Will Rawls, [siccer]
April 27, 20237:30 pm
April 28, 20237:30 pm
April 29, 20237:30 pm
April 30, 20232:00 pm
Edlis Neeson Theater

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https://experience.mcachicago.org/overview/5771

About the Event

Will Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation on the museum’s first floor.

Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement. Throughout the performance, an automated camera snaps an image every few seconds while the intervals between shutter clicks offer brief interludes when the camera fails to capture the dancers’ movements. As the performers improvise during these gaps between photographs, they rescript the terms through which blackness and queerness are made visible. [siccer] is also being presented as a video installation on the museum’s first floor throughout the duration of the Frictions suite, beginning on March 22.

Frictions is organized by Tara Aisha Willis, Curator in Performance, with Laura Paige Kyber, Curatorial Associate in Performance. Additional support on Will Rawls, [siccer], provided by Nolan Jimbo, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow.
Billing

Lead Artist: Will Rawls
Performer: Holland Andrews
Performer: Jeremy Touissant-Baptiste
Performer: keyon gaskin
Performer: jess pretty
Performer: Katrina Reid
Technical Director: David Szlasa
Lighting and Scenic Designer: Maggie Heath
Producer: Sasha Okshteyn
Dramaturg: Kemi Adeyemi
Costume Designer: Saša Kovačević
Director of Photography: Lauryn Siegel Studio
Rawls Director: Rebecca Fitton
Company Manager: Alejandro Flores Monge
Sound Editor: Jimmy Garver
About the Artists

Will Rawls (Lead Artist) earned a BA in Art History from Williams College. He is a recipient of a United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, MacDowell Fellowship, Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, a “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance Award), and Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Rawls’s choreographic work has appeared nationally and internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Chocolate Factory Theater, Queens; High Line Art, New York; ICA Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; and Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna, Austria, among others. His writing has been published by Artforum; Dancing While Black Journal; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rawls has been a guest artist at Bard College, Barnard College, Harvard University/Carpenter Center, Wesleyan University, and Williams College, and a mentor for Colorado College’s Department of Theatre and Dance. He served as the 2020–2021 UC Regents’ Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

keyon gaskin (Performer) prefers not to contextualize with their credentials.

Holland Andrews (Performer/Sound) (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, and performance artist whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics and frequently highlights themes surrounding vulnerability and healing. Andrews harnesses these instruments’ innate qualities of power and elegance to serve as a cohesive vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while also cultivating their own unique vocal style which integrates these influences with language disintegration and vocal distortion. Andrews previously performed solo music under the stage name Like a Villain. In addition to creating solo work, Andrews composes and performs for dance, theater, and film, and their work is toured nationally and internationally with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Dorothee Munyaneza, Will Rawls, and poet Demian Dinéyazhi. Notable musical collaborations include Son Lux, Christina Vantzou, William Brittelle, Methods Body, West Thordson, Peter Broderick, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Nils Frahm. Their previous work also includes composing the film score for Rebeca Huntt’s BEBA, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021 and screened at other festivals including Berlinale and Tribeca Film Festival. BEBA was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and acquired by Neon and Onyx Collective/Hulu. Andrews has gained recognition from publications such as The Wire, The New York Times, Le Monde, and BBC Radio. Holland Andrews is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (Performer/Sound) Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (b. 1984, Baton Rouge, LA), MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College. Select exhibitions include: I Would Prefer Not To (Stay Cool), Human Resources Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2022), Set It Off, ICA @ Virginia Commonwealth University and 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA (2021), Devo (Listenin’ Out The Top Of Ya Head), Berlin Atonal, Berlin, DE (2021), Pendulum Music: An Arrangement for Four Performers and Geodisic Dome, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2018); Club, Performance Space New York, New York, (2018); Evil Nigger: A Five Part Performance for Julius Eastman, The Kitchen, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Study Of ‘Study Of Three Heads’, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2018); Evil Nigger Part IV and Evil Nigger Part V, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY (2017); Who Needs To Think When Your Feet Just Go+ Never Not Doing, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016). Select awards and residencies include: Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellow (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Sound Artist-In-Residence (2021), Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design (2018); Issue Project Room Artist-in-Residence (2017); Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2019); Rauschenberg Residency 381 (2019). He is also a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!. Toussaint-Baptiste is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Technology In Music And Related Arts at Oberlin College & Conservatory.

