w/ Bethany Alwa
Arranged by Marina Kelly & Bethany Alwa
Blacktop/Bogdance was a live dance for two performed in the back lot behind the Commonwealth Gallery at the Madison Enterprise Center.
As part of the IRLmfg show, August 24, 2024.
Madison, WI
pc: Kim Keyes
pc: Jim Mathews
w/ Bethany Alwa.
Floodplain, a performance for small audiences (of up to 4 people from the same household) was created and shared as part of the Home Stretch Festival, Curated by Spatula & Barcode.
August-September, 2021, Madison, Wisconsin.
As we slipped into the pandemic back in spring of 2020, a great and satisfying dream came just in time:
Feet pierce the surface of the water. Floating….No, descending. There was a presence larger than my own, soft and grey. My eyes met it’s eyes-no, Her eyes. Just briefly. She was turning, revolving. Hippo! Hippopotamus. Dark water turned to green and we were in a hazy strip of light. She opened her soft pink feet to mine and I lay mine on hers and…and…
We collected audience members at their home, walked them a short distance to a nearby location where movement and story mixed.
Bethany shared a story of slipping into feeling “okay”.
She was ten years old. What is that? 5th grade? In perfect cursive handwriting, with little curlycues on top of the “I’s” The assignment: Describe a great American. Her sister; My Mother. She got a job in New York City, putting small things into tubes. She travelled to Greece and fed skinny cats under tables., learned Greek so that she could talk to her neighbors. Dug things up to give to museums. Now, she’s writing a book. She asked me, “Do you think I will ever be able to garden and write?” I tell her, “Maybe I garden, you write” .
We returned our small audience to the original location and, after a brief boogie inspired by the Laurel & Hardy’s dance routine to Way Out West, we departed.
We crafted the piece during July and August, sharing it with 10 small groups before the fall equinox on September 22, 2021.
w/ Bethany Alwa, Aliza Rand, Stephanie Rearick & Jim Vogel
Arranged by Marina Kelly, Music by Stephanie Rearick.
A Natural Conclusion to Floating in Space was a live performance inspired by the visual dust of a night poorly slept, the early days of the Cabaret Voltaire and portions of Edward Clodd’s Myths and Dreams (1891).
March 3, 2018: Elastic Arts, Chicago, IL, March 10, 2018: Arts and Literature Lab, Madison, WI
The Yelling at the Dark project, curated by Christine Olson, featured two evenings of live art (a mix of sound and movement based performance) celebrating the simultaneous absurdity and exhilaration of an insignificant act.
Chicago: Hosted by Butoh Curious Chicago , Elastic Arts, Sara Zalek and Christine Olson
Madison: Hosted by Arts & Literature Laboratory and Christine Olson.
pc: Aaron Granat
pc: Genia Daniels
It was a privilege to perform as one of Linda Montano’s Gland Angels as part of the New Museum’s 40th Anniversary celebration, “Who’s Afraid of the New Now?”
Who's Afraid of the New Now?: Judith Bernstein and Linda Montano (a conversation)
December 2, 2017
Emptied of all workers, the 75,000 square foot City of Madison Municipal building was used as an exhibition and performance space for a hundred artists on December 10, 2016. Subterranean Garden was located at the end of a dim corridor where the audience stood or sat behind a glass wall that faced the re-cultivated office space of the former Department of City Planning. Enclosed by disarranged cubicles, pads of astroturf underfoot and an imaginary net of evergreens overhead, two costumed figures kicked up their feet and sashayed in unison to the tune of Dieter Roth’s Harmonica Curse. Video projections, fragrance, ambient forest recordings and swan decoys completed the live tableau of a strange garden in the far reaches of the building’s lower level.
7’30’ loops
Municipal Show, December 10, 2016
Read more about the Municipal show in this Wisconsin State Journal article.
Featured at a celebration of ground breaking works by composers from the 17th, 19th, 20th and 21th centuries, this original Feldman-Cage mashup featured Morton Feldman's piece For Frank O’Hara (1973) as played by the Sound Out Loud Ensemble paired with a reading of John Cage's Indeterminacy cards read by Marina Kelly & Stephanie Rearick. The cards (numbered from 1-90, featuring stories created, curated and paced by John Cage) were chosen and read by Kelly & Rearick in response to the roll of two 9 sided die.
Marc Vallon conducted Sound Out Loud's performance of the Feldman piece. The ensemble includes Iva Ugrčić, flute; Pedro Garcia III, clarinet; Biffa Kwok, violin; Brian Grimm, cello; Kyle Johnson, piano; Satoko Hayami, piano; Garrett Mendelow, percussion.
