Premiere @ SomoS Berlin June 1-3, 2023
From June 1-3, 2023 choreographer Teoma Naccarato and composer John MacCallum will present a collection of artistic work spanning performance, video art, and sound installation at SomoS Arts in Berlin. The 3-day exhibit will begin with a 6-hour durational performance, followed by two days to visit the gallery installation and meet the artists.
III: Once Replete / 6-hour durational performance-installation
III: Once Replete is a 6-hour durational performance that unfolds within a video and sound installation. Two performers lie beneath a plaster cast, with projection mapped onto the contours of their bodies. The projected imagery is of a dissected heart, transitioning from vivid red to a black host teaming with the life of decay. The silence of this virtual heart is set against the beating of the performers’ hearts, sonified in real-time in the music and pulsing in the walls surrounding the audience. Throughout, bodies past and present and live and digital are intermixed and reconfigured, taking many forms and no form all at once.
LIVE PERFORMANCE & INSTALLATION | JUNE 1, 16:00 – 22:0
Arrive any time between 16:00 and 22:00, and stay for as long as desired! Entry is free.
VIDEO & SOUND INSTALLATION – JUNE 2 & 3, 14:00 – 19:00
Following the live performance, the installation will remain on display, and the artists will be present to meet visitors.
ADDRESS:
SomoS Arts
Kottbusser Damm 95, 10967, Berlin, DE
COLLABORATORS:
Created & Performed by: Teoma Naccarato & John MacCallum
Video editing and projection design: Teoma Naccarato
Music and audio/haptic installation: John MacCallum
Multi-channel camera array and software: John MacCallum
Director of photography and video collaboration: Guillaume Cailleau
Background:
III: A trilogy of works on the materiality and musicality of the heart
III: Once Replete is the third in a trilogy of installation-based performances by choreographer Teoma Naccarato and composer John MacCallum.
The two previous works, III: Once Removed (2020) and III: Once Returned (2022), set in motion an interrogation of the materiality and musicality of the thing-we-call-the-heart. The notion of “removal” speaks to the transplantation of the heart into our work as an art object – and as a performer. It also refers to the real-time extraction of heart-rate data from us as performers. Probing the irreconcilable gap that opens between bodily source and artistic representation is central to our works. Because of this gap, removal forecloses the possibility of return without difference.
The manipulation of time via digital media – which creates the illusion of return – led us to question our agency as choreographer-composer to negotiate human and machinic temporalities. In III: Once Returned, we sustained an intensely intimate continual performance for 72 hours, never stopping, our every action – even our breath – scripted and predetermined by a metronome. Surrounded in closeup by a 12 camera surveillance system, we subjected the temporality of our bodies and selves to a 6-hour cycle of choreography, returning twelve times back the beginning without ever arriving where or how we once were. With us was a heart, stripped of its body, slowly decomposing – unable to return.
In III: Once Replete we fold in layered material and memories from the previous performances, re-assembling the 72-hours of footage from twelve simultaneous cameras into a video installation in which we receive these images back onto our bodies. Following the 6-hour performance, the plaster cast remains as a projection surface, signalling the present-absence and absent-presence of our living bodies, now replete in the flesh of the installation.
“Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Media and Culture (BKM), as part of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, Aid Program for Dance”
