Memory and imagination

A time-bending performance from Bridgman|Packer Dance leads the 2017 New Genre Arts Festival

Like flowers bursting out of the winter earth, the New Genre Arts Festival arrives every spring to bust Tulsa out of its familiar ruts. Over its many years at Living Arts, the festival has brought in nationally and internationally recognized artists who are not so well known here, challenging notions of what creativity can look like outside our regular fare of more or less conventional entertainment.

This year’s festival will be Steve Liggett’s last as artistic director of Living Arts and will continue the format instituted last year, one that’s perfect for folks who might hesitate to take a risk on risky work: free tickets, reservations required, made possible by local and national sponsors. 

“People all over the world knowing more about Tulsa because of New Genre,” Liggett said, “and the city having a national reputation for being a place where, if you are a truly cutting edge contemporary artist, we have a festival to show your work—that’s the thing about New Genre I’m most proud of.”

New Genre 2017 is a raucous mix of installations and performances, from holographic visual art to a concert of sound works created on amplified latex balloons. The week’s main events (two performances and two workshops) come from Bridgman|Packer Dance, a duo of dance and video artists from New York City, whose mesmerizing creations merging video technology and live performance earned them in 2008 the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever given to a collaborative partnership. 

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer started working together in 1978 and began using video in their art about 15 years ago. 

“A number of other groups have used video as background,” Bridgman said. “We wanted to use it in the foreground along with ourselves and have it as a performer onstage.” 

Using both pre-recorded video and live camera feeds that pick up and process their movement onstage in real time, they integrate 2D and 3D worlds in ways that open up space for rich questions about reality.  

For their Tulsa performances (swiftly followed on their touring calendar by shows in Boston, Cleveland, and Beirut), the duo will present two works, “Under the Skin” and “Remembering What Never Happened.” In the first, their projected forms multiply on top of and alongside their performing bodies, filling the stage in a witty, tender, mind-bending play with identity. 

For “Remembering,” Bridgman and Packer researched cognitive psychology and neuroscience through the work of essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt. 

“I got very fascinated by the fact that the same parts of the brain are activated when we remember as when we imagine something,” Packer said. “That fed right into what we were working on about transformation. Video becomes a metaphor for transformation.

“Video itself has two different time zones in it, one past and one present,” she explained. “We’re playing with—and messing with—the usual past/present/future sequence that we like to think of as ‘reality.’

“We’re looking at the connection between memory and imagination,” she continued. “A memory transforms every time we remember it. We reconstruct it each time. When we’re having memories, we are living in present and past at the same time. And we use our memories to project what’s going to happen in the future. 

“In the piece we’re taking that a bit further. Each time we remember this event that either happened or didn’t happen, onstage, we allow it to become more and more fantastical as the piece proceeds.”

Bridgman and Packer film on location (for “Remembering,” in the Mojave Desert) and in their studio with green screen technology and computer programs such as Isadora. Their collaborators include composers and an array of tech experts. Their creative process is complex (with the addition of video, Bridgman said, insanely long rehearsals are the nature of the beast), but ultimately it’s about the simplest elements—time, space, and light—interacting in specific ways at specific moments.

Ultimately, Packer said, their work is a comment on a common human experience. 

“The question of what is ‘real’ is very vital in the news today, and yet these are ancient philosophical questions: what is this existence, is my perception of existence the same as yours, what is this reality that we call our lives? 

“We are looking these questions in our work,” she said, “not giving answers but presenting the questions. We’re doing it in a way that’s visceral, beautiful, and at times humorous. We’re using the technology as a way of getting at what that human experience is.”

The New Genre Arts Festival runs Feb. 28-Mar. 4 at Living Arts of Tulsa. Click here for information on more performances and installations.

For more from Alicia, read her article on Tulsa Oratorio Chorus and the Miró Quartet.