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Avant Yarde 02/10

Sunday, February 14, Valentine’s Day

Waxed Sealed Valentine Letter
Wax-Sealed Valentine Letter

The guidelines for this potlatch were simply to bring a Valentine to share — either chocolate, wine, flowers or love note, or some combination thereof.

A staged reading of George Hunka’s play What She Knew was performed by Gabriele Schafer along with two short performance pieces: Broken Umbilical Cord, created and performed by Fulya Peker and On the Ground, created and performed by Irem Calikusu.

George has written a few thoughts about the event and the nature of presenting new work at Superfluities Redux.

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What She Knew

Drawing on the Sophoclean and Senecan version of the Oedipus story, George Hunka’s What She Knew is a contemporary meditation on the role Jocasta plays in the tragedy: a woman whose willful participation in Oedipus’ guilt reveals an extraordinary capacity for erotic and sexual transgression as a means to freedom, as an avenue to outwit time, place and her own desiring and desirous body. She strides through centuries, balancing between the ecstasy of loss in another’s body and the agony of moral criminality.

Gabriele Schafer in stage reading of "What She Knew"

Broken Umbilical Cord

Fulya Peker’s Modern Mythologies Project intends to unite fine arts, performing arts, and literature to enact the creative pioneers of the past who engraved the landscape of existence with their thoughts and works. The spoken text and sounds (recorded), formed through a poetic re-arrangement of the artist’s personal writings, are used as the music for the moving/gesticulating/responding body of the performer who becomes a canvas and embodies the artist’s artworks. The aim of this project is to transform the creator into a creation; the artist into an artwork and to unite the observer and the observed. The first piece of the Modern Mythologies Project, “Hands of a Suicide” (Edward Munch), was performed in Leigne-sur-Ussau, France, in 2009. “Broken Umbilical Cord” (Kathe Kollwitz) will be the second piece of the Modern Mythologies Project. The focal concept of the piece will be death, femininity, and motherhood in Kollwitz’ engravings and letters/diaries.

Fulya Peker in "Broken Umbilical Cord"

On the Ground

Irem Calikusu’s butoh-inspired dance piece.

“Being in a body, having a self, these are already very complicated. Listening to the body’s silent words to find freedom…”

Irem Calikusu in "On the Ground"

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