 So welcome everybody back here to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY welcome everybody here in the audience and welcome everybody on howl round and we would like to thank howl round for being our national platform. For these what we think are important and conversation about contemporary theater theater that is meaningful has an impact, and also is on the forefront of experimentation, and in the search for new forms for the new times and we live in. So my name is Frank Henshka and I'm part of the Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY in Manhattan and Midtown and our center bridges academia and professional theater international and American theater. Today we have a great New York theater performance company movement company with us and lay me and we will learn more about them they have a long history they have made an enormous contribution I feel to the diversity to the joy that theater brings to our city but also in the sharing of the heroes of the world because they really also put the finger on the wounds and show them, and I think this is one of the great traditions of that theater of the traditional boot to even just different what they do but it's their, their source their own and I can't wait to hear more about it it's an important day it's the launch I think worldwide of the lay may archive it's the first time they will share or they did share screenings we showed quick seal quick silver a meal borders, correspondence correspondence and already today which haven't never seen been publicly. And so this is an important milestone I think also in the history of the company and with us we have him in a and with us and Brandon and so we will have a program it's about an hour long, we have the presentation and we can maybe take a few questions after so first of all welcome to the Siegel Theatre Center did you have the mics on so how are you guys today. Thank you Frank for having us it's an honor to be here I always feel very welcome in your space. So thank you for having us today. Thank you very much. Wonderful so. He may not tell us a little bit about your company or lay may what is it all about. Hi everyone thank you so much for being here and thank you for those who are going to watch this live stream or who see it later the recording. My name is Jimena Garnica my name is Jimena Garnica. I was born in Bogota, Colombia, and I guess I am a New Yorker because I have been in New York more than half of my life. I share my life with a wonderful human being who was born very far away from the land where I was born, and I never imagined that we're going to be together. His name is Chica Morilla. He's here today in the back. I'm hiding but never hiding present but never never here talking but very present in the work and Chica is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist. And together we have been working for the past 23 years, working and living and making what I will refer later and introduce later as an entanglement. And Chigue started a space called cave back in 1996 in Williamsburg Brooklyn. That was the time where people really didn't want to cross the bridge. The people who live in Manhattan because let's face it people leave there for many years. And it was at the time there were a lot of empty buildings. Industry have already moved out of New York City, many manufacturers had been shipped overseas. It was a time where things were starting to like be moved overseas. And there was a space available and a little bit of what happened in Soho as well in the 70s. And Chigue took advantage of a big garage space that was there. And together with two friends, Grande and Naoki Wakawa, they start building walls and making home and home meaning a space where they could work and leave and imagine. And I was very lucky that I landed in New York City as a teenager by myself, and, and I met wonderful people in the Lower East Side, and all this legacy of artists, squatters, people who were trying to make their homes, their life, their dream in New York City. And I joined Chigue. And after now after too many years, we have what we call LeMay. And LeMay is a it's it's I have trouble to say LeMay is an organization LeMay is a company LeMay is this, I will say it's a living entity. And is a living organism that change and transforms depending of the internal and external dynamics. And of course as a living entity is what is allow us to have a life as artists and to have resources to create and structure to create. We did become at some point a nonprofit organization so LeMay is legally a nonprofit organization as the system that we're working with right now. Not the best one but the one that has allowed us to to exist and to be an artist in practice living our art every day. It's a very privileged way as well, and a lot of hard work as well. And so LeMay appears as a name, a little bit after, you know, Chigue started cave in 1996, and I entered the picture around the year 2000. And it's about, it's very fuzzy for us but somehow between 2001 and 2000 something, we start working with a name LeMay, which is a Japanese work that means the moment that lights perces the darkness, or the moment of transition, or the moment of change, or the space between the one era to another era. And that was very powerful to us because as immigrant artists of the global majority, we are always in this really a space of transition and transformation. And we also think that it's a condition that we all share as humans. We are, we are all have been exiled of our mother's womb, we all were cozy and happy in the womb, and then one day we are born. And then our existence starts and our, our questioning between the social being who has an identity, a name, a persona, and this other being that is material, this other being that maybe is some sort of a spirit. There's always a lot of in between those. And society always allow us to be living in one realm of dimension, which is the social being what I call. And with Chigue, we really make a life trying to figure it out how we can create harmony about all these ways of existence and how we can allow it in our daily life to have a space for these other realms of living. And that means what we say let's live a life with poetry, creating. And today, it's now an organization that also runs an ensemble that may ensemble is a group of performers, some of them come from the theater some come from the dance. And with them, we start developing a practice that is rooted in the body. And like you say in your introduction, it carries the legacy of different artists and movements. And one of them is the Japanese butto. I'd like to say that I had, I had butto dancers as masters and as teachers. But I don't say that we have a butto company, or that we make butto work that's a choice we make very early on. Because of how radical this butto artist where, and the context in which butto appear, it's very different to the context of today in New York City, and I am not Japanese I'm Colombian. Yes, of course, our roots and our legacy, and it's specifically in the way if we are approaching choreography and dance comes from the Japanese butto tradition, especially the way in this question the materiality of the body, and the way in which they bring a lot to, to space and time. So for example something very simple that I always share with people is, what's the difference between I move, and I'm being moved by, or I occupy a space, and I become space, just that little syntax change. It really changed the way in which you are embodying something or the way in which dance. The space dances you the material dances you and it's, it's removing a little bit is individual as the center, which is so much of the thoughts that we're having these days on how we think of the human when it's in relationship to other and others. There's no existence in between and not necessarily the individual that lives alone. So