New Love : 1910 : World Out of Kilter
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter will be a performance event of roughly 70 minutes, currently scheduled for presentation at LaMaMa ETC, New York's landmark avant garde theater venue on May 10 - 13, as a featured work in LaMaMa Moves, an annual festival of post-modern movement based performances.
Your contribution will support fees, travel, lodging and related expenses of composers, musicians, performers, and other creative, technical and administrative personnel.
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter begins with Adrien Barrere’s 1910 film, Tom Pouce Suit Une Femme, a work about unlikely romance and the persistence, courage and discomfort of pursuing one’s desires. Contextualized by the destabilizing realities of the Great Flood of 1910 that submerged Paris into icy waters for several weeks and the emotional trauma of this historical moment, New Love is a meditation on love, desire, and queerness.
“In the US, in the current context in which male sexuality and its expressions are under the microscope and the way in which one expresses one’s desire, particularly desire that the mainstream invalidates, it seems important to me that we not lose sight of the nature and realization of one’s deep and persistent desires for another, the extent to which expressing that desire is not only an exercise of power, but a critical, human moment that is sometimes painful, sometimes marvelous, sometimes brave, sometimes welcomed, sometimes repulsed, sometimes embraced, sometimes triumphant, sometimes devastating and transformative. New Love… explores this territory from the point of view of people whose relationship to “their sex” is essential and contested. Looking at these issues through the “lens” of Paris, for me requires a kind of circumspection that, I hope, will be informed by a range of cultural perspectives, that, for me, as an “etranger” is often in high relief” TW.
In 1910, pioneering Pathé Frères motion picture studio was in the process of reconstructing itself after Paris’s Great Flood that had submerged much of the city, in the dead of winter and destroyed a large percentage of its inventory and film stock. Among the first projects the studio released was Tom Pouce Suit Une Femme, a short film by director Adrien Barrère, who was best known for his work as an illustrator. Its subject was a comedic tale of romance between characters we would now describe as a transgender woman and a young cisgender little male who encounter one another on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building. The young man follows her into the building and, unseen, enters her apartment. A romantic flirtation takes place and is precipitously brought to an end when the transwoman picks up her suitor and drops him from the window to the sidewalk. The short film was critiqued at that time in the review, Motography, as a work that "embodies in quintessential form the kind of vulgarity and horseplay that has been the basis of so many motion picture attacks."
As the second work presented of This Dancerie, Tony Whitfield’s multi-part cycle of projects exploring queer life in Paris over the last century, New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter offers points of departure for explorations of themes and issues that will span the coming century and is the point of departure for New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter’s exploration of the resilience of desire and the queer human spirit as it surfaces through non-conformity.
Central to this investigation will be Tony Whitfield in the role of on-stage interrogator/ ruminator, narrator and reflector. In this work, Whitfield will augment the film’s narrative with his own writing and excerpts from his interviews with queer friends, other texts and films ranging from Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris to Ferlinghetti poetry and testimonials from a variety of queer people on the recognition of their difference from others, the first time they acted to realize their “different” desires and the dangers inherent is the pursuit of those desires.
“The complexity of New Love: 1910… lies in spaces we create between the buoyancy of Adrien Barrère’s film and the dark rationalizations in Maria Schneider’s final monologue from Last Tango in Paris…where struggles for self definition and self-possession bang up against internalized conventions” TW.
Selected Notes on New Love
These video pieces will be integrated into the performance of New Love : 1910 : World Out of Kilter
A project of Whitfield CoLabs, New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter is a new work, developed through a collaborative process with a diverse group people whose relationships to the world defy binary conventions to explore, through movement and recollection those moments of recognition and the actions they inspire. That collaborative development process draws upon the input of a group of composers, musicians, live performers, and videographers/editors and a broad range of gay, lesbian, trans, queer and gender non-conforming folk from New York and Paris. To accommodate practical as well as conceptual realities of disparate venues, the project will be tailored to respond to the talents and input of the contributors in each city, assuming opportunities for fine-tuning at each performance venue. While many of Whitfield’s collaborations in New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter will be new working relationships, a core group of collaborators—among them, actor/director Oisin Stack and choreographer and performer Alexandre Bado in Paris and composers Andrew Alden and William Basinski as well as video editors, Hanisha Harjani, Peifu Chen, --have worked with Whitfield on previous projects. To bring a breadth of perspectives to the exploration inherent in this piece, the group of collaborators Whitfield has brought together are from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds with histories of working across a variety of discipline in traditional and unexpected contexts. Their experience contributes to a New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter’s combination of video, film, movement, live music and testimony in its narrative delivery.
