A Performance by Jennie MaryTai Liu
Saturday, November 8, 2025 at 7PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $15 General Admission / $10 for BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
“In the translation of the I Ching, Book of Changes, with the preface by Jung, the I Ching is offered as a tool for intervention in the visible world, to ‘free us from the tyranny of events.’ By way of Merce, we are guided in a dandelion blow of the algorithms that trick and trap us. It all yields in lists, would-be feats to memorize and embody. We are completely disorganized. And in the labor of reorganizing, which is rehearsal, content becomes form. When we leave, our days are more silent.”
— Jennie MaryTai Liu
More About the Performance:
A reference to a reference in a Hollis Frampton text sampled in Maryanne Amacher’s composition Remainde
With live music by Andrew Gilbert and performance by Liu, Stacy Dawson Stearns, and Orlando Day Gilbert, Times Change, 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.
“What we all receive from Cunningham: it is not imperative that our movements accomplish anything. We don’t have to produce meaning, make new mythologies, carry old ones forward. It’s marvelous enough, never too simple, to be physical material, matter, kinetic energy engaged with all its attention in the figuring out of how to get from this position to the next. Merce, our totem ancestor, a changeling, a nightwalker, grants us this inheritance.
Yet, as female respondents, we are always subject to interpretation, bearers of signification, and we are partially constantly seeking it. We’re dancing seekers, and this is Los Angeles and we came here to be see-ers, so when we’re done with numbers we throw more hexagrams, and listen for meaning. Oracular voices indicate the essence of the situation prevailing, the situation being the dance, which is and isn’t inextricable from the dancer. Some whispers from nature: go a little too much in the direction of the small, get mean, cut through, rely on the capacity of self to bring about a fortunate change in circumstance.”
— Jennie MaryTai Liu
Jennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, video, writing, and education. She has recently received commissions and presentations from Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, New York Film Festival/Currents section, Crossroads/San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, PAM, Human Resources LA, The Mistake Room, Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center.
She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo Arts Colony, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting.org, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA.
In 2022, funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation and in collaboration with The Box and Pieter Performance Space, she curated Knees, Schools, Urges – an exhibition and performance program engaging ten LA based artists in a decolonial response to histories of 20th century modern dance and embedded embodied histories.
Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group. Since 2021 she is based between Los Angeles and Hong Kong where she runs Center for Artists in the Making, an art education program engaging young people in methods and practices from multidisciplinary art making towards the development of their own work and platforms.