community and collaboration is a big part of our work and community and collaboration means that I don't only collaborate with she get we collaborate with the one of the senior members of the ensemble, a person who has been with us for many years is Masanori Asahara who has been chairing his, his work as a dancer his flesh and bones, and then Andrea Jones who will be teaching the class later today. And this is like another kind of branch of this community. But then there is also the artist in our ecosystem and the artists who are also putting process as a big value in their work, you know, like process is so important with us just the act of getting together and working through the body. And we were lucky to have cave, which, by the way, we spent six years fighting a big battle, we managed to change the New York State law by becoming citizen lobbyists and being able to save that space in Williamsburg Brooklyn. But a space has been very important, especially for artists who value process so much. So another part of our resume of things is that we share the space with other artists so we have developed residencies fellowships. And at some point she and me were undocumented, and we wanted to study this is a bit too many years ago. And we wanted to learn from these Japanese butto artist we wanted to learn from people from the grotowski center you know we wanted to learn from people who were not necessarily to study with them we had to go and travel. So we also became presenters and producers at some point, and the New York Buddha Festival was boring 2003 before the festival. We had a gallery chigas started a gallery cave, which lasted 10 years. So I'm saying all these things here and there because I want to give you this idea of a constellation of like a lot of starts and a lot of circles and ripples. And these humans that are like navigating in the in between and maybe resonating like becoming antennas allowing ourselves to be resonators. And that's what I called entanglement. So when we're thinking now we're here today to introduce an archive. And it was hard to me to say what is this archive about. So hopefully, what we're going to be doing is keeping the traces of all these resonances in some sort of container that maybe those that we haven't had the luck yet to meet, we can meet. Because it's also about resonance is great but it's amazing when it actually can resonate further, because then we can learn more of each other and I'm sure that there is many communities. There are many, many communities like La Maze like cave, where people are really figuring it out how to leave and work in a place in which you kind of determine it, your values, but you also in conversation with philosophical questions of existence but you also a political being and you also trying to be an artist who can have a profession as an artist so all this ecosystem all this starts all these little dots everywhere is part of will be part of what we hope their archive is we're in the first phase and Brandon will talk more about exactly what we did. I don't know if there's anything else I say a lot but what do you think. Thank you so much. It's so much just give us a how long do you exist how many productions have you done what are places where you performed. Okay, so I this I have to look but we have done about like, at least we have 14 series of video installations. We have done probably I don't know when this was written, but it says 26 stage performances. We have done also a lot of photography series, and we have some work that hasn't been even published yet. We have been working a lot. But it also helped that we work in collaboration so of course we can produce a lot of more than just a single person can. And so cave the space in Williamsburg our home studio live work space was open in 1996. And the may officially has been incorporated since 2001. And that means like the other day we counted 27 years, and the main sample, which is the group of artists which we develop our practice which we call ludos that has the legacy and the roots on Buddha dance but we call it ludos. It's been officially I think since 2012. So I don't know how many my brain is burned right now. Yeah, that's a little space is next to your own place and spaces. We have, we have, of course, our home is the place we a lot we did a lot of work. We have performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the Bound Fisher Theatre. We have been here art center Japan society. We have been at the Brooklyn Museum, the new museum, and I'm Colombian so now we are also working. We have been touring a lot to Colombia and Japan and Mexico, but we are just open. We have now official La May Company in Colombia we're working with three amazing dancers from Bogota they're developing a lot of work. In fact, next week we have a video installation at Chelsea factory, which was shot in the Colombian Pacific coast and then some areas of Bogota. Fantastic. Thank you so much Brandon. Tell us a bit. Hello everybody. Brandon has official presentation. So here and at home. Maybe we could put the light a little lower in the room so we see. Think, think that works. Oh, okay. I think you're still there. Hello everyone I think is here and elsewhere also for how around you know it's good. No, no, leave it. My name is Brandon Perdomo. I've been working with La May now for about six years. Now in the capacity of operations and programs administrator never mind my notes please they help my mind from wandering elsewhere. So I find myself as the La May archive program coordinator. I arrived to La May with and you with a background in public and oral history. Having earned my masters at Columbia Columbia University from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of oral history. So when I entered this project of the La May archive. It's already been long since and its own development. But is my own personal journey to La May. And now it's been nearly a decade since arriving to cave home of La May where I took my first class with Andrea Jones, I learned the word ludus. I meet friends who had turned to collaborators and at this point I didn't really know how deep I'd be heading in with the with these people, but these with these artists and you know just just how how deep that entanglement would go. All right so oral historians describe the practice of what we do as building history from the ground up. All right. Now this has remained at the core of my work for the past several years, building a collection of what I call testimony the body by means of interdisciplinary storytelling. All right so my experience of La May comes with a positionality of witnessing their practice their practice through lineage. And then fat fat fast forward and non linearly. Autumn of 2020. All right. We'd all be shifting in rearranging ourselves during the time of COVID global pandemic. In my studies. He meant I was moving mountains advocating for the La May dancers and freelancers in total. While the cultural sector of New York City had all been but frozen. Right. At this time I had been caught in this thought of public memory and access of information and through many late night discussions barbecue storytelling together. I noticed that La May for all that it's done from the New York puto festival to collaboration with all these famous musicians and the enchanting weaving of physical poetry is right. I'm threading history through relics textbooks and institutional residencies from MIT to California. There wasn't yet an anchor for public reference to the history of La May. And that's from, again, 96 beginning as a DIY gallery to there's being a staple the Williamsburg waterfront so today. The original idea for this was to create a visual timeline. Right. Remember how simple that sound is from from the 90s to current of the happenings of La May. For example, the gallery starts in 96 by she gave and her Jimena New York puto festival begins 