey Red. That project led to deeper relationships between Airlift and the wider Bounce community. From there, we began partnerships that continue to this day, leading to projects like the first ever Bounce showcase at South by Southwest, creative projects with visual artists like Aiko, fashion luminaries like Rick Owens, and musical partnerships with bands like the Brooklyn art punk duo Japanther and dance music superstar Diplo. Most recently, Jay (aka DJ Rusty Lazer) and the entire Airlift team worked with Windows to bring together the Bounce and Vogue scenes in a massive "Vounce" Ball focused on the undeniable similarities and unique differences between the two cultures.
Press: Amoeblog
Collaborators
Producers
Vice Versa
Written by Super User
Vice Versa is a dance & music exchange between children in London and New Orleans.
Project Description:
Vice Versa is a dance & music exchange between children in London and New Orleans presented by New Orleans Airlift in partnership with choreographer, artist and filmmaker Hattie Worboys, who worked with local rapper/dancer Jermy “Lucky Lou” Tassin while in New Orleans. Regional and foreign dance and music elements were incorporated into a final dance performance created by both group of kids. In London and New Orleans the kids connected via Skype conversations a virtual dance battles. The project was then turned into an artistic dance film with an accompanying short documentary.
New Orleans Kids:
Jermy Jr. / Bria // Devon // Tianna // Kori // Omorion // Devphin // Troy // Tamia
London Kids:
Mary Peace // Ethan // Imotep // Ama // Joel Thomas // Bellis // Katchi // Daniel // Jerome //Drocus // Noah // Khepera // Benita // Shanni
Project Director
Community Partners
Upstairs at the Wax Museum
Written by Super User
Synopsis:
On the first weekend of May, 2014, the Airlift held a masked ball in honor of the meeting of the courts of New Orleans Bounce and New York Vogue.
Project Description:
Legendary rappers Big Freedia, Katey Red, Sissy Nobby, and amazing dancers Ro, K Gunna, Ra Ra and Tori represented for New Orleans Bounce, while commentators Jack Mizrahi and Kevin jz Prodigy mastered the ceremonies, dance luminaries Leiomy Prodigy, Kassandra Ebony and Nunney Karma brought their elegance and unbelievable talent. DJ’s MikeQ, Rusty Lazer and Lil’ Man supplied the beats. And the rest is history.
The ball, held in the Wax Museum on Conti St. in the storied French Quarter, was designed in the spirit of a Vogue Ball meeting a Bounce Shakedown meeting an unconventional New Orleans masked ball. A small army of local artists brought the magic in powerful and unforgettable ways. Honored guests arrived in chariots of wildly different styles created by iconic local and international artists. All guests were ushered in by the iconic and mystifying LiquidNailz and entertained and enlightened during their journey through the Wax Museum’s somewhat jarring dioramas by The New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant. A human sized swinging chandelier met guests at the top of the stairs where decorations by Margot Walsh, Ellery Neon and Andrew Schrock transformed the space into a ballroom worthy of such a unique convergence. This is only a handful of the talented people it took to make this happen, please see our additional links for a detailed list of participants and creators, and more amazing images.
Collaborators
- Jack Mizrahi
- Kevin jz Prodigy
- Kassandra Ebony
- Nunney Karma
- DJ MikeQ
- Big Freedia
- Katey Red
- Sissy Nobby
- Ro
- Kgunna
- Ra Ra
- Tori Sims
- Rusty Lazer
- Lil' Man
- Meg Turner
- Delaney Martin
- Harrison Bartlett III1/2
- Richie Kay
- The Reader
- LiquidNailz
- Jayme Kalal
- Margot Couture
- Andrew Schrock
- Ellery Neon
- John Slaby
- Vness-Wolfchild
- Leaf Samstorm
- Mumurations Choir
- Colin Dodsworth
- Corinne Loperfido
- JJ Marshall
- Sam Springston
- Lee Kyle
- Laurence Ross
- Alexis Branger
- Li Yaffe
- Akrum Salem
- Anna Karina
- Mandy Stahl
- Beth Hertzler
- Alita Edgar
- Francis Wong
- Alyssa Ray
- Rocky Banks
- Barnabas Jenkins
- Jonah Gropper
- Matt Rhody
- Cassidy Holden
- Earl Scioneaux III
- James Westfall
- Taylor Lee Shepherd
Synopsis:
Artist Delaney Martin, a tableaux revivalist, founded the New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant and invited guest curator Rosie Cooper (UK) to direct their inaugural performance.
Project Description:
Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective, presented a selection of historic tableaux vivant alongside specially conceived tableaux by contemporary British artists.
Tableau Vivant translates literally as “living picture”; a costumed group or individual in a static and carefully arranged pose, usually accompanied by elaborate sets and props. Illustrating popular mythologies, famous paintings, or historic events, Tableau began as a parlor game for the wealthy and gained wide popularity in the 19th century only to fade away with the coming of radio and moving pictures.
Artist Delaney Martin, a tableaux revivalist, founded the New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant and invited guest curator Rosie Cooper (UK) to direct their inaugural performance.
Cooper enacted a long distance exchange by delivering instructions from overseas artists for interpretation by the local Society members, who also created their own tableaux. Stage effects ranging from projection to fire accompanied the tableaux that were presented on a flat bed truck paraded slowly through various New Orleans neighborhoods.
Having a strong relationship to the still image, the tableaux vivant is a living thing perpetually situated in a morphological state between statue and movement. The impossibility of holding a certain pose for a long stretch of time means that the tableau vivant can never embody the stillness to which it apparently aspires – rather, is time stretched and slowed. Presenting this group exhibition as a series of live tableaux exposes its unstable state, and within this, it’s numerous ends.
Locating the project in New Orleans, a city ingrained with the composite histories of popular performance traditions including the Tableaux Balls of old Mardi Gras Krewes, Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective inhabits a space between the histories of high art and popular entertainment: illuminating the nature of the tableaux but also suggesting an alternative history for contemporary visual art performance.
Historical Tableau:
The Hal an Tow – British folk tradition /// Bruce McLean - Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band /// Mistick Krewe of Comus – Scenes from Metamorphosis /// Pablo Picasso / Erik Satie / Léonide Massine - Mercure ///
Press: Pelican Bomb
