LIVE/LENS at Celebration Barn

Please join us for a beautiful evening of performance, art, music, and food for all!

“Space—my space—is not the context of which I constitute the ‘textuality’: instead it is first of all my body, and then it is in my body’s counterpart or ‘other’, it’s mirror image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other. Thus we are concerned, once again, with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations, Yet, through and beyond these various effects of meaning, space is actually experienced, in its depths, as duplications, echoes and reverberations, redundancies and doublings up…”

—Attributed to Loie Fuller

No one living remembers a time before audiovisual recording. These almost mythic powers of record keeping have spawned new relationships that define our attitudes towards the world; how our bodies, our images, are controlled and perceived. It is a shared experience in our understanding of technology that bodily presence may be suspended in favor of the real or imagined influence of those distant to us. This is the perception of liveness, of liveliness, which we freely accept. These channels may take a variety of forms, from the framework of our communication devices to the physical interjections of our bodies within a real-time event. Whether flesh and blood in front of us, or telematically transmitted, we feel a powerful sense of co-presence, exceeding the distance that may accompany a documented performance. The framing and cutting of film and video allow the experience of time based media to transmit a sense of immediacy. Both the margins of a screen and the edges of a stage are responsible for the flourishing, unfolding feeling of live performance. The camera is as integral as a stage to a dancer. Rather than something that is always secondary to the presence of a body in space, we understand the camera to be an extension of agency. We have many ways to identify bodily presence, through a scope of different sensory inputs we can understand the reality of ourselves and others.