Legal Tender is a live assemblage of multi-media performance, video, and text material drawing across a yearlong collaborative devising practice, its marginalia, and postscript.
Poet Kyle Dacuyan, in collaboration with Antigravity Performance Project (directors Michael T. Williams and Francesca Montanile) and artists Andalyn Young, Kate Liebman, and Michael Costagliola, present this new range of work in a collaboratively-designed digital studio, with a live program featuring poems, meditations, and movement oriented around pleasure, flux, and connection.
Originally conceived as an episodic duet of movement and poetry, a first performance work was created exploring the relationships between information, consumer culture, labor, and borders – drawing attention to our eroding news and media environments, and the places where fact, opinion, and falsehood settle unconsciously.
Postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and inflected in new ways with our more fully digital and remote present tense, an expanded field of poetry reading, video pieces, movement, and sound work has been created, deepening these themes against the backdrop of shifting and uncertain time.
Screened at Fringe Arts Philadelphia & The Jewish Museum 2021.
legal tender
i am one who
Working with performance marginalia, journals, essays, reading annotations, search histories, sent and unsent text messages, and other language matter from our respective days, we’ve assembled a polyvocal text read and sung aloud in three movements.
As we looked through language documentation from that devising process and in the time since, we uncovered shared concerns: the precarity and pleasure of embodiment, changing notions of time, and how experiences of grief and uncertainty shift and blur together. alternately intimate and diaristic, hypnotic and kaleidoscopic, the piece moves through loneliness, alienation, connection, and desire. aired Friday July 24 at 4pm on Montez Press Radio.