Katie Wood and Cherrie Yu, William & Mary alum and Senior, performed electronic-music and interpretive dance last week at emerging printmaker Studio Two Three in Richmond, Virginia to raise money for the ACLU. Amid the smell of fresh ink, next to the gallery art show "Artists for Inclusion," Katie soberly performed 40 minutes of electronic sound manipulation while Cherrie danced. Their talent and focus brought forth infectious joy to a novice viewer who found the unfamiliar experience refreshing, and well-thought-out. Their show complemented the gallery which was dedicated to "diversity and inclusion," because they presented themselves simply and set off the art, the audience, and even the studio space as sound and body transformations liberated everyone to see their surroundings anew. The ladies put on a sober and neat performance. Their decorative pizzaz was limited to well coordinated simplicity, and Katie's sparkly-black witch socks. They took the spotlight in front of a black temporary wall that partially concealed the printing press and cabinetry of the aritst-workspace. Katie's equipment sat on an unadorned table. They began to perform without announcement after they emerged from a chat among audience members, and performed with their eyes focused on something. Katie looked to her equipment and Cherrie was often looking at her hands or the floor. I got the impression that Cherrie's performance depended on the music that Katie produced. Perhaps this is because of the Sia music videos I've been watching (Chandelier, and The Greatest.) Sia's songs are performed by a young modern dancer, Maddie Ziegler. The minimalist sets and costumes lend focus to certain objects and especially the dancer's body and expressive movements. The videos are presumably made for the songs, so the chicken and the egg, but Katie's performance was improvisational, and it's possible that Cherrie's dance leads her as much as it follows the music. Simplicity was the root of Cherrie's modern dance performance. I watched her begin with small, repetitive movements that were reminiscent of work, and built into bold, repetitive gestures. She had her eyes on her hands or the floor, and swung her whole core in circles, pointing on her toes. She was very focused, and built up to these bigger gestures that felt joyful and liberating. To me, her performance was all about starting small with something she seemed to be holding, moving, examining, and then persisting with the same idea until it was no longer centered on the object. Katie made varied expressions with her synthesizers that were overall a mildly-dark, meditative sound. Her tools were the only props on the set, we'll say. My favorite was a contact microphone that looked like a white temporal thermometer. She put it against her throat and sang. The modulator picked up vibrations from her larynx. She transformed her voice by using a part of if that Helen Keller certainly didn't take for granted. Katie projected this tangible experience for all of us to feel at once, and it came out like a dying croak of a dreadfully thirsty person. She unleashed the sound simultaneously with her own sighs and wavering song-notes that she had secretly recorded under cover of long, sharp synth notes. The viewer had to wonder which sound was issuing from her mouth at that moment, and which was a reverb from the synth. She mixed whispers and made them sound frantic, and amplified sighs so that they washed over the room like a cold wind. I entertained the possibility that Katie could in fact manipulate time, and project herself in several ways at once. Like a printmaker going over her work again with painstaking paper pastes and stitches and gouache, Katie took rhythms and utterances and transformed them and relaid them. Another prop in the performance was Katie's only sound sample. After the show, Katie told us that she used a recording of an overseas phone conversation between Cherrie and her family in China as a source of noise for her performance. Cherrie laughed, remembering how she could hear the family chit-chat again while she danced. Ironically, she was telling her parents about dance class. I didn't recognize anyone's voices during the show. I liked the symmetry though. Cherrie danced to Katie's music, and Katie made music with Cherrie's voice. Katie probably had no idea what the voices were saying, because the conversation was Chinese. Cherrie's took in the music and spoke with her body. I've never seen an all-electronic improvised music performance, so that language was new to me. And I really didn't understand the music nerds talking after the show about how Katie used all of her equipment. Mostly, she was successful. I say it was a refreshing performance because I felt impressed by Katie's and Cherrie's dedication, and their smiles belied deep gratification when the performance ended. I liked seeing the two girls shine together at the end of their shared performance. Katie made a mockery of deciding to end the show, but the responsibility fell to her. She took a deep breath, and relaxed her hands over the machines like she might pat the strings on her beautiful acoustic guitar to end the last note, and then nodded to Cherrie, who had paused to see what she would do next. She could have gone on with her exploration. She said at the beginning of the evening that it wasn't so important that the show start on time, because the Studio wanted to emphasize the social gathering and conversation rather than call it a show. But Katie and Cherrie captivated the audience, and took a great bow at the end. In a few, far-between moments, the sound was a little loud for some of the attendees, but overall, left me with a happy, satisfied feeling. I'll add that the visual art in the gallery was worth visiting on it's own. Photography representing trans-gender African-Americans, the women of the January Women's March on Washington, clever feminist minimalist painting, and mobilizing mixed-media are all on display this month.
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AuthorWe are Kieran and Michelle, two 32-year-old William & Mary grads living in Virginia. Archives
March 2024
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