jess pretty (Performer) received an MFA in Dance with a minor in Queer Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She has shown her work at La Mama Experimental Theater Club (2017 La Mama Moves Festival), New York Live Arts (as a 2016/17 Fresh Tracks artist), CATCH!, Gibney Dance Center, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, the CURRENT SESSIONS, panoply performing arts space, Green Street Studios, three ACDA conferences, and the Chocolate Factory Theatre. pretty has been an artist in residence at Kent State (2017), the Chocolate Factory Theatre, and the Center for Performance Research (2019-2020) and was also a 2020 member of the Queer Art Fellowship. pretty has collaborated and been a part of the works of: Will Rawls, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peter Born, Catherine Gallasso, David Thomson, Katie Workum, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson, Cynthia Oliver, Leslie Cuyjet and Dianne McIntyre. pretty recently took over as Director of AUNTS; a punk/DIY performance series that hosts events/festivals/shows to highlight the works of experimental dance makers in New York. pretty recently relocated to Minneapolis, where she is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Katrina Reid (Performer) is a dancer, choreographer, and storyteller. She collaborates with a range of artists who explore performance across dance, theater, ritual, music, and film. Select presentations include: Queens Museum, ISSUE Project Room, the Knockdown Center, Current Sessions, AUNTS at Beach Sessions, the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) as 2016-2017 Dancing While Black Fellow with Angela’s Pulse.

Kemi Adeyemi (Dramaturg) is assistant professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Director of The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing residency at the University of Washington. Her projects use performance as a site and methodology for theorizing the contours of contemporary Black queer life. Her book manuscript on Black queer women’s geographies of neoliberalism, and her co-edited volume Queer Nightlife, are currently in development. She has forthcoming writing in GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, and has published in Women & Performance, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking. She has contributed exhibition essays for Tschabalala Self (Seattle), This is Not a Gun (Los Angeles), black is a color (Los Angeles), Impractical Weaving Suggestions (Madison), and Endless Flight (Chicago); and writings on artists including Liz Mputu, Adee Robinson, Brendan Fernandes, Oli Rodriguez, and Indira Allegra. Adeyemi co-curated the unstable objects exhibition at The Alice Gallery in 2017 and is curating Amina Ross’s October 2019 solo show at Ditch Projects.

David Szlasa (Technical Director) has designed and toured internationally with artists including Bill “Crutchmaster” Shannon, Boots Riley and the Coup, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Sara Shelton Mann, Rennie Harris, Hope Mohr, and numerous others. His work has been called “so timely as to feel timeless” by the SF Chronicle and has received an Isadora Duncan Award, Future Aesthetics Award, and a Gerbode. Szlasa has taught design at Stanford University, St. Mary’s College of Moraga, NYU, and Bard College. Szlasa keeps bees and chickens, tends a small garden and orchard, and lives with his partner and two sons in a 200-year-old farmhouse in Clermont, NY.

Maggie Heath (Lighting and Scenic Designer) is an artist and production designer who has recently relocated to New York, departing from fifteen years in Portland, OR. They received a BFA from Portland State University, focusing in sculpture, though they found a creative home in theaters. Heath is an avid collaborator and makes work that is in search of crudely built tender moments.

Alejandro Flores Monge (Company Manager) is an artist and international arts administrator based in Querétaro, México. While studying for a BA in Art at Williams College, he performed with various dance ensembles, including Ritmo Latino, Kusika, and CoDa, as well as with Daniel Roberts and the Department of Dance of Ohio State University. His photography, videography, textile, and performance art has been showcased both in student exhibitions and sight-specific, solo showings. His administrative experience began as Artistic Director for the student ensemble, Ritmo Latino, and would lead to him to collaborating on curatorial and production projects alongside the ‘62 Center for Theatre & Dance at Williams College, The Williams College Museum of Art, The Clark, MassMoCA, Jacob’s Pillow, The Foundry, and The Yard.