BACKGROUND
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter is the second work in Tony Whitfield’s ten part cycle of works entitled This Dancerie exploring Paris as the site of a queer century lived in public in a multi-event, multi-site, multi-media project. This Dancerie investigates the ways in which gay men have created public expressions of desire despite prohibitions against the manifestation of those aspects of their lives.
In a series of projects spanning several years, This Dancerie will seek to:
illuminate transitions in identity that evolve for cisgender males over the course of a century, moving from the modern construct of the homosexual to current articulations of “queerness;”
look at the persistence of public expressions of identity that defy binary gender definition across the century;
reflect the critical social events that have had an impact on “queer” lives ranging from wars to public health crises to liberation struggles to fashion and entertainment;
reflect the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, economics, politics and creed as well as immigration patterns that have created evolving heterogeneity in the French populus;
reflect changing technologies that have supported notions of self actualization while challenging policies and practices that have defined standards of public decency.
Unifying the works in the Dancerie cycle will the personal responses of the project Artistic Director, Tony Whitfield rooted in understandings of the narrative underlying each work in the cycle to their relationships to contemporary socio-political issues. The pretext of This Dancerie is urbanization as a prerequisite for modern homosexual subculture and the understanding that despite the lack of recognized communities or “gay ghettos,” gay men have lived forbidden aspects of their lives in many cities, in public. This Dancerie focuses on Paris as a crossroad of queer life in which, although, technically, homosexuality was legal since 1791, notions of public decency were legislated and under surveillance and further complicated by the re-criminalization of same-sex relations during the Nazi occupation that remained in place until the 1980s.
This Dancerie will highlight a series of sites and events across Paris of historical importance for gay men as members of a broader social context. For each site, narratives based on actual events will be developed and represented in public works that range from image projections to performing arts-based works/events. Each narrative will seek to elaborate aspects of gay history and the intersection of that history with issues of race, class, creed, ethnicity, ability and gender. The role immigration has played will also be underscored in This Dancerie.
This Dancerie’s Artistic Director and Executive Producer is Tony Whitfield. Each work in the series that will constitute This Dancerie will be conceived, written, directed and produced by Whitfield in collaboration with teams of artists, performers and technicians based in Paris and New York. Each work in the Dancerie cycle will have a team specifically assembled to meet its artistic demands.
Over the course of the next five years, Whitfield plans to execute eight works that will constitute This Dancerie in locations across Paris where same sex desire has created a shifting landscape of encoded behavior, transgressive beauty and seduction, criminalized activity, class-complicated entanglements, immigrant survival strategies, forbidden trans/interactions. As such, they will also employ elements that will seek to engage viewers and community groups in a variety of ways that illuminate connections to the City’s gay history. In situations that range from motion activated videos to dance parties to social media directed investigations, This Dancerie will ask viewers/participants to question what it means to live a forbidden life in public.
All of the This Dancerie’s constituent parts are and have been conceived and developed with the goal of presentations in Paris and New York, as well as other cities with the desire of creating contexts for discussion that have international implications in a framework that encourages analysis and comparison. Toward that end, international creative teams are being engaged various collaborative activities that are integral to each project’s realization.
To date, support for This Dancerie has been provided by The Jerome Foundation, The New School University, and contributions of private donors through crowdfunding campaigns. Administrative support in France is provided by Association Errances and fiscal sponsorship in the US is provided by Fractured Atlas.
CONTEXTE
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter est le second ouvrage du cycle de dix parties de Tony Whitfield intitulé This Dancerie qui explore Paris comme le site d'un siècle queer vécu en public dans un projet multi-événements, multi-sites, et multimédia. This Dancerie étudie la façon dont les hommes gais ont créé des expressions publiques de désir malgré les interdictions contre la manifestation de ces aspects de leur vie.
Dans une série de projets s'étalant sur plusieurs années, This Dancerie cherchera à:
• illuminer les transitions identitaires qui évoluent pour les hommes cisgenres au cours d'un siècle, passant de la construction moderne de l'homosexuel aux articulations actuelles de la “queerness”;
• examiner la persistance des expressions publiques de l'identité qui défient la définition binaire du genre à travers le siècle;
• étudier les événements sociaux critiques qui ont eu un impact sur les vies “queer”, allant des guerres, aux crises de santé publique, aux luttes de libération, à la mode, et au divertissement;
• examiner les intersections de la classe, de la race, de l'ethnie, de l'économie, de la politique, et des croyances, ainsi que les flux d'immigration qui ont créé une hétérogénéité évoluante dans la population française;
• étudier les technologies en évolution qui ont soutenu les notions de réalisation de soi tout en remettant en question les politiques et les pratiques qui ont défini des normes de décence publique.
