Beau Bree Rhee: “Performance Paysage”
This Video Viewing Room features excerpts from a performance recording of Performance Paysage (translation Performance as Landscape) (2020), along with an accompanying text and drawings by the artist.
THE BODY is a cosmic and relational site; it is a porous space where we live in radical dependency to the world. I believe that a contemporary, poetic, and emotive art language is needed to make sense of our existence & the state of our Earth today. I approach the body as our main connection to our ecosystem. In my drawings, I work both figuratively and abstractly with these concepts of body-space.
Performance as Landscape (première 3.13.2020 at University of Toronto) stems from a philosophical frustration with the human-centric notion of performance itself. Of course, these desires & questions come from a deeply personal grief at being human now in this particular moment in our planet’s history, in the Anthropocene.
The piece is fundamentally about rage/grief related to climate change and themes of breath and loss/absentia. I wondered if it was possible through this performance to insert (and perhaps even transform) the human into a bigger flow & time of life, into the non-human, the lithic, the telluric. Art is made by and for humans, but it seems necessary to propose an alternative.
Could performance itself become a landscape, an atmosphere, an ecology? What would a paradigm shift into elemental horizontality look like, while ultimately remaining human of course? What about air & atmosphere?
The research for the piece centered around time & cosmology (modern day physics), agricultural calendars & rites (more ancient), and notions of weather. Some of the choreography was directly informed by a Korean agricultural calendar that identifies 24 seasons in one calendar year, each season lasting 15° of the Earth’s revolution. Life actions & survival rituals often accompany each season.
The drawings & score give a sense of the direction: conceptually, spatially, emotionally. Some were drawn before the rehearsals; some were drawn during and after. The March version of the performance was quite ritualistic, in response to the site-specific installation New Circadia at the gallery. It comprised nine sections—“Canyon of Intimacy,” “Duet,” “Quartet,” “A Song: Crete Sleeps,” “A Poem: Eclipse Poem,” “Chorus of Breath,” “Chorus of Rage,” “Drying Winds - Reverse Vitruvian,” “Canyon of Intimacy - Absence Presence”—across three “geographies” in the gallery, named Coves of Breath, The Canyon, and The Aeonic River.
There’s an atmospheric quality of storminess in the work; an underbelly and girth of rage that is important. The piece gives space to explore the poetics & politics of our rage (most obviously in “Chorus of Rage,” but it’s there in other sections as well), a collective rage. Like a grid for a garden trellis, or chord changes in jazz, my process left a lot of room to welcome the personalities and textures of my collaborators. The sound is an important spatial and somatic element, created by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste who I’ve collaborated with since 2017.
There’s a deeply uncanny prescience that the performance has to the current pandemic landscape (the “Chorus of Breath,” the visors, the silk Head Clouds that performers wear over their faces). It’s almost uncomfortable to look at, now. The boundary of art-and-life becomes grotesquely fuzzy, and what we performed seems encapsulated as a portal in time. A sort of shamanistic neo-surrealism. The Head Clouds are a visual cue I’d used in a performance nearly nine years ago (at that time responding to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima) as a way to visualize the body’s membrane-like relationship to the environment. We breathe nearly 23,000 times per day, or 12 cubic meters of air. These questions keep coming back: What unites? What separates?
Now, I am imagining future iterations of the performance in the pandemic: outdoors, perhaps more raw, real, figurative. Surely these phrases, “Chorus of Rage,” “Chorus of Breath,” “Canyon of Intimacy,” have a different pallor to them now.
I’ll end here with a poem that was part of the score for “Chorus of Rage”:
31.8.2019 NYC
When I die
My bones I hope
Especially my femurs
Long lithe calcium carbonate structures that port me through this life
Turn into fossils
Hard packed with minerals soil and time
Like love and losses infinite density
Perhaps next to a million year old shell
I’d be a sprightly sprig
Beau Bree Rhee
September 2020
Performance Credits
Performance as Landscape premièred on March 13, 2020 at Daniels Gallery, University of Toronto, in the context of the installation New Circadia.
Sound: Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Cast: Mannan Ahmad, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Eric Duan, Ariadne Kaperonis-Bountris, Cindy Xinyu Jiang, Beau Bree Rhee, Oscar Alfonso Lira Sanchez, Lauryn Sherwood, Collin Tatton, Amy Thomas
Curators: Dean Richard Sommer, Natalie Fizer, Emily Stevenson
Producer: Aidan Cowling
Beau Bree Rhee is a visual artist & choreographer based in New York. Drawing and performance are her primary forms, but additionally text/poetry, installation/sculpture, scent, scores. She is synesthetic and grew up tri-lingual/cultural (Korean-English-French). She is invested in multi-modal work & collaborations spanning environmental/ecological science, philosophy, cosmology, performance, visual art.
She has exhibited & performed her work internationally at KW Institute for Contemporary Art/Berlin Biennale; Bard Graduate Center Gallery NY; Daniels Gallery University of Toronto; Kaaitheater Bruxelles; Baryshnikov Arts Center NY; MoMA/PS1 NY; among others. Her work was included in the exhibition Predicated. at The Kitchen in 2018. Her work is held in private collections as well as the MoMA Library & Research Collection. She teaches at Parsons School of Design. She holds degrees from Haute école d’art de design HEAD-Genève (MFA) & Columbia University (BA).
Images and videos: 1) Beau Bree Rhee, Performance Paysage: “Chorus of Breath,” “Chorus of Rage,” “Drying Winds - Reverse Vitruvian,” March 13, 2020 at Daniels Gallery, University of Toronto. 2) Beau Bree Rhee, Performance as Landscape concept diagram, 2020. Ink & aquarelle on paper, 11.7 x 16.5 in. 3) Beau Bree Rhee, Various movement phrases, 2020. Ink & aquarelle on paper, 11.7 x 16.5 in. 4) Beau Bree Rhee, Drying Winds – Reverse Vitruvian, 2020. Ink & aquarelle on paper, 11.7 x 16.5 in. 5) Beau Bree Rhee, Performance Paysage: “Canyon of Intimacy - Absence Presence,” March 13, 2020 at Daniels Gallery, University of Toronto.