ICA Live: Experimental Performance Art Series | San Jose

Submitted by the Event Organizer

ICA Live: Experimental Performance Art Series | San Jose

The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art launched ICA Live!, a new program that includes ongoing presentations of engaging and experimental performance art.

Presented during downtown San Jose’s South First Fridays, ICA Live! seeks to explore the role of the performance art medium in contemporary society. Focus is placed on live, interactive and participatory projects which engage members of the audience and may include experimental sound and sculptural elements.

Friday, September 4, 2015
ICA Live: Experimental Performance Art Series | San Jose

On Friday, September 4, ICA Live! will present two showings of Niki Ulehla’s marionette performance piece George Travels to the Afterlife. Presented with minimal staging to experimental music, the performance follows the story of America’s Founding Father as he crosses the River Styx and confronts the various beasts and creatures that inhabit the underworld.

The work is a loose interpretation of the story of Orpheus, the musician and poet who traveled to the underworld in an attempt to reunite with his love Eurydice. In the ICA Live! performance, Ulehla replaces the Greek protagonist with a recognizable American hero. He and some of his fellow cast of characters appear in the form of hand carved wooden marionettes, a craft that Ulehla first learned in the Czech Republic. Others were made during Ulehla’s artist residency at Recology in San Francisco out of objects found in the city’s Public Disposal Area. Nothing goes to waste—dismembered mannequins and discarded children’s toys are pieced together and reborn to form the bizarre and ethereal characters of Hades’ underworld.

Niki Ulehla is an artist, jewelry designer, puppet maker and performer. Originally from Tennessee, she moved to California in 1997 to study painting at Stanford University and is currently based in San Francisco. She premiered George Travels to the Afterlife with composer Wobbly and puppeteers Petra Class and Renu Cappelli at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013.

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