With Womens Work: Ayano Elson

Wednesday, February 10th, at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream a new piece by choreographer and performer Ayano Elson responding to a score by pioneering composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. The piece is part of the With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood.

Notes from Ayano Elson:

In the first days of the new year, my friend and collaborator Matt Evans, my partner John Dodig, and my dog Patrick woke up before sunrise to help me film and record this video outdoors in Prospect Park. Two women ate breakfast as they watched me perform multiple runs of this work — my first public performance in 10 months.

Pauline’s score directs us to “keep the next sound you hear in mind for the next half hour.” The implicit and potential physicality — listening, remembering, and holding — drew me into her words. In building my own interpretation of her text, I thought of the specific sounds and environments I wanted to keep in my body and the ones that are out of my reach.

Whenever I think of Pauline, I envision her holding a conch shell to her ear, as I have seen her do in photographs. As she listens to her own heartbeat, her body and the shell create a dark pyramid made of flesh and calcium. It’s my desire that we sit in this enclosed space together.

The piece features accompanying sound by artist, composer and percussionist Matt Evans. Additional color correcting by video artist Hyung Seok Jeon.

Ayano Elson is an Okinawan–American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her choreography has been presented by Art Cake, Chocolate Factory, Gibney Dance, Knockdown Center, Movement Research, and Roulette, among others. She has performed in works by Kim Brandt, Jessica Cook, Simone Forti, Kyli Kleven, Abigail Levine, and Haegue Yang at Danspace, ISSUE Project Room, MCA Chicago, MoMA, MoMA PS1, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and the Shed. She has developed her work through artist residencies at ArtCake, Gibney Dance, and AUNTS at Mount Tremper Arts. Her work has been supported from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Dance/NYC, and Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship.

Matt Evans is a Brooklyn based artist, composer, and percussionist creating cross-disciplinary productions and sculptural sound installations through an eco-fictional lens. Since moving to Brooklyn in 2012, Evans has maintained numerous musical projects: producing solo performances, writing commissioned compositions, working with choreographers, playing in bands, and performing with new music ensembles. As a solo artist, Evans produces drum performances and sound installations that capture the inexpressible absurdity of supermassive phenomenon (e.g. “global warming” or “the internet”) with a focus on the fearlessness of the human individual in the face of such circumstances. His debut solo record “New Topographics” explores our cultural epoch’s existence between digital, physical, and natural realms via hypnotic compositions for percussion and electronics that “thrust the listener into hyperreal and phantasmal realms” (Wire Magazine).