October 29, 2016 @ 7:00 pm in Mills Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison
w/ Trent Miller & Jennifer Conrad
A collaborative offering in the form of poetry paired with a picnic of local foods. Created for farmers Adrea Yoder & Richard de Wilde from Harmony Valley Farm in Vernon County, Wisconsin. As part of “Feeding Farmers”, a Spatula & Barcode project featured in the 2016 Triennial Exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
Learn more about the project, including poetry chosen for each course of the meal at this Spatula & Barcode blog.
Reverie is a work of material poetry. An installation of devised and re-constituted objects, the piece is composed of inherited tool & die bits, latex, wax, chalk and paper.
Reverie was featured as part of Preservatif, curated by Niki Johnson. Most recently installed in Milwaukee, WI (Stockholm Gallery, 2014) and Memphis, TN (Marshall Art Gallery, 2015). A travelling exhibition, Preservatif features artworks by 23 artists from throughout the United States, including sculpture, jewelry, photographs and couture fashion. All of the work was made in response to a large donation of (expired) condoms.
Closer to size, closer to section, closer to straight, closer to smooth…
There was an almost imperceptible low-pitched sound to the space. The session began as audiences of two entered the small space and ended as the black sand collected on the underbelly of an hourglass. A perfectly timed collaboration with the life-model, musician & visual artist Ruby Tingle, Helix Duette was informed, in part, by the suspended animations of snails and life models.
Windowed nook, willow branches, garden bedding, sod, charcoal, refuse bags, partners, cosmetics, hourglass, shells, live flowers, amplification & Vaseline.
ArtFunkl, Manchester, United Kingdom, 2014
A series of dense orbs molded from earth and water using a Japanese method called Dorodango. In this process, an internal capsule of mud is formed by hand, then covered with layers of dirt and dust which is then polished to completion.
Earth Art 2015 , Natural Path Sanctuary, Farley Center for Peace & Justice in Verona, Wisconsin, 2015
w/ Christine Olson
Reliance was a site responsive video installation created for the 2015 Earth Sculpture exhibition at the Natural Path Sanctuary at the Farley Center for Peace & Justice in Verona, Wisconsin. Curated by Bobbette Rose. Reliance documents live performances for the screen shot on location during the night of the last full moon of the summer season.
w/ Megan Katz.
Palimpsest occupied a soon-to-be renovated office space in the downtown Madison Public Library. Part of Bookless, the site-responsive five-channel video work featured a choreographed video loop approximately 20 minutes in length. The work utilized clips of libraries sourced from films throughout the last 5 decades. Bookless, the one day art and music event welcomed over 5,000 visitors to the central library.
The teens chose love songs; songs whose lyrics they would want to share with a potential partner. Audience members approached a teen for a unique dance experience or a teen would exit their pool of light to invite audiences of one into their performance space. Each pair listened to the teen's chosen song on headphones, with the teens guiding the one-of-a kind dance. A durational performance event conceived of and directed by Marina Kelly, featuring: Aliza Feder, Emmaline Friederichs, Grace Jolicoeur, Rae Peterson, Rain Lochner, Tiffany Tran and Jo Ward. Assistant to the Director: Alaura Seidl.
Commonwealth Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin, 2012
Entrainment is a phenomenon whereby two or more things or beings find synchronicity in response to an external rhythm; a concert of fireflies flashing in an open field or crickets chirping in unison. This synchronizing effect often occurs below our threshold of perception. We do not completely understand how or why these things occur. Music can entrain human motions to the rhythm and we can entrain with another person—with our heart-beats, our breathing pattern or our movements.
This series of pieces was shown at the Commonwealth Gallery in concert with the live artwork Holding You in the Light.
Memorial (looping video, featuring Kristin Forde & Kelly Warren)
Fallschirm (parachute sculpture)
Like I Never Left (text/video)
Rosie (phone sculpture featuring Depeche Mode).
In this hd looping video installation, Lili & Grady eat their way through giant lolipops. The children lick and bite the sugary discs, engaging in a seemingly endless innocent indulgence.
Lili & Grady was featured at the Beacons show at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (UICA) in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2011 with an updated version created for the Engendered exhibition at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) in 2015.
Vestibular featured the artist furiously progressing through a crimson red fabric tube, surrounded by the steady throbbing of blood imagery and sound. Vestibular was featured at the Project Lodge as part of Dark Dances, an evening of short butoh-inspired performance works. A version of the work made for intimate audiences (of 8) featured an interactive audience component. Music composition by Brian Daly.
Project Lodge, Madison, WI, 2010 & Studio 1005, UW-Madison Art Lofts, 2011 (Erin Elise Hood, Attendant)
w/ Erin Hood
Hey, Fighter was a one night only durational live artwork that investigated the potential in the space between two people. The work was created for and with the community at Ford's Boxing Gym in Madison, Wisconsin. Audiences experienced Hey, Fighter street-side, just outside the gym's glass windows along Winnebego Street. Some opted to get in the ring, in pairs of two, for a more intimate performance experience. Read more about the event in this Isthmus Preview. Spring 2011.