L’unification des œuvres dans le cycle de This Dancerie se fera à travers les réponses personnelles du directeur artistique du projet, Tony Whitfield, enracinées dans la compréhension du récit sous-jacent à chaque œuvre du cycle dans leurs relations avec les problèmes socio-politiques contemporains. Le prétexte de This Dancerie est l'urbanisation en tant que condition préalable à la sous-culture homosexuelle moderne et la compréhension que, malgré le manque de communautés reconnues ou de “ghettos gays”, les hommes gays ont vécu des aspects interdits de leur vie en publique dans de nombreuses villes. This Dancerie se concentre sur Paris en tant que carrefour de la vie queer dans laquelle, bien que, techniquement, l'homosexualité soit légale depuis 1791, les notions de décence publique ont été légiférées et surveillées, et d’avantage compliquées par la re-criminalisation des relations homosexuelles sous l'occupation nazie qui est resté en place jusqu'aux années 1980.
This Dancerie mettra en lumière une série de sites et d'événements à travers Paris d'importance historique pour les hommes homosexuels en tant que membres d'un contexte social plus large. Pour chaque site, des récits basés sur des événements réels seront développés et représentés dans des oeuvres publics, allant des projections d'images à des événements basés sur les arts du spectacle. Chaque récit cherchera à élaborer des aspects de l'histoire de homosexualité et l'intersection de cette histoire avec des questions de race, de classe, de croyance, d'ethnie, de capacité, et de sexe. Le rôle que l'immigration a joué sera également souligné dans This Dancerie.
Le directeur artistique et producteur exécutif de This Dancerie est Tony Whitfield. Chaque œuvre de la série qui constituera This Dancerie sera conçue, écrite, dirigée, et produite par Whitfield en collaboration avec des équipes d'artistes, d'interprètes et de techniciens basés à Paris et New York. Chaque œuvre du cycle This Dancerie disposera d'une équipe spécifiquement constituée pour répondre à ses exigences artistiques.
Au cours des cinq prochaines années, Whitfield prévoit d'exécuter huit œuvres qui constitueront This Dancerie dans des endroits à travers Paris où le désir de même sexe a créé un paysage changeant de comportement codé, de beauté et de séduction transgressive, d'activité criminalisée, d'enchevêtrements de classes, de stratégies de survie des immigrants, d’interactions trans interdites. À ce titre, ils emploieront également des éléments qui chercheront à impliquer les téléspectateurs et les groupes communautaires de diverses manières qui éclaireront les liens avec l'histoire homosexuelle de la ville. Dans des situations qui vont des vidéos activées par le mouvement, aux soirées dansantes, aux enquêtes dirigées par les médias sociaux, This Dancerie demandera aux téléspectateurs / participants de se demander ce que signifie vivre une vie interdite en public.
Tous les éléments constitutifs de This Dancerie sont et ont été conçus et développés dans le but d’être présenté à Paris et à New York, ainsi que dans d'autres villes avec le désir de créer des contextes de discussion ayant des implications internationales dans un cadre qui encourage l'analyse et la comparaison. À cette fin, des équipes créatives internationales mènent diverses activités de collaboration qui sont intégrales à la réalisation de chaque projet.
À ce jour, le soutien pour This Dancerie a été fourni par la fondation Jerome Foundation, l’université The New School, et des contributions de donateurs privés par le biais de campagnes de financement participatif. Le soutien administratif en France est assuré par l'Association Errances et le parrainage fiscal aux États-Unis est assuré par Fractured Atlas.
Paris Underwater: Background
WRITTEN BY - Aamna Mohdin
March 08, 2016
Paris wants to be ready for the worst-case scenario: a catastrophic flood that could reach the scale of the “Great Flood of Paris.”
In 1910, the Seine rose eight meters (26 feet) above its usual level as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall. The river flooded Paris for over a week; inhabitants were forced to evacuate their homes and travelled around the city with makeshift footbridges. Now, officials are undergoing a two-week exercise to prepare for a similar devastating flood. “This is the first time an exercise of this scale has been carried out over a region the size of Ile-de-France,” Jean-Paul Kihl, secretary-general of the Paris security and defense zone, told The Local.
Kihl insists that this isn’t a waste of time; a major flood will definitely happen. “It might be in five, 10, or even 20 years time, but it will happen,” he said. The exercise—called Sequena 2016—suggests there’s a one-in-hundred chance that Paris could be struck with another disastrous flood in any given year. The flood could surround Paris’ famous landmarks, such as The Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, in water and cause €30 billion ($33 billion) in material damages (link in French). The Urban Planning Institute (IAU) released a series of videos to show what a devastating flight would look like.
