147 Devices for Integrated Principles is a playful interdisciplinary performance by collaborative husband-wife team, Hillerbrand+Magsamen. They animate everyday objects in a desperate and perhaps futile way to connect to each other and the audience. Written by Kirk Lynn, photographs, video and performance by Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand.
A Device to be Heard, ©Hillerbrand+Magsamen
A Device to Forgive All Those Who Have Wronged You, ©Hillerbrand+Magsamen
A Distant Marker is a movement piece instigated and inspired by the history of the Western North Carolina Railroad. About 13 miles east of the Black Mountain College site there is a distant marker memorializing the hundreds of mostly Black, incarcerated men and women who built the nearby railroad under cruel and crude conditions. The cost of building the railroad for many of those workers was their lives.
For more information about The RAIL Project and memorial, visit their website.
(Stripes but no Stars, Fred Kahn Asheville Postcard Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, UNC Asheville. Image from The RAIL project.)
Adjunct is a set of three structured improvisations using sound and movement as a responsive, interdependent framework. We draw from our individual and collective histories to investigate how lines of improvisation and structured movement create a specific and coherent meaning that answers only to itself.
DEBORAH is an improvisational performance project by collaborators Eleanor Hullihan, Jimmy Jolliff, Emma Judkins, and Adam Schatz with costume design by Asli Bulbul.
The Cottonwood Meeting House stands alone, on the west side of Wildhorse Highway, near mile marker twenty six just north of Havre, Montana. This photo was taken with a Canon A-1 on 35 millimeter film by Landon George in the summer of 2022.
Within every space, there is an infinite, invisible energy. Malice? Joy? Or perhaps we ascribe these human conditions to the unseen that exist beyond our knowing. Sensitive as we may be to the ebb and flow of that great unseen, we are often caught in between, pursuing ego, wealth, or comfort. All I Ever Wanted Was A House I Could Scream In, led by Mike Holmes and Landon George, aims to interrogate the liminal space between human connection and absence of empathy. The large ensemble is comprised of multi- instrumentalists whose backgrounds range from spoken word to classical, from harsh noise to Appalachian fiddling. Together, the ensemble employs improvisational techniques with extreme intention and graphic scores. Through the labor of active listening and responding, a house emerges. The door is open. Will you step inside?
Participants include: Mike Holmes, Landon George, Edgar Medina, Zoie Reamer, Chad Beattie, Cam Stack, Shane McCord, Michael Powers.
Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra at Underground Atlanta
An interactive zine which demonstrates juxtapositions in experiences of Black Mountain College. The zine will be inspired by elements of Appalachian State University’s Special Collections, which houses first hand accounts of the expressions of students and faculty.
Created by Adekemi Adekanle, Katie Andrews, Kat Arendt, Francois Desautels, Elliot Froese, Jessica Greenfield, Hailey Jordan, Trinity Luce, Juliana Maurer, Grace Moffitt, Ben Pluska, Jody Servon, Becca Stickler, and Anna Wolly as part of the course Collaboration & Participation in Art.
gwen charles – CACTUS CARE
CACTUS CARE asks the question “Who do you care for and who cares for you?” Caretaking. Caregiving. Self-care. Earth care. Enter the mini-greenhouse for sessions of interactive cactus ecotherapy that transform acts of care into creative expressions. Reflect on how the relationship between creativity and care can guide us to better serve our community with grace, gentleness and empathy.
At {Re}HAPPENING 11, visitors can choose to clean the cacti, draw the cacti, write a poem or song for a cactus, read a story to cacti, or meditate with the cacti.
Dance to Anything is a dynamic constellation of visual artists, writers/readers, and movement makers responding to sound works that have been crafted to be difficult to dance to. This sonic constraint response project was designed and organized to think less about choreography in a general sense, but how shared translations of a choreographic object (the sound works) move relational possibilities. Some of the ideas, questions, and metaphors we might conjure up from this attempted endeavor: How might we find joy in the not legibly functional in art? What are dance-tos and dance-nots? Why is movement thought of as secondary to form? What gestures, minor/major or otherwise, when explored relationally, elicit and inspire potential politics to come?
Participating artists include: Anna Johnson, Camille Casemier, Chris Reeves, Jesse Malmed, Lauren Sudbrink, Lula Asplund, Maggie Wong, & Tiffany Funk.
Dancing with Max, Kayla Hammonds
Swannatopia’s Experimental Art Club – Fountain of You
Fountain of You is an interactive experience that explores the way in which we orbit one another around the symbolism of a fountain.We will have a kinetic fountain feeling, with ongoing performances and busking sets around the interactive wishing well.
