THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
The Los Angeles Times (Dead Zone) project is a series of public performances in different locations around Los Angeles. Each performance requires between two and five performers and is documented as a video, which will be its final form. A physical copy of the LA Times broadsheet with its pictures removed sits between the camera and landscape, dividing up the vista as well as the recorded pictorial image into smaller ‘picture windows’ through which the performers will be visible.
The newspaper chosen for each shoot is dated a year prior to the designated shoot date.
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Synopsis
This project brings together experimental theater, group analysis, and histories of public performance to ask what it means to be part of a collective public in 2023.
Along with a group of performers, I use journalistic news imagery to develop choreographic scores to take place in specific locations across Los Angeles. The performances will be partly improvised, yet the performer’s range of movement will be restricted to areas relative to the placement of the camera. The front page of the LA Times will be embedded within the video image as a formal structure as well as a visual timestamp of the given day of the performance.
Prior to the performances, the group collectively reflects on events from a year prior within the workshop and rehearsal. Here, we collectively interpret the material, insert personal associations, and unstick the images from their purely narrative function.
The structure of the project was developed in response to a lack of public space in contemporary life to grieve the atrocities carried out against our communities and lives alongside the constant feeling of personal failure to fully comprehend the reporting on such events.