Curated by Marina Kelly & Megan Katz, featuring work by 10 years of participants at Summerwork at the Farm. Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin. April 15-June 30, 2013
Between the years of 2005-2015, visual artist Douglas Rosenberg and choreographer Li Chiao-Ping opened their home, land, garden and studio in Oregon, WI to an annual gathering of artists, dancers, writers, musicians and creative people of all kinds. This intentional community met for one full week each August and included artists from near and far from the Oregon, Wisconsin site.
Called Summerwork at the Farm, these yearly retreats were open to anyone who wanted to participate in periods of localized, spontaneous collaboration. Farming was the working metaphor for an approach to art-making that is directly connected to the land on which it’s made, and the people who are present.
Inspired by people like Allan Kaprow and Lucy Lippard, and spaces such as Black Mountain College, Farmwork was rooted in the idea that Art and Life can be one and the same, a hybrid practice. Together we would make food, practice yoga, take walks, talk, laugh, move, draw, write, play, climb, explore, dig and build. We staged performances, recorded sounds, made music, and shared ideas. Along the way we documented.
Farmwork: A Retrospective exhibited photo documentation alongside video and photography works created by Farmwork participants. Marina Kelly & Megan Katz premiered an 8 channel synchronized video installation for the Farmwork exhibition alongside a 36' long light box, featuring over 100 photographic transparencies curated from the Farmwork archive.
The Asylum soundscape was installed in April & May of 2014 in Madison, Wisconsin at the pedestrian/bike passageway along the Yahara river at Tenney Park.
The inspiration for the piece was the dramatic sound of rain abruptly stopping and starting again when you drive under a bridge during a rainstorm. The silence marks the passage under the bridge and back out into the world; it is an auditory experience that draws attention to a brief moment of transition that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The Asylum composition used abstracted recordings collected from the site combined with snippets of song and the sounds of pouring rain to create a world where the boundaries between real and imagined were no longer clear.
Read more about Asylum in this article in the Wisconsin State Journal by Gayle Warland or read an interview with the artists by Toby Kaufmann-Buhler for the Spackle Blog below.
A site-specific conceptual act by the Cohorts: Gregory Grube, Megan Katz & Marina Kelly.
Homage to Donna Summer, Dim All the Lights featured the artists amid awkward intimacies, slippery transformations and shimmery acts of entanglement. Costume, sculpture and a strong association with modern dance and disco supported the experiment.
Bryant Lake Bowl, Minneapolis, MN, 2012. Two shows, one night.
A Dear Heart Dance Production. Directed by Marina Kelly, Liz Sexe and Kate Hewson. Here We Left It featured fourteen artists in an immersive theatrical experience for audiences of five. Each of the artists made work in response to Virginia Woolf’s short story A Haunted House.
This intimate, haunting, guided performance experience evoked a traditional haunted attraction where Gregory Grube & Marina Kelly as a ghostly couple lead small groups through the house. Shows ran on the half hour starting at 7pm and ending at midnight each night. October 14 & 15, 2011 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Participating Artists: Gregory Grube, Dominique Haller, Kate Hewson, Erin Hood, Jerry Hui, Megan Katz, Marina Kelly, Christine Olsen, Kerry Parker, Kalpana Prakash, Angela Richardson, Andrew Salyer, Liz Sexeand Susan White. Assistant to the Directors: Shelby Sonnenberg. Video documentation by Rob Matsushita. Still image documentation by Mick McKiernan.
Here We Left It was supported by funds from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arts Enterprise New Arts Venture Challenge.
GOING (après Waiting) features the artist and audiences of one participating in a poetic performance stroll. The piece was included in Spatula & Barcode's Café Allongé in Montreal, Canada (2012) and in Madison, Wisconsin as part of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art's Triennial Exhibition (2013-2014).
In Montreal, participants met the artist at Cafe Myriade. In Madison, we met at Coffee House. They donned auditory devices (allowing the artist to speak through a wireless microphone-with the audio projected to the participants' wireless headpones).
GOING (après Waiting) takes it’s inspiration from Faith Wilding’s 1972 monologue “Waiting”. Born one year after Wilding’s performance of Waiting, the artist crafted a performance that keeps in step with Wildings pacing, meanwhile denying the female life lived in waiting.
View a full listing of the Café Allongé performances in Madison, Wisconsin, here. Read comments by audience members of the Café Allongé series here. Watch a photo slideshow featuring Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, aka "Spatula & Barcode" in the Wisconsin State Journal.
A movement choir performs for one (and some) in this 3 hour durational performance. An audience member kneels down, placing the provided headphones over their ears in order to listen to the artist's autobiographical re-telling of a childhood misunderstanding whereby she confused Rod Steward with God.
