Kemper Live: Here and Now
Inspired by the multimedia installation Nicole Miller: A Sound, a Signal, the Circus, Kemper Live: Here and Now explores embodied storytelling through circus arts, dance, electronic music, and spoken word. Performances by Circus Harmony, the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, and local dancers and poets will occur simultaneously throughout the Museum.
Free and open to the public. Don't miss ice cream sandwiches by Sugarwitch and dogs (meat and veggie) by Steve's Hot Dogs for sale at the Museum’s Coffee Bar!
Performers and Performances
Alex Braden's Movement I: Moira is a site-specific work comprising a guided video walk with an original score and live performance. Featuring performers Jamie Harris, Sharlene Lee, and Samantha Slone. Watch and walk with the recorded video during the performance on your device via QR code in the Lobby. Follow his work @braden.wav.
Circus Harmony, the St. Louis social circus school that uses circus arts to motivate social change, will perform acrobatic feats that defy gravity as they showcase strength, flexibility, and collaboration. Between performances, circus artists will create live, kinetic sculptures in and outside the Museum. Follow their work @circusharmony.
Christopher Douthitt is a composer whose work explores how technology can be used to create new contexts for song and songlike expression. He will display Lift (for Elevator), an interactive soundscape that uses a simple tether controller to accentuate the feeling of moving while standing still. Follow his work at christopherdouthitt.com.
Erica Garcia (dancer) / Josiah Gundersen (dancer) / erika harano (choreographer) / Jessica Pierce (dancer), four St. Louis–based queer and mixed-race dance artists, will present bodies moving in (between) space and time, a series of compositions that explore themes of liminality and ephemerality, layered and fluid motion, and rehearsal-as-performance. The artists consider: What does it mean to move in and through the here and now, with/in queer and mixed-race bodies? What does it mean to perform with/in ambiguous contexts and conditions? Follow their work at ericaharano.com / @josiah.in.drift
Lillian Gardner, visual artist / poet / dancer / musician, will perform new work from her poetry prose novel Everything Is a Love Story, “Poetry Was My Music: Lyrics for a Lifetime,” which explores the genre of a “love story” and how relationships influence and shape us into individuals. Follow her work @tapezoid.
Edil Hassan will perform Gestures and Language, work on art and performance, Black life, and womanhood. Hassan is a finalist for the Brunel African Poetry Prize and a recent graduate of the WashU MFA in Writing program. Her work has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Stadler Center for Poetry.
Zoe Levin will present an interactive soundscape, Expansive Cover, inspired by the sonic experience of driving in a rainstorm.
Noah Maguigad will display Coalesce, a participatory project that challenges how we interact with art and invites visitors to contribute to a communal musical piece.
Tushar Menon will perform Tides, a project that gives form to the movement of people within the gallery as sound, against the background of the room’s own immobility. The movements are reflected within the sound, which is always evolving.
Precious Musa will read poems from her manuscript Carry Go that posit the body as a vessel containing personal and national histories. These poems long for a semi-fictitious elsewhere that consists of ancestral noise. Musa’s poems have appeared in “Tupelo Quarterly,” “West Trestle Review,” “Black Perspectives,” and she has curated visual storytelling in “Listen, Look: A Reconciliatory Journey Through Black Grief and Joy,” a multimedia installation featuring Black St. Louis artists. Follow her work @listenlookinstallation.
Nathan Stanfield’s Pendulum explores a sonic dialogue between Library of Congress recordings and ultrasound readings of Olafur Eliasson’s Your Imploded View. Follow his work @natestan15.
Support
Support for this program is provided by Women and the Kemper.
Kemper Live
Kemper Live is an ongoing performance series that brings together artists across disciplines to connect sound, movement, and visual arts, transforming galleries into a varied sound installation.
Image credit
Laser animation stills from Nicole Miller: A Sound, a Signal, the Circus. Mixed-media installation. Image courtesy of the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.