Sights & Sounds is your weekly guide to the Bay Area arts scene. Transdisciplinary artist and performance maker Seth Eisen told KALW’s Jen Chien about three wonderful arts events happening around the Bay this weekend.
- The Great Liberation Upon Hearing at Dance Brigade in San Francisco all weekend long.
- Bruce Conner: It’s All True at SF MOMA, opening on 10/29.
- Music for the Underworld at the Center for New Music on 10/30.
The Great Liberation Upon Hearing is a multi-media dance/drama that explores death and dying. It’s based on the journey as laid out in the book Bardo Thodol, which is read to the dead while they are in the state between death and reincarnation. By providing a verbal guide to the deceased, this tradition shows how to use the moment of death to attain liberation and help the departed with reincarnation into the next life. The performance combines contemporary dance, theater, Taiko drumming, and video. There are shows at Dance Brigade on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
SETH EISEN: This piece really brings that to the fore ... Some of that wisdom of, you know, how we live as humans and also how we die.
Bruce Conner: It’s All True is a retrospective from multimedia artist Bruce Conner, who lived in the Bay Area for the last 50 years of his life. Among other things, he’s considered by many people to be ‘the father of the modern music video.’ One of his best-known videos is ‘Mongoloid’ with music by DEVO. The exhibition opens on Saturday.
SETH EISEN: He was a bridge between all of these different worlds and media ... and he's the original collage artist, in a way.
Music for the Underworld is a dance and music performance. The performance will include a musical performance from Rawcliffe on ancient Mezo-American style flutes and ocarinas, collective Pet the Tiger performing their ballet Pahoehoe, and musicians performing live to the 1910 film Frankenstein. It will take place on Sunday evening at the Center for New Music.
SETH EISEN: It seems like such a deep piece, I was looking at a video for it ... It's otherworldly.