2003 New York puto con trainings, Lutus trainings. It was very simply, or maybe depending not simply a visual layering of who done it. What, when, where, and ultimately why. And he comes from, you know, my admiration of their cultivation of their crafts and from how I experienced it. They're honest approach to meaning making and commitment to community dedication from and with him and his words, living a life with poetry, and that I really wanted others to see it. It's kind of desperate to all right. So let's see if this works. Brilliant. Now, to give thanks where thanks is due. The first major effort of this archival projects. In making the onsite archive accessible to the public and 0607 was through the volunteer labor of Asian cultural council fellow to zero us we performing artists Peter doble and artist Hiromi Uchi. So hard and digitizing their postcards, press and physical records. This is back in 2006. Yeah, this people started it. And, and, and all that's contributed to the onsite archive and, and fed into our work of creating this inventory and in their work in the initial database right, and then the second concentrated effort was in 2013, led by volunteer Raul, then why you and who's now head media archivist at the National Museum for African American history and culture. Blakely conducted collections assessment of the LeMay audio visual collection, including a visual, sorry spreadsheet inventory of all materials, all materials. And provided a plan for the archives preservation. Thanks to this assessment assessment and years of volunteer efforts, years, the digitization and preservation of 618 analog audio and videotapes was finally completed by human as father. Jaime, Garnica, prison. All right, moving on. We were involved. And as we were digging into videos, servers, old computers, ancient hard drives and new network attached storage systems. We were joined by interns, college students colleagues community members. This year alone with brilliant, brilliant helpful community members and friends, Emilia Berga, Carla Perez Z Baird Appleton who joins us. Sophia romantic and into very early and very late hours of days of months and very emulatively years, which turned into where we arrived today. Three years of this push, many brilliant minds and any a grant later, though we still face applications to support the labor and resources of the immense work ahead of us, including further digitizing database entry, and much more. nearing the end of initial phase nearing the end of the initial phase, along with thousands of hours of love and labor from our community which we celebrate today. By use of this is this is where the where the nerd stuff comes in right unless it all is I don't know by use of media metadata and our own in house object ID codes comprised of a taxonomy system that we that we put together. We categorized images and printed matter, including pamphlets brochures house programs and all else into their own digital and physical envelopes, and eventually I kind of splintered out and did did some other homework I visited other Athenaeums took workshops at the Brooklyn Public Library, some of them even said we make up this stuff on the spot so we're in a good place we're we're among guy. Crowd and it was vilifying right. Moving on with with the availability of this collected information the status that details of past events presentations and class sessions by master teachers, the lectures the public interventions. We had the information sorted and so database, which directly corresponds to an image hosting service. And then as of 2023 we've processed thousands of photographs and articles of printed matter from 27 years of La May history from the cave gallery again 96 to 06. The New York Boutou festival 2003 to 09 New York Boutou con training initiative, and Lutus training programs and numerous presenting series including outside at home and acts, among other programming. And we're in the process of organizing, digitizing and indexing now the works of him and a girl Nika and she game or yeah. And all this was, of course, supported and grateful and infinite thanks to a web developer in La May collaborating artist arena romantic in the corner thank you very much. There she is. And who she created a interactive portal on the La May website, which acts as a hub for research and public access and and a tethered ecosystem to these archival materials, which today we celebrate and look forward to growing, evolving and a living repository for the memory of the works and happenings of La May, as well as the multidisciplinary works of him and she gave an upcoming we're going to be welcoming specialist from the dance from dance USA as a summer 2024 archiving fellow will be focused on cataloging previously digitized materials, composing complimentary public texts for video excerpts and assisting with data collection and organization of La May's creative works. This was a competitive pool competitive pool from which La May had entered and was chosen to gauge with enhance our methods of archive building. We're also going to. We also welcome Katie dammers of curator and archivist who's managed the archives of the kitchen and work closely with Jacobs pillow as a consultant for the next phase of the archive. And, you know, we all ultimately we wish to move beyond the preservation aspect to imagine archive as a living entity, which engages the works and the world around us which we're living today and for the future. Thank you Brandon for taking us to that journey. Thank you thank you and I'm sure you found many surprising things that when looking back or for you who entered before we may come to those question maybe it's time to to connect to Tanya. Yes, yes, and Tanya calamonary is a scholar and she wrote a book that just came out 2022 last year by in rattleto is one of the most significant publishing house for contemporary theater I think it's on. Buto buto in the United States, especially of course in North America and Mexico 1970 I think to the 2000s I think so. And you got your company also features in it so Tanya welcome can you hear us and can you see us. I can both thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, so tell us a little bit. You surveyed the landscape, you know, of the buto movement or artwork for the stage close to it inspired by it. Where does lay may fit in. I have a chapter in the book called Gen X buto, and I'm going to focus on them, but I'd like to start with kind of the archives that I went through to get to this process and then some of the images that I got from from him and I'll say that I met him and and she gave in 2003 when I moved to New York and got involved in the buto festival got involved in their company and I had a little space also at the same time I was doing my masters. And then went off to do my PhD and stayed connected. And so it was an easy connection to add them into the book and it made a lot of sense obviously because they've been such a hub. But I'm also really grateful that they were so open. And it's, you know, they're very busy and they're traveling a lot but they sat with me and he made a multiple hours of going through old hard drives looking for photos looking for negatives, pulling out boxes from closets and I am really excited that there is such a big push that I just want to highlight the labor that it takes to make an archive because it's very significant the, you know, finances and then also the labor to maintain that sort of thing. So it's really exciting for, and for future generations and researchers to be able to connect to these resources. So that's super exciting. And let me share my screen, hopefully, and take you on a little adventure. So I'll start by saying my mother was a librarian. And so I was in archives and libraries pretty early on. And I really I love that the idea of documenting things and the fact that I've also been a dancer my whole life I was