This Saturday, June 22, 7:30pm: Performance composed by Saun Santipreecha and Screening + Talk with Katherine Weiss at the Closing Reception for Saun Santipreecha’s current solo exhibition, “…These Things That Divide The World In Two…” (May 25 – June 22, 2024). The Performance is set to begin at 8:00pm.
Santipreecha’s translational performance-piece “Mother […] Mother” enacts a permutation of Samuel Beckett’s play “Footfalls.” Echoing the complications of physical and psychical interiors/exteriors that occur throughout his sculptural sound installation at the gallery, “Footfalls” revolves around a single feminine character May, who walks back-and-forth while carrying-on a conversation with the disembodied—‘outer’—voice (which begins as her mother) with what sounds like an internal dialogue. In both the original play and in Santipreecha’s translation, sensations or structures of insides and outsides are produced through the subject’s (and the system’s) relations and positions within language. Santipreecha has evolved the performative and linguistic dimensions of the play in relation to music and sound, and in relation to the sculptural elements of his exhibition—particularly the 4-part permutational sculpture that shares the same root name as the performance: “Mother […] Mother.” The work is carried-out through an atonal musical score and choreography composed by Santipreecha and performed live by flautist Cari Ann Souter, as well as a shifting architecture played-out by Max engineer Luc Trahand.
Katherine Weiss, co-editor of “Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art” (ibidem Press: 2017) will be Screening a rare, original performance of Samuel Beckett’s “Footfalls” (1988), directed by Walter D. Asmus (who worked as Beckett’s assistant director at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin), with Billie Whitelaw as May. Afterwards, Weiss will be discussing “Footfalls” and extending the context of this performance up through Santipreecha’s present translation of this piece.
