Mike Tyus, Paula Matthusen, Kate Ladenheim, and More Join MAXlive 2023 festival

Media Art Xploration (MAX) presents MAXlive 2023: Where Is My Body?, a festival of premiere and new performances grappling with some of the most pressing questions opened up by scientific and technological advancements, and how they’ve reshaped our relationship to our bodies and minds. MAXlive 2023 includes works developed by artists in the MAXmachina laboratory program, the organization’s incubator for new work at the intersection of performance, science, and technology. The festival productions will be presented at National Sawdust (80 N 6th Street, Brooklyn) and ONX Studio (645 5th Avenue, Manhattan), two sites of bold artistic experimentation, November 8-11.

The performances that emerged in MAXmachina this year bear a shared interest in examining the status of the body in this moment when technology creates opportunities to fragment, replicate, erase, exaggerate, and give and deny agency to our physical forms. Through the inquiries artists make here, they reveal the psychological, environmental, and social impacts of the shifting nature of embodiment.

Media Art Xploration Founder and Artistic Director Kay Matschullat says, “The body and its various manifestations and ‘realities’ in the digital age are artfully and thoughtfully explored in all the festival works. Consistent with how MAX has always approached our growing inseparability from science and technology, the festival as a whole is neither doomsaying nor naively optimistic—but rather explores, with curiosity and criticality, both the possibilities and the dangers of the new worlds we’re finding ourselves in.”

The rich and often disquieting symbolic and real-life implications of avatars pervades numerous pieces—in imitation, contrast, illumination, and obfuscation of their tangible counterparts. In Matt Romein’s Bag of Worms (November 10–11), performers Julia Mounsey and Peter Mills Weiss move in motion capture suits with their avatars transposed into new environments. They are joined by a tyrannical disembodied head named Matt who leads the audience in a disarming satire of video games, violence and American internet culture. Lisa Jamhoury’s Maquette (November 10–11) similarly uses avatars to investigate the body’s slippage and multiple existences between the physical and virtual world. Inspired by Norma, the 1940s statue of a “normal” body created from averaged measurements of 15,000 white women aged 21-25 and used throughout media and medicine, it engages the struggle of the fleshy human wishing to thrive in an increasingly averaged, virtual existence.  In Kate Ladenheim’s COMMIT! (November 9), the dancer-choreographer turns herself into a playable avatar. She falls repeatedly, meticulously collecting data about the force and impact of each fall, while the audience rates and judges her "commitment" and she edits her action in real time.

The relationship between music and the body is also explored through technology. Mike Tyus and Luca Renzi’s world premiere My Body Is an Instrument (November 8), with dancers Layne Paradis Willis and Gretchen Ackerman, inverts the typical relationship between sound and movement in performance, wherein sound/music often acts as the causal force for a body’s action. Musicians from The Knights perform the world premiere of making the whole world a sky (November 11), featuring songs and dances that either directly or indirectly take cues from birds, butterflies, and other natural emblems of flight. making the whole world a sky includes a newly commissioned composition from Paula Matthusen, in collaboration with researchers from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. In Paul Pinto and Kameron Neal’s cantata Whiteness (November 7 festival preview; excerpts from the forthcoming live adaptation of their film), a chorus of floating heads evoke the silliness and anxieties of skin color.

Two works use distinct means of bringing audiences into their worlds. In Mercedes (November 11), Modesto “Flako” Jimenez virtually reconstructs his grandmother’s Bushwick home, in a poignant VR story of matriarchal influence and multigenerational care. Sister Sylvester’s Good Genes (November 10) is a performance that takes place within the biological matter of the audience, turning DNA from a hat that used to be a costume at the Berliner Ensemble, into a genetically-modified cocktail-party cabaret.

MAXlive 2023 is a cornerstone of the organization’s model for developing, producing, and presenting compelling and artistically sophisticated new work that brings important questions surrounding scientific research and emerging technology to the public in an accessible format. MAX has produced two previous festivals: MAXlive 2019: A Space Festival, on the topic of space exploration, and MAXlive 2021: The Neuroverse, which presented performances and interactive experiences examining cognition and neuroscience. The young organization, founded by Kay Matschullat in 2017, has commissioned and premiered works that have gone on to have runs at large institutions: in 2022, the Museum of Science, Boston presented Nuum Collective’s Doppelgänger, a duet between a performer and themself; also in  2022, MASS MoCA presented sound artist Annie Lewandowski, artist and coder Kyle McDonald, and scenic designer Amy Rubin’s Siren, a dive into the creative minds of humpback whales. Beginning September 15, Theatre for a New Audience will present Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theater lecture-performance Prometheus Firebringer.

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