one of those lucky kids that got to take dance classes from three years old. But it was really, it's been a great process to mix those two things together and you know part of my work as an academic is to write about the people that are important to me and have been important to me to my development as an artist the things I'm interested in and a lot of times those are not the mainstream and the, you know, the dominant discourse so it's been really rewarding to enter a lot of the buttoe artists into this idea of archive. So this book that you so kindly introduced was it's buttoe America. And, and I'm going to take you through a little bit of the journey so this is actually King Jayashi who was an artist that I knew in San Francisco, and, and was in that ink boat was in the first company that I that's how I got involved in the arts and buttoe. And, but I ended up coming to New York, and do my masters at NYU, and in that process I went to Japan. And so just highlighting the importance of archives this is actually the program. It's a marzipan hand and phallus and lips from Rose color dance this is in the Higikata Tatsumi archive which is at Kao University. This flag is also in that archive. And I don't my I've tried so hard to learn Japanese and I'm terrible at it congee is really really difficult. But the fact that there's a little bit English here you know I got to learn about the performance the fact that it said 650 experience got curious about that. That had to do with the number of seats in the audience. And that's not the kind of thing you find in a book or even find out an interviews it's something that you know you get to touch these materials or see them and learn more about it so the idea was that everyone is having their own individual experience in this performance and that's why he called it the 650 experience Higikata called a lot of the early performances that the scrapbooks of Higikata's are also in that archive so again getting to touch materials, I had taken workshops with everybody through cave actually through the Boutou festival and then, you know, they were able to connect with those with those scrapbooks were in the Boutou foo got to actually see them. And the other archive I wanted to talk about and that was really important in the making of the book and something that reminds me that there's a resonance in what Lemay is doing is what's happened with L.S. I spent a lot of time in that archive and and was able to see the roots of Japanese experimental performance in New York that helped pave the way for Boutou to be here. And so some of the early performers that Ellen Stewart brought. There's the Tokyo kid brothers in 70 and also teriyama shuji in 70. There's multiple performances and all these photos are from the archive there and that's an archive that you can go and research and find the connections. So, but part of it is not just seeing the photos but but starting to do like a performance analysis and image analysis based on the work and the kinds of settings and and even even costume or no costume, all of that kind of thing like there were Boutou performers in teriyama shuji who was a theater artist in his work. Fast forward or rewind however you look at it. And I also spent time working with the Timanos in San Francisco. They also began kind of in this gallery space similar to what Lemay was doing. So this was a Koichi Tamano performing in a gallery space in San Francisco. And in research for the book I went back to San Francisco and did research at their archive. And there's, I will loosely say archive it is very much, you know, papers stuffed under books kind of things in their house slash studio slash garden. But I was able to pull out a lot of photos and digitize things through my PhD and master's research. Street Theater performances. They connected me to Esmeralda Kay who was punk performer in the 70s who was one of the first people in their company. And I had the Boutou Festival in San Francisco, and I'll add that I did research in the US and in Mexico and I kind of purposely leave my slides, this mishmash of languages and half Spanglish. And because of that slippage it's important to me to not sort of tell, you know, the American story first and then the Boutou Festival that happened in Mexico after because it really was a cross pollination of artists through touring entities and courses and that kind of things. So, the students cross pollinated the artists cross pollinated I presented a lot in the US and in Mexico so some of my slides are in English and summer in Spanish and I leave it that way on purpose. So these are artists from that were in the San Francisco Boutou Festival. And then again back to La Mama right cycling through there's a whole history of ours men to not. And these are also photos from the archive, more in following performed with men to knock on a tour in Greece. And then this was just another piece connecting and this is Senkai Jugo performing in Mexico at Teotihuacan. So there's like again to show you that cross pollination this slide like finding this was actually a coup, not to Nakajima posted this on her Facebook page at some point it was like, Ah, proof that Boutou and Grotowski's work is connected to the actual tangible cells they exchange cells. This is from a performance that they were doing I'm honoring Josie Kotoski's work in Latin America there was a conference I think in the early 90s, and cousin on and Grotowski and Nakajima brought together. And I want to speed through some of these because there's other things I want to bring up but these are all the artists that are that are highlighted in the book table pinion. And on this one for a second because this is another space that reminded me, or I felt the resonance when I got to cave this is actually country station sushi which is the the Tomanos had this Japanese restaurant for many many years and it was posters all over the walls Beatles music playing Boutou books everywhere it was really like a center that you could come and gather we all went there after performances. And cave felt like that when I got there so it was, it was great to see that kind of resonance and the fact that you know the archive is not just the papers that we have to do the ephemeral pieces but the, the living archive of the people as well so these are some of the stories we try to capture through photos and video and interviews but this, this restaurant became another restaurant and then you know the tomatoes now just have their own studio space because they're quite elderly at the time but they were a hub for a long time. Speeding through some of these and then I got to the Boutou festival in New York and met all of these fabulous people I had not met what he signed before that, and what a bushy son, and because I something. I had actually known him if she okay, but that was kind of that first Boutou festival that I that I came into and met him in after that process as well. I was in the, in the process of a collaboration with Wagouti doing this duet, and that was my entree to her work. Followed her through many other performances got to see furnace and then becoming at BAM I was actually working at BAM at the time that piece was there. And then when I went back around to write the book. I had already known about some of the action painting because actually this photo, I think I might have been around for some of these pieces where this is him in a performance neoki. But these are some of the earlier pieces of you know k bar spaces and action painting kind of gallery and performance music space. So a lot of different cross pollination of artists happening. And this piece really captivated me I just have to highlight this because I think it brings together so many things that are pivotal about this company, and why I feel like it's other people need to know about the work and it needs to get out there to a broader audience and it needs to be