Marina Kelly with gesture choir (Rachel Walker, Christine Olson, Michelle Solberg, Katrina Schaag, Lisa O'Connor, Genia Daniels & Mary Patterson).
Sound (church organ version of Rod Stewart's If you want my body...) by Reem Totonchi.
UW-Madison Art Lofts, Madison, Wisconsin, 2011
Spoken For is a multi-media performance work by Marina Kelly and Megan Katz. Four male performers perform the stories of four women’s desires (speaking in time with video projected onto their torsos).
Shown at the Raandesk Gallery in New York (February, 2011), Spoken For featured performances by Jason Bahling, Andy Dayton, Michael Eckblad and Jon Wohl of the Notion Collective.
Read a review of the work in the Summer 2011 issue of Bitch Magazine.
The one-time-only performance of Sugar River featured the artist as well as her parents, Marina and Bobby Kelly. The theatrical re-enactment of a girl's life steeped in sugar included the re-telling of intimate family stories, tracing the circuitous passage from adolescence to adulthood. Sugar River recalled the artist's introduction to a new country's worth of sweet things to discover and, eventually, habitually overindulge in.
Sugary Scottish treats (some home-made, some beautifully packaged by the Cadbury company), soft-serve ice cream, Dallas on the tv, parents, video, returnable bottles, The Sugary Cake & Candy Man song.
Inside Story Performance Festival and Symposium, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mitchell Theatre, 2010
Farm Dance was an original community dance work by Dear Heart Dance collective in collaboration with Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture and community members passionate about the local food movement.
The Farm Dance project was supported by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission. Original music score by Justin Richardson. Costumes by Petra Lampertz.
Listen to a preview interview on Madison's own Community Radio, WORT, on Jonathan Zaroff's 8 O'Clock Buzz show here.
I crawled through the field, keeping my spine parallel to the earth. I filled the cloth bags at my sides with milkweed pods and clumps of molding leaves. The rain soaked my hair and clothing, making the bags heavy, cumbersome. When the bags were filled, the performance ended.
A 1-1 performance documented by Douglas Rosenberg.
A Curious production, created by Helen Paris and Caroline Wright, Out of Water featured a newly commissioned sound-score by acclaimed composer Jocelyn Pook and singing by Laura Wright and Oo La Lume. Stories of endeavour, of swimming, of sinking, interwove with haunting music, lifeguard drills, calls for help and struggles for breath.
In the early morning light a group of singers and swimmers strike out towards the water's edge until they span the wide expanse of beach. They each look towards the sea, eyes intent, focused on the horizon, searching for something. Is somebody lost at sea?
PSI #19: Now Then: Performance & Temporality
Ft. Funston Beach, San Francisco, California with performances at dawn and dusk on June 29, 2013. Image courtesy of Curious
{Safe Prime} Crawl features a small pack of women, traversing the city-scape en route to a hut awaiting them in the corner of the gallery space. Marina Kelly with Raka Bandyo, Genia Daniels, Mary Patterson and Elizabeth Wautlet.
Art Loft Gallery, Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010
A 10 minute piece for an audience of 50, shared as part of the 2008 RAW show at the Project Lodge, in Madison, Wisconsin. The live performance explored the tension between taking one's time and the task of arriving on the dot.
Fifteen digital alarm clocks, video projection and a performance that began (and gained momentum) as the audience gathered.
A one channel video installation featuring three women in crimson running across a burnt brown field. It is the end of summer in South-Centeral, Wisconsin. Dancers: Susan Lee, Liz Sexe & Marina Kelly. Camera work by Michael Eckblad.
Rural Dane County, Wisconsin, 2009
A multi-media performance work inspired by the respective childhood immigration experiences of the artists Marina Kelly and Kate Hewson. Music composition by Brian Daly.
The performance integrated aerial performance with gestural movement phrases performed on suspended chairs and backed by a sound work with loose/ poetic narrative threads. Suspended objects and video projection combined with the live movement and sound score to create a theatrical spectacle in the corner of the soon to be transformed Ironworks Building on Waubesa Street in Madison, Wisconsin.
Resident.Alien. was shared as part of UW-Madison's TRANS conference and exhibit in October, 2006 (read more about the TRANS conference here). Video documentation of the work was featured at the Out of Timespace Exhibit (San Francisco Art Institute, November 2007). Video documentation of the live performance of Resident.Alien. by Jason Bahling
w/ Kim Keyes
From the sod filled elevator to the rock filled hallways, nature permeated the installations, still and moving images in this one-night-only show. Large scale still images complemented the video and sculptural works. The bulk of the still images were taken by Keyes while the 8 mm film and video works were created for the show by Kelly. Each composition documented sensory explorations in nature.
Commonwealth Gallery, Madison, WI
