Friday 17 March 2023, 8pm
Object Collection presents
HOUSECONCERT
paranormal-domestic actions in no particular order
A performance at the end of time, the last house concert of them all. Or the first, before everything. Casual, using whatever is at hand. After everything has been done, we do this anyway, just because. Because this is what we do in our house, with our invited guests. Getting amongst it.
Object Collection’s history is intimately connected with house concerts. Several of our first performances were in friends’ living rooms for a small group of attendees. The barest of bare bones, essential DIY. We summon the ghosts of Jack Smith, Sam Rivers, and all those who blended their art with their homes. The most basic form of a community: you there watching me here, us together.
written and directed by Kara Feely
composed by Travis Just
performed by Catrin Lloyd-Bollard, Kara Feely, Travis Just, Neil Luck, Daniel Allen Nelson, Nicolás Noreña, James Oldham, and Timothy Scott
With scenic design by Peiyi Wong and lighting by Liz Schweitzer.
HOUSECONCERT will tour to: Stanford University (USA); Indexical, Santa Cruz (USA) and will have a theatrical run at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn, NYC May 1-28.
Kara Feely is a writer, director and designer for theater and interdisciplinary performance, and co-director of Object Collection. Her work draws inspiration from experimental writing and music composition strategies, and combines a variety of materials, from found text fragments and landscapes of objects, to recorded interviews and radio broadcasts. She has written/directed over 14 projects for the company including the experimental operas You Are Under Our Space Control, It’s All True, cheap&easy OCTOBER, No Hotel, Innova, and Problem Radical(s). Her work has been presented at La MaMa, Performa, Abrons Arts Center, the Chocolate Factory Theater, PS122, the Incubator Arts Project, Roulette Intermedium, National Sawdust, Cafè OTO (London), Borealis Festival (Norway), and SPOR Festival (Denmark). Texts/plays have been published in Antennae, PLAY A JOURNAL OF PLAYS, MusikTexte, and futow. Kara teaches in the Theatre Department at Barnard College.
Travis Just is a composer. His music often uses text, objects, and gesture in addition to instruments, voice, and electronics. He has composed many evening-length pieces, primarily for Object Collection. These include films, operas, live-video, and a wide variety of performance and music. Pieces include Problem Radical(s) (2009), Innova (2011), Actua 1 (2011), NO HOTEL (2013), cheap&easy OCTOBER (2015), It’s All True (2016), You Are Under Our Space Control (2019) Look Out Shithead, Episodes 1-3 (2020-2022), as well as numerous hybrid performance pieces and individual musical works. Travis is active as an improviser. His music has been released on Slip/Warp, a wave press, khalija, and Infrequent Seams. Writings in Arcana, Tempo, and the Experimental Music Yearbook. Commissions by Bergen National Opera/Borealis Festival, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, MAP Fund, and NYSCA. Travis worked for Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, assisted La Monte Young, and adapted Robert Ashley's music for the stage. He is co-director of Object Collection.
Glasgow-based experimental composer Max Syedtollan allies with feral performance troupe Cank (ft. Laf Tebano, Romy Danielewicz and Wormhook) for a 10-date tour of the UK, to tie in with the release of his new album ‘Disposables’ on 33-33. Melding improvisation with mutant song-craft, the collaboration marks a departure from Syedtollan’s recent work in more classical territory. Melody, noise, text and movement collide in anarchic and unexpected formations that veer between hilarity and dread, and evade easy genre categorisation.
Recently featured by WIRE as a representative of underground music’s ‘new vaudeville’, Syedtollan has been releasing music since 2016 - including a string of tapes on Glasgow’s cult GLARC label. His live performances incorporate theatrical and comic elements, blurring the distinction between music and performance art. This new collaboration with Cank explores the aesthetics of group dynamics - taking ‘the rock band’ as a cultural trope to be played about with, knocked apart and reconstructed in weird new forms.
ffo. This Heat, The Shadow Ring, Coum Transmissions