studied is because they, this was from correspondences in 2017. Many of you probably saw it that it was in St. Mark's church in the church St. Mark's in the plaza. And in these large, you know, columns they're plexiglass columns and it was a durational performance it was public art. It was dealing with environmental issues. So, this is where it's like that kind of thing that pivots off yes they're they're lineage comes through but but there's so much more that they're doing with the work and I think it's just, it's so riveting to watch. These are all pieces these were all photos that were contenders to make it into the book but I ended up choosing the one action painting one, and then another piece from, from this work from correspondences, but borders frantic beauty. Actually let me go through a little bit for those artists in Mexico. These are other artists that were in that chapter. Let me land on this piece and then I wanted to shift over to I think I have to exit. No, I need to be able to read you some things I think I have to stop sharing. And we can see you. Sorry. Oh, now you can see me. Okay, great. Oh, I have to hit escape. So, I wanted to tell you a little bit about the artists in the in general, like the generation X, butto artists and why I'm calling them that. So the people I, I mean, as you'll find out by looking through the archive, I mean, there is a lens into certain artists but there are so many artists that branch off of it and that's part of the beauty of the archive it like it spreads out as a rise and then there's a deep root right that we're trying to find all of those different in looking at the work. So I only could highlight and space limitations word count limitations photo limitations. But I got what I could in there right so I talked about this company I talked about the general art ensemble in quotes and then to Mexican artists and the one that was the one that found the festival which is and so it's leader, it's, it's, it was his company, and then it's practical Martinez because he was in that I quit a con and then came back and does work in Mexico. So I want to say a little bit about these particular companies. In 1990s there was a new generation of American artists that were influenced by butto and they began to form companies and collectives. So I wanted to talk about attempts to to capture the number of artists there's a whole bunch of websites butto nets. Actually, there was a butto nexus that cave art space did that was like a user driven database so there's been attempts to, you know, archive the community of butto for a long time but it's it's pretty hard to get your arms around it. So I wanted to highlight in this chapter include to Mexican artists, and then a Japanese American artist, the strongest in the West Coast, which is Chinichi, a Colombian Japanese duo, human and she gay, and then another group of artists a Japanese American artist who is in Seattle, each of them had a significant impact on the formation of American butto today, through some combination of their aesthetic and interventions into butto or their teaching and producing. These artists all share cross disciplinary approaches to their work for him and I mentioned in the beginning that some came through theater some came through dance and came through visual art there's all kinds of different entry points into the work that they're doing today. In Mexico, Eugenia Vargas began in dance and then studied writing and cinema, and before teaching movement to actors at the, an institute or the idol go as part of the Martinez began formal performance training in Casa de teatro. In Cuyo Khan but quickly connected his lifelong interests in writing and painting to the imagistic aesthetics of physical theater and mine. Both artists foreground a spiritual aspect to their work, either through connection to indigenous populations or projects designed for community. Chinichi over cova initially studied filmmaking before switching to theater and then eventually began performing the tomorrow's harp and ha, he's been heavily involved in the experimental music scene in the in San Francisco Bay area as well. And the song. Five more minutes or more. Fine. Yeah, I can do. And, and yeah. Five minutes. Tell us about yeah what you but a lay may also you know your thoughts about the company. Yeah, it's in the next paragraph I'm almost there. Okay, so the general art ensemble and crow, they began as musicians as well they worked through classical studies punk performance art getting their stage productions. And he may not was a child actress in Columbia before immigrating to New York to study theater, and she and Maria was initially a painter who began experimenting with video when he moved to New York. The pair widely experimental in terms of disciplinary boundaries spanning light sound movement character physical objects and performance environments. Interestingly, the majority of these artists do not label their work as buto anymore, perhaps due to the trend for transgressing disciplinary boundaries. It is one lens through which their creative process has found focus. Many of them cite conversations with Japanese buto artists encouraging them to find a buto as the key which spurred them to keep in the innovating. I'm going to skip down to talk specifically just about him and she gay now. And it's also interesting to note that a lot of them have been producers like they were artists producers who may not talked about, you know, not being able to leave New York or leave the US. So they brought artists to them. Other artists had different reasons but similar effect that they began producing and bring artists to their work, particularly a lot of us in Mexico. Okay, so this is from directly from Gen X buto. It's based on the specific generation, and it's the, the profile of LeMay. And it says, the work of this artistic duo has been vital to the contemporary development of buto in New York. Their story is laboring then both came from abroad in search of their artistic experimentation and found buto through happenstance. They have played a pivotal role as curators and community builders and now as artists who are forging their own path inspired by those who have encountered along the way. And this is based in New York from Osaka, Japan in 1993. His father, a respected visual artist himself helped land Maria a position at the Soho gallery where he had connections. Maria began to build a network of like winded artists who wanted to experiment with cross disciplinary work in ways downtown and gallery scene did not allow him to do. He was a fashion painter Neoki Iwakawa, and Satoshi Imagawa. Maria converted a 3000 square foot space was, which was an auto body shop at the Fiat Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, into a live workspace with two galleries. He called it cave because it was freezing cold and we had to make open fires to keep warm indoors. In the early years the space hosted weekly salons as well as monthly gallery exhibitions that were open to the public. The majority of the artists came from the visual arts and music and they were both experimenting with different media including paint fabrics projection and a wide variety of instrumentation. The space attracted and fostered further experimentation and artistic genre. The artists involved in these early years of cave were Ben Armstrong of Ladioboloco, a group of experimental rock musicians. Armstrong collaborated in numerous exhibitions of Neoki's action paintings. Additionally, Tim Wright at the American Band DNA, a part of the no wave experimental music scene frequently performed at cave events. It worked with Brian Eno and David Byrne and he was fascinated with mummies and Mexico, two themes that Wright would find in common with Kovar Boushi when they later met. Also Jack Wright, a free jazz saxophonist who frequented cave events performed there with Azumoto of the buttock