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Jennie MaryTai Liu’s Living Female Respondent or 53 Yakshi, a dance performance created with devika wickremesinghe and Hannah Heller, draws from Merce Cunningham’s use of chance operations in his 1976 work Torse. Using the I Ching, Liu and wickremesinghe selected 64 short video clips from across the internet to build a movement vocabulary. The resulting performance explores how digital media, randomness, and embodied movement intersect. First presented at LACMA in 2019, this work both honors and critically engages with the legacy of postmodern dance.More About the Performance:
A reference to a reference in a Hollis Frampton text sampled in Maryanne Amacher’s composition Remainder which accompanied Merce Cunningham’s 1976 dance Torse, Living Female Respondent is a dance which exhaustively appropriates Cage and Cunningham’s compositional use of chance. Originally commissioned to accompany the exhibition Merce Cunningham, Clouds and Screens, at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) in February 2019, the dance took place in the Korean Art Gallery amidst 17th–19th century Korean ceramics and screen paintings, highlighting the primacy of Asian thinking and aesthetic values in the production of the western avant-garde. Along with performers Hannah Heller and devika wickremesinghe, choreographer Jennie MaryTai Liu playfully consulted contemporary feminist oracles and the Chinese divination text I ching to determine all structural elements of a bank of movement created from a ‘gamut’ of random YouTube videos, manifesting in a theatrical display of indeterminacy.
With live music by Andrew Gilbert and costumes by Wendy Yang, the version to be presented at Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center re-wrangles the choreographic material for a different moment and place, a continuance of a response to impure, incidental inheritance.
Living Female Respondent was originally commissioned with additional funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
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