MeMoSa: OASIS, an interactive performance ritual by Norah Zuniga Shaw and Livable Futures
Imagine how different your week could be if you were given an hour of deep, dreamy, healing rest, a sonic tonic and contemporary performance portal. Join us in the OASIS. It may only be a mirage, but we leave nourished, nonetheless.
Amidst planetary conditions of loss and fatigue, OASIS offers an unexpected site of respite, an immersive performance for creative community renewal.
Participants are bathed in sound, stars, stories, and sensation as they move and create with performers in sound and movement oscillations.
A four part song-cycle composed with Byron Au Yong moves and bends and vibrates the space via interactive software performed by Oded Huberman.
Stories emerge, invented anew for each performance, weaving oasis ecology and post-human philosophy with audience contributions. Warm water flows through the themes of the work but so does mirage and the impermanence of any site of refuge on the planet today.
Designed to be responsive to the needs at hand, OASIS is a transmedia performance ritual that can be programmed in many ways including virtual reality and online events as well as in-person immersive experiences.
While at the Movement Lab, Norah and her collaborators will be exploring their audience participation/ transmedia ritual practices, developing new immersive elements, and connecting with NYC communities seeking new pathways into rest and recovery.
This open rehearsal MeMoSa begins 3:00 PM on both Saturday, November 19 and Sunday, November 20
Capacity in the lab is capped at 35 audience members. Attendees who have RSVP'd before the event will have priority, and admission will be determined on a first come first serve basis on arrival. If you RSVP before the event but you arrive late, we reserve the right to give your spot to someone on the waitlist.
Attendees who have not RSVP'd will be put on a standby waitlist if they arrive in-person before the event.
Bios:
Norah Zuniga Shaw (ZShaw) is an interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, and creative director. Her work has been presented throughout the Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sadler’s Wells, London; the Chicago Humanities Festival; and at the Wexner Center. ZShaw’s projects include interactive media works Synchronous Objects with William Forsythe and TWO with Bebe Miller, an anthology Degrees of Unison, the transmedia performance ritual Climate Gathering, and the Livable Futures public practice and podcast. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, Oxford University Press and Motion Bank, among other journals, platforms, and publications. She is a vocalist for the Sonic Arts Ensemble, professor and Director for Dance and Technology at Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, where she cofounded the Motion Lab in 2005 to foster innovations in performance and technology including an artistic residency program for BIPOC and queer-identified artists. With degrees in environmental science and intercultural performance, ZShaw is multilingual and has lived and worked extensively in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Called “wildly creative” by the New York Times, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards and continues to teach and offer public lectures, performance installations, and consulting internationally.
Composer and educator Byron Au Yong creates musical events Variety calls "claustrophobic and expansive, intimate and existential, personal and political all at once." He was born to Chinese immigrants in Pittsburgh and raised in the Pacific Northwest. This background informs a creative process attuned to migration, nature, sustainability, and the American Dream. Au Yong's projects include Activist Songbook, to counteract hate and energize movements (Asian Arts Initiative, International Festival of Arts & Ideas), The Ones, about coming of age in an age of guns (Virginia Tech Center for the Arts, MDC Live Arts), Piano Concerto—Houston, for 11 pianists (University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts), and Turbine, for more than 80 moving singers along the water (Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia and Leah Stein Dance Company). The Seattle Weekly says his "interdisciplinary works are as exquisite and imaginative as they are unclassifiable.” Honors include a Creative Capital Award and Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship. Au Yong holds degrees in theater, dance, and music from NYU, UCLA, and the University of Washington. He is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco.
Kathryn Nusa Logan is an interdisciplinary artist employing experimental art methods to imagine alternative relationships between humans, technology, and the natural world. Logan has shared her work internationally in Scotland, Cyprus, Sweden, and Brazil and across the U.S. in venues including the Lincoln Center Clark Studio Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Movement Research, The Wexner Film/Video Theater, and Center for Performance Research. Her work includes ongoing collaboration with visual artist Jacklyn Brickman as the fictional “Department of Planetary Futures”, which engages multispecies collaborative experiments to investigate the interrelationships humans have with other life forms and each other. In her iterative screendance work The Maya Project, she studies the camera as an anti-oppression tool, interrogating the dominant gaze by engaging in new, somatic-based practices of looking and interacting with technology. In all her work, she is imagining more sustainable ways of being in the world, and practicing them through performance. She holds degrees from University of North Carolina School of the Arts and The Ohio State University, and lives on Lenapehoking land in New York City.
Oded Huberman is a Certified Master of Stage Technology with a background in European contemporary performance and extensive experience touring internationally. He holds a BA in Dance from the Folkwang Universität in Essen, Germany. After finishing his career as a professional dancer with Neuer Tanz, Huberman completed a three-year apprenticeship in brass metalworking. He returned to the theatre by joining the founding team of PACT Zollverein Choreographic Center in 2000 where he worked for more than a decade, producing and operating shows for some of the best-known companies and artists in Europe including Anne Terese de Keersmaeker, Need Company, Lloyd Newson, Meg Stuart, Forced Entertainment, Rimini Protokoll, Jérôme Bel, Xavier Leroy, Ultima Vez, Jonathan Burrows and many others. He regularly served as a master teacher for theater technology apprentices at PACT and has taught as visiting lecturer of tech/production at the University of Giessen, Germany at the Department of Applied Theater Science. He has been collaborating with Norah Zuniga Shaw since 2011 and regularly works for the Ruhr Triennale and as a tour technician for other major artists in Europe. Currently Huberman is Production Manager for the Motion Lab at Ohio State University where he supports advanced technology theater research and teaches interactive media for performance.