company of Dada Kudakon. And let me skip down a little bit. You can read more on Shige in the book. Kimana Garnica was also involved in theater at an early age in a home country at Columbia. She was a child television and stage actor, and had also been exposed to this to distinct Latin American physical theater traditions that were based in Eokanea Barba's work. Garnica says that this was her in road to contemporary performance as well. She was reading Barba's book Theater Anthropology, in which he describes Japanese Boo-Yo, and this led to a fortuitous mistake later in New York. From Columbia she went to Denmark to research the Odin Theater to continue investigating physical theater. In 1998 she moved to New York to study English and later on to pursue theater studies. She attended the Lee Strasburg Theater and Film Institute and completed her BA in theater at City College of New York, but was left wanting a different approach for performance. Let me skip down a little bit more. She went to a buttock workshop by mistake thinking it was Boo-Yo that she had encountered in Barba's book. That workshop was led by Mexican dancer Diego Piñon. Because Garnica and Juan Martín, with whom she met at the workshop spoke Spanish, they began to organize workshops for Piñon in New York. Garnica and Martín became creative partners and brought other artists to New York as well. Skipping down, after meeting Maria and collaborating on the things we step on, Garnica and Maria embarked on a new chapter of their creative work as they became interested in exploring the intersections of their different disciplines. Garnica notes that when she first came to the cave, she and Maria were already exploring art that was made live in front of the audience, action painting, action installations, and action interventions. It wasn't buttock per se, it was performance that explored liveness and chance. They even wrote bios for the studio cats Franny and Zoe in the program Action Liquors, who would regularly walk through and become parts of the art in progress. Okay, I will stop my part there and see if there's any other questions or thoughts. Well, first of all, thank you so much for that tour de force and I'm sorry to cut it short but everybody who's interested really it's an important book, a book that traces and not the what is so highly visible, like what we say another book about a Tom Stoppard or Kushner this is one of those books in the performance series that really looks at significant movements. And, and I think also your gifts tribute and importance to what really is meaningful so really thank you for doing that work and we can only imagine how many hours you spend in transportation and in libraries and writing putting it all together as a big deal. So really congratulations on getting that done to a question to all three of you what surprised you what did you find looking back at the archive to Brenda and then also first I just wanted to say thank you to Tania. I didn't always you know it with Buddha is weird because it ended up like, sucking everything, but it was important to us to a little bit share how the archive could potentially be used. And even though at the time that Tania came to Cape to look into boxes and things that was not an official archive yet. It ended up being part of this larger project that she had of documentary documentary in the history of Buddha in the United States and Mexico. So I just that just put it in context we wanted to invite Tanya today here because there is already somebody who have used this archive that is not even public yet. So just do an invitation to people that once they archive is out there that there is can be a resource where you could ask questions have materials. I don't know about surprise for me it's like we are because I just feel like everything was yesterday. So sometimes I look things like wow we did this oh we did this. I always also question the why of their kind because usually archive is something that people gets when they die. So there is something a little bit of I feel of an intervention of taking agency to tell us stories to tell our own story. So I think that there is something that that that's what is your price may is the willingness of the community to jump in and wanted to tell that story. Together, because it's also their story is our story so I think that's the, maybe it's not as romantic or intellectual but but really that willingness of the community has been a big surprise to me because otherwise, this archive wouldn't happen like, we're making work now in the studio. So it's, yeah, that really surprised me and tricks me. For me, I always think of, you know, you know when when where where I was in thinking about this project and making it public was like I've been meeting people and artists and working with musicians and meeting dancers and taking workshops with people and I turn around and see like a postcard or poster or photograph I'm like oh, there's this whole web that I find myself in the middle of, and maybe it's maybe the surprises. Oh, how cool. It's all just so very cool. And, and to be able to you know put it in a place of like look at all these people that are around and look at this early place of where they were around centralized in a place in a hub that you know other people have taken classes that they're like oh I didn't know so and so it's here how cool is that. So the memory of the space cave but also you know the memory of the collective, you know, the bodies and people that have been around it. Thank you. Tanya for you who looked at so many artists who are close to the butto movement. What do you think is special what they did here what makes them different from others. What fascinated you about lay me. I really resonate with their work. I mean for sure I think that's the biggest piece I think it's, it speaks for our generation in a way that I find really compelling. But I wanted to add something about the, the, because I mean I've seen libraries for such a long time since I was really little and now I'm in my 50s. Right so the technology has changed so much that there's there's a little bit of that Zen thing of trying to catch that fish you're never going to fully catch the experience, but the fact that we are constantly documenting even the fact that this is recorded and will be posted on how around and for others to see like we're trying to catch that that sense of, you know, the community is if we could, you know, I don't know if this technology existed when the factory existed I don't know that might be a dangerous. Maybe we don't want all that documented, but there's something amazing about being able to document as we go, and that artists are still creating and developing work at the same time as they are trying to leave an echo. So that the residents of the work can can reach even wider and affect each other. And I mean I think like I said as well about the fact that the space itself has a community and you know, I mean I know that they're working on a piece about food right now and I'm being Jersey Italian food is super important to me. There's something really interesting also about that sharing food together and that was something we would do it gave all the time after performances and that is an open welcoming space where people live and work and sweat and eat and you know everything happens there so it's that kind of family community that that I think in many people, you know it's a substitute, or I don't know it's the family of choice like it is very much reminds you that I wasn't around the beginning of my mama but it feels like that kind of community that they created a center, you know, so I think it's important that way. Yeah, and I also do think that since we also at the university that the idea to document theater work is of significance, you know so often work also focus for good reasons you know on theory, or how to apply is actors work