Lauryn Siegel (Director of Photography) (aka STUDIO SIEGEL; she/they) is an independent mixed-media and lens-based artist, designer, photographer, video director and educator who has worked collaboratively across an extensive range of media and scales for nearly two decades. Having got their start in media production at Wesleyan University’s radio station WESU Middletown, they have nurtured a focused relationship with music, dance and performance practitioners for much of this time. Working fluidly between cultural and commercial realms they have intentionally evaded categorization throughout much of their career, instead choosing to evolve, grow, fail, change and learn with every project they engage in. They are eternally grateful to have worked with long-time friend Will Rawls on this latest piece, and would like to extend gratitude to the brilliant cast and crew who helped bring this vision to life over many years, states and situations.

Jimmy Garver (Sound Designer/Video Installation) has over 17 years of experience creating sound designs and composing music for live performance, films, & art installations. He works primarily with composed sound and the spoken word, often mixing the timbres of acoustic instruments and human voices with synthetic audio to sculpt imagined textures and environments. In addition to this work, Jimmy has also consulted on large, AI-powered, synthetic voice projects for Microsoft Research and Descript. He is one half of The Sending, an electronic music group. His work has been heard at and/or commissioned by Ballet Hispanico/Apollo Theatre, Lincoln Center’s Dance On Camera festival, the Smithsonian Institute, Microsoft Research, Descript Inc., Pushkin Industries, BAM, PS-122, Joyce SoHo, 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance, Bearnstow, Atlantic Theatre Company, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Signature Theatre (DC), Folger Theatre Company, Studio Theatre Company (DC), A Contemporary Theatre, UMO Ensemble, Chamber Dance Project, Whitman College, Georgetown University, Bowdoin College. Some previous collaborators include Kimberly Bartosik, Diane Coburn Bruning, Shana Cooper, Katie Pearl & Lisa D’Amour, Michael Garces, Derek Goldman, Elizabeth Klob, Peter Kyle, Duncan Macmillan, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Will Rawls, Mary Stuart Masterson, linn meyers, David Muse, Christopher Petit, Aaron Posner, Kameron Steele, Matthew Torney, Eric Tucker, Yury Urnov.

Sasha Okshteyn (Producer) is a creative producer with over 10 years of experience in live performance production. Sasha has collaborated and worked with artists and institutions such as Miles Greenberg, Adam Linder, Madeline Hollander, Jacolby Satterwhite, Yvonne Rainer, Pam Tanowitz, Baye & Asa, Stephen Petronio, Gerard & Kelly, David Gordon, Michael Portnoy, Performa, Museum of Modern Art, Pace Gallery, MCA Sydney and Imprint Projects. A native New Yorker, Sasha received her B.A in Art History and Dance from George Washington University, DC and M.A in Visual Arts Administration from NYU, NY.
Funding For This Project

[siccer] was originally commissioned by The Kitchen in partnership with co-commissioners, The Momentary, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, On the Boards, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. [siccer] was made possible, in part, by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is a Creative Capital Project. [siccer] is also a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project which is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). [siccer] also received substantial developmental support from THINKLARGE.US, a family run nonprofit created by Don Quinn Kelley and Sandra L. Burton to aid in the creation of new work.

[siccer] was developed and supported, in part, by residencies at The Momentary and Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts, with additional support by On the Boards and The Kitchen; a creative residency at Petronio Residency Center, a program of the Stephen Petronio Company; with financial, administrative and residency support from Dance in Process at Gibney with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Movement Research; the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles and The Hammer Museum Residency; the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University; with production support and residency provided by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Williams College and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Access Information

This work includes live performances and a video installation on the museum’s first floor that runs from March 22 through June 18, 2023.

The performance is improvised and may include some swearing and sexual innuendo.

CART captioning, ASL, and audio description will be provided for the April 29 performance.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: [siccer], Alejandro Flores Monge, Chicago, David Szlasa, Holland Andrews, Jeremy Touissant-Baptiste, jess pretty, Jimmy Garver, Katrina Reid, Kemi Adeyemi, keyon gaskin, Lauryn Siegel Studio, Maggie Heath, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Near North Side, Rebecca Fitton, Saša Kovačević, Sasha Okshteyn, Will Rawls