Set in the chapel-like room of the Brancusi gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I created a sound and audio environment to hold a 40-minute, improvised performance of myself and four collaborators: poets Laura Neuman and Sekai’afua Zankel and dancers Vitche-Boul Ra and Meg Foley. The audience and performers are illuminated by the flickering of a video projection distorted across the arched ceiling. For the projection I filmed the stark edges of Brancusi’s sculptures and lines of museum interpretation. Turning the recessed sculptures into distorted, moving images I broke open the haunting power of figure and body in Brancusi’s works and disoriented their arrangement in space. For the live sound, I played and then sampled a large scientific tuning fork through a guitar amp, distorting the tone into body rumbling noise. I then read two of my poems about death and the Garden of Eden into the reverberant space. This is the opening segment of the performance.