directors work a playwrights work to this theory and then make it fit to this theory and then say why the others doesn't fit I think the archive in a way is a in is a real look at the rocks of the landscape in kind of that post structural idea you do not impose the structure but you show the fragments of what you did in its real and it's truthful it will be valuable for coming generations or even centuries. It will be something real. Strangely enough, as far as I know there's no real archive of the public theater and no real book. It's the same of the mama I think the real book on the mama this I don't know where it is. And others, I'm also the booster group this David Saffron's book but it's also a theory book but what just the weight of documenting what is there. This is something that I think is of real importance. And, and I think it's a great project that you take it on I know how complex and complicated. That really is and it's to what a Tanya said you know what if this technology would have been available in the factory time of the early buttoit times wouldn't really work some say the end of the punk movement was the beginning of the internet because it wouldn't really work anymore, you know because a small movements of clubs where you went you knew people will by mouth, you know, this was something very different and you can't put it on an Instagram, or on the Facebook is radically different and you worked in both worlds and technology. What do you all imagine a question to both of you, what could come out of that archive if it's true that your work is like an octopus but entangled and different arms as teaching performing installation, music, the archive now. Will the archive itself be performed are you having plans of activating it. What's what's what are your ideas your visions in case you had the resources. So there is all something we say so much about what what the act of creation is for us. And the act of creation is. It's a way to remembering while simultaneously becoming and is a serpentine act of many resonances and echoes. Usually in our work that's what we look to to explore and to delve into into this multiplicity of a special temporal intervals that you know exist within the body, but between materials and also between environments. So, I think the archive could be part of those echoes. I have. There's something that I'm like, I don't want it just to be preservation. We started with that as the face where we are like, yes, cataloging and wonderful humans doing that labor. It's already part of what we do with our practice with ludus. So I imagine that there is going to be more and more efforts in how, how the archive intertwine with the work that we're already doing, which is actually each piece of us has like a book and community conversations and performance and it's already a reason. So maybe it's it's kind of framing it and their archive is going to help to to sort of frame that that is already happening so in a way that there is access to the public does like I feel like we're still in an unknown of what those faces will be but I feel like I don't we don't need another program right we don't need to like we are artists where you know like even though yes you are or a historian and you came to us and they're going to be archivist working our work it's still it's it's it's there is something about making the work so how the archive is going to be entangled into that current of the making of all these works like tanya talk about a meal or extension rituals which is the current piece that we're working on. Yeah, I think you said it. It will be quite interesting do you plan since tanya's book is about you know the buto movement in the Americas in the way do you plan also to host a duck on other artists we had a big conversation at the Segal Center with Virginia Barbara who was giving his archive is going to be in Italy he says gonna have three rooms one is his personal collection of books artifacts the second is the archive of his work photos videotapes but also a digital one. And the third he said we're going to create a room for what he calls the invisible theaters he said he his real real real heroes are theater artists who in some small places I know did the work to transform themselves to transform society without any commercial ideas and they're unknown nobody really knows what nobody documents that nobody connects and he feels it's a significant thing to have at least a memory or something. I'm there so and with tanya's help or others really could you imagine that perhaps your tree will also then become a hybrid tree that you know you'll kind of add some some other slices of branches from from from other trees. Absolutely, I mean, it's already part of our tree so we have like the history for example of what we call the cave gallery was 1996 to 2006 is 10 years. Every year they were a gallery exhibitions featuring at least six artists. A lot of these artists are unknown artists to the mainstream of the artistic field and then that ask you questions you know who who gets to write history right who gets to tell who actually, it's a tremendous labor right so who gets to actually got the story chair. So, I think it's already happening, I love to say that at cave, there is like hundreds if not thousands of artists some of them who just they're out of our DNA now, just the same way that you know we had Philip glass performing in our studio or Robert Wilson, or Laurie Anderson, who are part of also that generation of New York City artists who had loved and live work spaces. There is also a big generation of immigrant artists who came to New York also just looking for a place to be in these relations with diverse humans with the in betweenness of life and existence. I think it's already doing that there Kai once it's on you will all. It's not on our website yet, but the first phase will be soon put up there and the initial phase you get to see all of these hundreds of artists in fact you don't get to really see our work of performance, or visual art yet because it's still in the process of organizing and I think that's hard for me like to see you on work. I'm like, I already did it. I don't want to deal with how it's going to be shown. It's on its way. But with what you were saying that, again, building history from the ground up, of course they're there, you know, the well more well known but then there's, you know, so and so that played clarinet for so and so dance performance and then, you know, and that's that's kind of the lore of the place and the history and that's that you know the what what still I love that word Tonya used echoes that echoes within us and that carries us to today and to onward going forward. I just want to add one little thing maybe actually Frank you can speak to this but there's something about the Academy like I came through the Academy through the institutions and everything was kind of behind the wall was such a delight to get to use the library at the University right and but there's something so satisfying about an archive being available to the public like you don't have to be part of an institution to access this information that you can access it and you know fold it into your office or whatever it is that you're interested in doing but I appreciate that there's public access to something like this. I think this is one of the great also in I think critical ideas that it is not membership, you know, you don't have to be a student, you don't have to be subscribed to something for what happens in academia, the slave labor of students or professor they don't make any money but companies you know charged and for storing in the news projects of this world, and that you don't have to be open, but they're also that it's organized and created by the artist. Traditionally, it is done at Yale, it's done at NYU libraries, people decide you know what you know is important and what not. I think