A dance performanceChoreography, concept, dance: Inka Juslin
Concept, dramaturgy, visual: Svitlana Matviyenko
Dance: Ronja Verkasalo
Music: 3 Songs without Words,
Part III: There is a solitude of space (2001)
and Kolomyika, a dance (1981) by Virko Baley
Sound: www.freesound.com
Sound collage and technical assistance:
Mick Lexington
Paintings by
David Burliuk and Vasyl Bazhaj. In the performance we use Inka Juslin’s reflections on Vasyli Kandinsky’s writing on art.
The Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. presents THE YELLOW, Inka Juslin’s collaborative multimedia performance, featuring two dancers and a visual artist. By telling the story of an imaginary woman, dwelling in this building, Juslin’s choreography accentuates the architectural features of the Gothic mansion. The work asks how a strict division between public and private within one’s home affects the way life is lived there.
Special Thanks to
~ Virko Baley, Olena Jennings, jj higgins, Virlana Tkacz, and The Academy of Finland.
August 16, 2008 @ 8 p.m.
2 East 79th Street, New York, NY, 10075
Inka Juslin is a Finnish dancer and choreographer currently based in New York City, where she collaborates across artistic disciplines and genres. She choreographs her own works as well as performs for other choreographers. Juslin is a visiting scholar at the Performance Studies Department at New York University. Her scholarly interest is related to new technologies and media, and to their use in conjunction with the human body, dance and movement. Juslin has choreographed dance and video works in Finland, and also in Asia, North America and Europe. Her doctoral choreography Redress was presented at the Kiasma Theatre in the Museum for Contemporary Art in Helsinki in October 2002. She collaborates with companies, such as Melinda Ring Special Projects in New York, and continues a work-in-progress dance and new technologies project with Susan Kozel/Mesh Performance Practices, a company based both in US and Europe. She is currently working on a new research project on Dance in the Nordic spaces, which also includes elements of Yiddish film and theater.
Svitlana Matviyenko’s experimental video and photography addresses the medium as an essential part of an art work. She is a film, media and literary critic, she edited Literatura Plus, a newspaper of the Ukrainian Writers Association; she was a founder and an editor-in-chief of Komentar, a Ukrainian political and cultural monthly. Svitlana is a co-founder (with Virlana Tkacz) of ‘ROUND US poetry & performance series that has been on since 2002 in Kiev and New York. She is a Fulbright fellow, pursuing her PhD in new media art, visual theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Svitlana Matviyenko curates a new series of experimental performance, launched at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York.
Ronja Verkasalo is a dancer and an artist, with a strong focus on research in both performance work and teaching. She comes from a small island in the Gulf of Finland, surrounded by the sea. The sea and the weather conditions in the Finnish archipelago, while being the main source of her aesthetic, also teach perspective for her work as an artist in this time and age. Her work consists of choreographing and dancing, as well as writing, performance and conceptual art. She is currently a freelance artist, with previous posts e.g. at the National Theatre of Finland and the Riitta Vainio Dance Company. She began dancing after studying and writing much theory about the body and the politics of the body in the University environment. She still works with these same issues, but through the physical approach has come to a wider understanding of the work. She is continually in awe of how the body learns and teaches the mover.
Space : Inka JuslinHow can architecture be embodied in dance? Our intention is to not merely reinvent characters that lived in the mansion, but to animate and choreograph the different flows of movement reflecting desire, pain, hesitation, struggle and excitement.
Each room of the building has its private and public dimension, which means, it has a couple of different stories to tell. Our choreography presents the duality of each room, their real and virtual realms, fused in our experience of space.
Two other “folds” of space—exterior and interior—are not easy to distinguish. First of all, they exist only in relation to each other. Second, each of them carries its own exteriority and interiority. Our choreography grows from the intersection of these two dimensions of space—the inside and the outside. It shows how we simultaneously exist in both. In other words, this performance reminds us of what our body knows, even though we are not entirely aware of it…
Time : Svitlana Matviyenko
…And now we are in the dimension of time.
It was Eadweard Muybridge whose experiments on capturing the images of running, flying and walking animal and human bodies “folded” the movement into one tiny spot of a frame. This was where space shrank into time.
It could be a minute or two that we devote to viewing a short loop of animation during the performance. It has been a hundred and thirty years since Muybridge accomplished his experiment. Our short animation bridges the present and the past: a contemporary dancer meets a 130 year old moving image.
This performance involves the movement embodied by the dancers, and the movement recomposed from the traces of digital recording.
How different is the time of different media? What are the old media and the new media, when, with computer animation, as strange as it sounds, we are back to the moving image of Muybridge’s flip-books, a simple result of a quick change of layers?..
…And now we are in the dimension of time.
It was Eadweard Muybridge whose experiments on capturing the images of running, flying and walking animal and human bodies “folded” the movement into one tiny spot of a frame. This was where space shrank into time.
It could be a minute or two that we devote to viewing a short loop of animation during the performance. It has been a hundred and thirty years since Muybridge accomplished his experiment. Our short animation bridges the present and the past: a contemporary dancer meets a 130 year old moving image.
This performance involves the movement embodied by the dancers, and the movement recomposed from the traces of digital recording.
How different is the time of different media? What are the old media and the new media, when, with computer animation, as strange as it sounds, we are back to the moving image of Muybridge’s flip-books, a simple result of a quick change of layers?..
The mansion was built on the corner of 79th Street and Fifth Avenue a hundred and ten years ago. It was Isaac Fletcher, a banker and railroad investor, who commissioned the famous architect C.P.H. Gilbert to build a house using William K. Vanderbilt's neo-Loire Valley chateau as its model, on the property which was originally the Lenox farm. Since then, known as the Isaac Fletcher House, it became one of the most spectacular landmarks of Upper East Side Manhattan. Mr. Fletcher himself was so pleased with his new home that he hired Jean Francois Raffaelli to paint a portrait of it; the painting, the mansion and the Fletcher's extensive art collection were all eventually bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917. However, as Christopher Gray points out in his book on New York streetscapes, anonymous critics saw the mansion as ecclesiastical rather than domestic in origin. One of them, Gray reads in the Real Estate Record and Guide of 1899, observes that the Fletcher mansion had “too much the air of an archeological reproduction to be accepted as an appropriate New York City house of 1898.”Later, in 1920, the “inappropriate” building was purchased by Harry F. Sinclair, the founder of the Sinclair Oil Company, and then sold in 1930 to Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant, Jr., a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. A bachelor and recluse, Augustus Stuyvesant occupied the mansion with his unmarried sister until her death in 1938, then lived out the remaining years of his life until 1953 with just his butler and footman to serve him.And finally, in 1948, William Dzus, inventor and owner of the Dzus Fastener Company in West Islip, Long Island, New York founded the Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. for the purpose of promoting Ukrainian art, culture, music, and literature. In 1955, the mansion was purchased by the Ukrainian Institute of America Corporation with the charitable generosity and support of Mr. Dzus. In June of 1962 the mortgage was paid off and subsequently the Ukrainian Institute of America attained landmark status. This year the Ukrainian Institute of America celebrates its 60th anniversary and is happy to open the doors of its 110 year-old home to admirers of experimental dance by which Finnish choreographer Inka Juslin choreographs a story of an imaginary woman, dwelling in this mansion. Ms. Juslin’s performance will lead the viewer to imagine this woman slipping through the crowds at receptions and dinner parties. She belongs to this Gothic space: she performs what it asks her to, lives the life it offers her. This is the time when a strict division between public and private is maintained within one’s own home. Her being there is architectured: she is a different person on the different floors of the house.
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