A living art

New Genre magnifies life, by whatever means necessary

The 22nd annual New Genre Arts Festival continues Living Arts’ commitment to boundary-pushing performance and visual art. In a new split format, Part A of this year’s festival happened in the spring, and Part B runs this month. Thanks to community sponsorship, the performances and installations are free to the public, but reservations are required.

Among the highlights is a new work by Cloud Eye Control, an experimental theatre group whose collaborators (Miwa Matreyek, Anna Oxygen and Chi-wang Yang) met at CalArts in LA. Their new piece, Half Life, deals with the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster using live facial recognition software, animated projections and original music and performance. Living Arts Artistic Director Steve Liggett talked with me about a few of New Genre’s featured works as well as the festival’s raison d’etre.

The Tulsa Voice: Half Life explores some heavy themes—anxiety, safety, the fragility of the collective—in a mind-bending way. What moved you to bring this piece to New Genre?

Steve Liggett: It’s so well integrated—the music, the images, the performance, the movement, the six screens that they reconfigure. All these art forms can connect and overlap. 

The piece deals with the obliviousness that a lot of people have to what we’re doing to the earth. It invites us to feel compassion for the real impact of that on people’s lives. The way the show juxtaposes natural elements like rain and lightning with immersive technology, with cyber reality, is very timely. We are a part of it, and it’s a part of us. And with our politicians rejecting the reality of global warming for economic gain, it’s speaking to something to bring this show to Oklahoma. It’s saying, “We don’t all believe this way.” 

TTV: Sarah Hill (an interdisciplinary artist from Austin who prefers the pronoun “they”) brings a true piece of performance art to the festival with I’m Fine, which—among other things—addresses the challenges faced by transsexual bodies in a binary world. What can audiences learn from them?

SL: I’m Fine shouldn’t be looked at as a transsexual-only message. Sarah is going to work with LGBT groups, but the piece is really about: If you feel like you’re the other, how do you negotiate that in the world? 

They jump and crash during these performances, and it hearkens back to ‘70s and ‘80s performance art. It’s a way to make a metaphor of the frustration, the pent-up anger, the confusion about oneself, and—this is my interpretation—the “front” that we put up. In that way, this piece, and Half Life, and Mark Wittig’s The Two Room Schoolhouse relate. I never think about a theme, but things do connect: We need to stop making people feel like they’re dysfunctional because they are different. 

TTV: This kind of multimedia work is flashy and sexy, but what sets it apart from, say, going to a film? 

SL: A film is its own genre. Visual artists start creating performances to push their work further. Most things are made up! Our environment is made up. Why should art be any different? To incorporate all those things, in the words of my teacher Tom Manhart, broadens your horizons, broadens your palette. 

Another teacher of mine, John Plouff, said, “The difference between the artist and the craftsman is that the craftsman tries to conform their practice to the discipline they most know. The artist uses any media to best communicate their idea.” 

You make whatever needs to be made. 

TTV: Do you think people who come to New Genre can translate these processes into everyday life?

SL: That’s the point. The barriers we put up around ourselves are only perceived restrictions. Artists have always broken barriers and gone outside to say, “How can I use anything, everything, to communicate my idea?” 

I want to influence artists to do that more, but also influence the community to realize that their movements, their sounds, what they look like, can be a work of art—a living art. 

For more from Alicia, read her story on painter Matt Ruyle.