This water ballet of sorts will attract and engage the viewer in a multi-tiered experience of choreographed parading, interactions with our life guards, and places for reflection looking into a holographic “fountain of you.”
Swannatopia’s Experimental Art Club and participating artists have previously presented work at the {Re}HAPPENING with Road Signs (2022) and more.
Photo by Kaylee Dunn
HomeSick is composed of 12 large house-like structures. During the evening, these large, whimsical houses will light up with dynamic video projections playing in unison with audio samples, including testimonials of Asheville residents speaking on behalf of their housing experiences.
Images of sculpture are by Emmanuel Figaro and image of the artists by Liz Trader Williams.
Drop of Sun Studios
Drop of Sun Studios and Lamplight AVL will be curating the John Cage room at {Re}HAPPENING 11. Since the studio’s launch in 2015, Drop of Sun has become a hub for musical creativity, working with local and nationally recognized artists including Indigo De Souza, Animal Collective, Trevor Hall, Angel Olsen, and many more.
Brett Naucke – Adjacent Rooms Without Time
Adjacent Rooms Without Time is an installation for multiple speakers and projectors focussing on the absence of time within a space. This work expands on Naucke’s 2022 immersive self-playing installation work Room Without Time into a multi-room presentation interweaving both composed and live manipulation of electronics, strings and percussion into a hexaphonic, 6-speaker audio array with multiple overlapping video feeds projected on various surfaces of the rooms themselves. This work utilizes the unusual space of the adjacent dormitory rooms in the North Lodge and allows the audience to move about the space and choose different perspectives in which video is seen and audio is heard.
Room Without Time Still, Brett Naucke
Lovers Leap is a multidisciplinary installation, performance and screening that explores Appalachian representation and mediation. Inspired by Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring,” this project blends original music, found footage film, and dance in an interactive space that encourages audience reflection and participation.
Jonathan Furnell is a media artist, filmmaker and composer currently living and working in Wilmington, NC. Jonathan’s work explores the supernatural, the Appalachian South, and the space between sight and sound. Rachel Pittman is a writer and MA candidate in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research explores 1980s cinema and underground videotape subcultures. Holden Treadway is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. His work explores the relationships between process art, analog manipulation, and new media. He is a graduate teacher of film production, editing, and experimental practice.
Images: Lovers Leap Stills, Jonathan Furnell
Madeline Yahr – Málning
Málning is a free-space for the audience to create their own story; Málning is a meditative experience for the movers and the audience. Choreographed by Madeline Yahr, in this piece dancers travel through and around a cellophane divider, activating the space with paint to create a unique world. Yahr obtained her MFA in Choreography from the University of Roehampton, and has been creating Málning since 2017.
All {Re}HAPPENING attendees are invited to take part in a multi-vocal painting – an artwork that celebrates a diversity of perspectives while also upending traditional notions that paintings should be by a single, expert individual. The beauty of the process is that it can accommodate any skill level, so please don’t be shy!
A Living Machine, Mollie Hosmer-Dillard
Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre (ACDT) is a non-profit professional dance company created in 1979. ACDT believes that everyone is a dancer. Through art and inspiration, the company illuminates the points of intersection that exist on both intellectual and emotional levels. Their diverse repertory reflects both traditional and experimental forms of modern dance.
For this performance, three large globes made from translucent plastic will house three individual dancers. The dancers will move within the globes with bottles of selected colors of paint which will be used to slowly create a landscape of blended colors inspired by outside sounds.
The Last Letter Writer is a semi-fictitious film that documents a day in the life of the last public translator in Vietnam. In addition to the film’s premiere, artists David Raymond and Trong Gia Nguyen have fashioned an old-fashioned, interactive stage set that invites the audience to engage with the lost art of penmanship and missives.
Film Still, The Last Letter Writer
Film Still, The Last Letter Writer
Astrid Kaemmerling and Becca J.R. Lachman’s What I say to this house
Astrid Kaemmerling, What will hold a room together?
What I say to this house is an immersive exhibition by poet Becca J.R. Lachman and interdisciplinary artist Astrid Kaemmerling documenting a 7-year collaborative creation process. The exhibition is titled after and will showcase the work of a threefold art book project that came into existence by sending emails, art, photographs, texts, stanzas, and snail-mail letters between SE Ohio, San Francisco, Vermont, and New Orleans between 2015-20. Completed in December 2022, the collaboration consists of a book-length poem, 34 artworks, and a process book documenting the 7-year collaborative creation process. Collectively, the exhibition is an invitation to engage with the topic of “home-building,” be it physical, reproductive, metaphorical, or structural.
WNC Wildflowers, photographs by Julie J. Thomson