it's a very different approach if the artists themselves you know do this I think the ridiculous leader company got so upset that we're going to do our own book and we don't give our photos out anymore. And we want to be in control of our history we actually had one author here who has lived in New York teachers wrote a book about the company, never met one person in life. It's the first time here but let's include him you know we celebrate 50 years of the company, and it's a shocking in a way and I think the idea that archives are created by the artists in a way with the help and in communication as equal partners with Tanya, you know, who is from the University of Ohio right where you are dance, actually, the real estate. Yeah, yeah, the rare bird, a professor of dance, you know, I don't think in New York we have maybe one. The CUNY system it's also shocking and wrong, I feel. So, I think this is a great contribution. So maybe at the time we put up the light a little bit and we have at least already very much over time but two three questions comments from the audience. If anybody wants to say something, we went a bit over time and in 20 minutes I think the movement class starts but still I think this is important and we take it very serious at the Segal Center, Matthew. How does the access work. So, soon we decided not to do it in the middle of the holidays at the end of the year. But early next year, we're going to be launching the online platform and people are going to be able just to go and wander around and click things here and there. And then we decided to do like the, this is like a web developer talking like it and I told me this thing I forgot the word but it's something like you start you don't just wait for things to be perfect. You just put it out into the world and you continue like feeding it and making it more abundant. So that's what we plan to do so sometime in February we're probably are going to be sending out and put it in our, on our website for people to access and again, in June, we have a fellow who we're working with the digitalization of tapes. So there's a, I think it's an ongoing project. Join our newsletter. Hi, thank you so much for sharing your archive with us. And I'm realizing the constellation that we share to and hi Tanya it's just from performance studies stays. I'm curious about shuffle, which I see up there because one of the things as like a career as a practitioner but also continuing to be a scholar and juggling those two things. One of the things that my time at CUNY has been able to give me is that I have a social responsibility as a scholar to how I enter an archive and how I use it. And I think that there's also agency that you have now because you're building your archive together and so I saw the shuffle thing there and I was wondering if that's like the spirit of lemme where like something might be able to get entangled, and we'll be able to give that to an artist that they really have to embody or think because like screens are so challenging, you know, like, it's public but but your work is so visceral so anyway I'm just curious what shuffle is and if there's a some magic that's going to happen. It's just it's going to throw you anything we have done or any program so it might be from 1997 some gallery exhibit to some performance in the waterfront to some tour in Colombia so that's the I think that's the shuffle. But I think that there is something that we quite haven't put our finger on which is also how, how we bring this element of environment. And I think it's still there is a screen there is this so that's why for example today we have a ludus class and what we're doing is also chairing some of the teachers where some of this knowledge started and who cultivated some of the work of today so today is going to be very specific about one very specific topic called ludus water. And there we're going to be able to show people in their archive, who is Mario son I who is in retirement, who were these people that the no Gucci ties so which is where these work come from. But we also are uplifting the legacy and and and even though we're yeah we're not the only ones but we are always standing in the lands of others right like we are right now in Lenape land. Hi, wonderful talks. I'm a young practitioner and consider myself a living archive. And I'm wondering, having gone through this process for you all. How would you look back upon it and I guess I'm just looking for a couple words about what living archive means to having gone through this process now. I have to be honest that I have issues with the word archive itself. You know, we're living organisms so we're for stories and experience and life. And I think about it as sometimes I could think about these are kind of in many ways in a personal way. It's like people who have journals. I've been very bad at journals of my life. But in a way this archive in a personal level is almost like a journal of all these people I have met in like sometimes I'm like, Wow, I have lived with people from over 32 countries. Like I have had so many roommates in my life like over 100 roommates. So in a way, it is a living archive in a way is the resonance that the memory, but I know it could be so much many things is out there like for what it is for Brandon is going to be different for Tanya is going to be different as you saw. She's focused on Buddha and on this and that we are not necessarily only focused on that but I think they're believing means like is alive and it could be experienced, depending on how people are embracing or entering to it. Just like us right who we meet. Yeah, I know we could go on much longer. We have to transition the space for the class but I really would like to thank you for the presentation I want to give you our respect for your work but also admiration for creating this archive is something scholars should do in a way but you say you took the lead I think it's very inspirational also that you place importance on it I hope you will do a book. If it comes out of it we would be help you at least been publishing if we do it you know on demand we could happily do that so really it's a great thing and I would like to as a side note also to say that they should get and creamer so that to undocumented immigrants coming here to New York City and embracing a city a spirit of a city working through complications and in their work. Which traditionally would focus on playwrights, you know, terrible conditions and living with a family or how the American, you know, police as misery now there's or, and the immigrant and they are all important ones but this is also a transformation of experience in an aesthetic choice that is global it's inspiring it is as existential. I think as the place we just had. Amayok with us here you brought these beautiful plays you know iron bound and Queens and all that you know who tells the story of her mother which is a wonderful flower that grows here in New York City or in Jersey where she live but this is also a work of this company that grew out of New York City and represents the unique spirit the global influence and also chose a form that is a very traditional but also very new in expressing the loneliness of human beings of the existential angst we live in now in the catastrophic moment the world is in your peace. You're making our work so dark it's not. Also what I want to say the joy of performing of a sharing you know as some Buddhist say the joyful participation in the sorrows of life. You know what art should be doing. And I think is a great example, you know, of, of a company that is truly multi and interdisciplinary as the day today represents so thank you thank you Tanya for joining us and also on your book and hope to see you here again at this season. Thank you everybody for coming and thanks to how around. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Frank. Thank you everyone.