Part installation, part interdisciplinary performance, LA Samuelson’s Telegraph Valley is a work that uses roofing material, parts sourced from replicas of the liquid transmitter (an early ancestor of the landline telephone), and a dancer to reverse engineer the feeling of having sent out and/or received a message through the medium of one’s body. Telegraph Valley is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund project, co-commissioned by RedLine Contemporary Art Center, square product theater, and Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, and will première in its entirety at RedLine in March 2024.
The installment of the work premiering at MCA Denver at the Holiday on Thursday, March 23 is titled Almost Transmission. It focuses on dismantling the ubiquitous metaphor of “the body as a house” in order to consider the role of the body in creation and dissolution of a singular self, and how who we are and what we love lives somewhere between the inside and outside of us. The performance — set in a sculptural/sonic installation — will investigate what happens to the body when the self is populated with that which extends far beyond it.
Telegraph Valley is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project, co-commissioned by RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, square product theatre, and NPN. For more information, visit www.npnweb.org.
Almost Transmission is created in collaboration with Adam Stone (sound engineer) and Elle Hong (dramaturg).
About the Artist:
LA Samuelson is an interdisciplinary artist working in contemporary performance, sculpture, and writing. Their projects have been presented nationally and internationally, and their current work is supported by the National Performance Network. LA has been an artist-in-residence at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Crosstown Arts Memphis, the Denver Art Museum, Skogen Arts Sweden, and the Colorado Conservatory of Dance.
LA holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado-Boulder, with secondary emphases in visual art and somatics, and a graduate certification in Emergent Technologies & Media Arts Practices from the College of Media, Communication, and Information. They teach contemporary performance practice at Hamilton College.
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