The exercise will replicate the conditions of a real flood, where the river levels would rise gradually every day until it reaches eight meters—the same level as the 1910 flood. Metro stations will be walled up, radio stations will sound the alarm, and important artwork will be moved to a safe place as part of the simulation. Eight-seven public and private institutions will take part in the exercise, which includes police officers, ambulance workers, and firemen.
A flood of that scale would affect around 830,000 people and 100,000 businesses, representing 750,000 jobs. The IAU has even released an interactive map of the city to highlight the areas most in danger of flooding.
Paris Underwater: Contexte
ÉCRIT PAR - Aamna Mohdin
08 Mars 2016
Paris veut être prêt pour le pire des scénarios: une inondation catastrophique qui pourrait atteindre l'ampleur “la Crue de la Seine”.
En 1910, la Seine s'est élevée de huit mètres (26 pieds) au-dessus de son niveau habituel en raison de précipitations inhabituellement élevées. La rivière inonda Paris pendant plus d'une semaine; les habitants furent forcés d'évacuer leurs maisons et de parcouru la ville avec des passerelles improvisées. Maintenant, les fonctionnaires subissent un exercice de deux semaines pour se préparer à une inondation dévastatrice similaire. "C'est la première fois qu'un exercice de cette ampleur est réalisé sur une région de la taille de l'Île-de-France", a déclaré Jean-Paul Kihl, secrétaire général de la zone de sécurité et de défense de Paris à The Local.
Kihl insiste sur le fait que ce n'est pas une perte de temps; une inondation majeure va certainement se produire. "Cela pourrait être dans cinq, 10 ou même 20 ans, mais cela arrivera", il déclara. L'exercice - appelé Sequena 2016 - suggère qu'il y a une chance sur cent que Paris puisse être frappée par une autre inondation désastreuse au cours d'une année donnée. L'inondation pourrait entourer les monuments célèbres de Paris, tels que le Louvre et la Tour Eiffel, dans l'eau et causer 30 milliards d'euros (33 milliards de dollars) de dommages matériels (lien en français). L'Urban Planning Institute (IAU) a publié une série de vidéos pour montrer à quoi ressemblerait un événement dévastateur.
L'exercice reproduira les conditions d'une véritable inondation, où le niveau de la rivière augmenterait progressivement chaque jour jusqu'à atteindre huit mètres, soit le même niveau que l'inondation de 1910. Les stations de métro seront murées, les stations de radio sonneront l'alarme et les œuvres d'art importantes seront déplacées dans un endroit sûr dans le cadre de la simulation. Quatre-vingt-sept institutions publiques et privées participeront à l'exercice, qui comprend des policiers, des ambulanciers et des pompiers.
Une inondation de cette ampleur toucherait environ 830 000 personnes et 100 000 entreprises, soit 750 000 emplois. L'IAU a même publié une carte interactive de la ville pour mettre en évidence les zones les plus menacées par les inondations.
Ruminations: Notes on New Love at HOWL! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
As the closing event in the one-person exhibition of Tony Whitfield's work entitled Ruminations: Notes on New Love at HOWL! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project installed from October 17 to November 11, 2018, Whitfield produced a revised version of New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter, entitled In My Mind We Are Always Naked. His collaborators for this production were Marian Schoettle (garments), Mike Russnak, Matt Knife, Barbara Maier Gustern (performers) and Kurt Hoffman (performing musician.)
En tant qu'événement de clôture de l'exposition individuelle du travail de Tony Whitfield intitulée Ruminations: Notes on New Love at HOWL! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project installé du 17 octobre au 11 novembre 2018, Whitfield a produit une version révisée de New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter, intitulé In My Mind We Are Always Naked. Ses collaborateurs pour cette production étaient Marian Schoettle (vêtements), Mike Russnak, Matt Knife, Barbara Maier Gustern (interprètes) et Kurt Hoffman (musicien interprète).
After the murders at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA and at Kroger supermarket in KY Jeffersontown, on November 4, 2018, at HOWL! Happening, Andrew Alden (on keyboard) and Pat Irwin (on guitar) performed this improvisation to a backdrop of Tony Whitfield's video and drawings. This is the record of that event.
Après les meurtres à la synagogue Tree of Life à Pittsburgh, PA et au supermarché Kroger à KY Jeffersontown, le 4 novembre 2018, Andrew Alden (au clavier) et Pat Irwin (à la guitare) ont interprété cette improvisation sur un fond vidéo de dessins de Tony Whitfield à HOWL! Happening. Ceci est le record de cet événement.