Art: The Art of Performance with Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver
University of California, Irvine | April 12, 2021
The Art of Performance, cofounded and curated by Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver, is an annual event dedicated to experimentation in live art and pedagogical research at UCI’s Experimental Media and Performance Lab, which includes a Q & A after each performance with the audience and workshops and classes with UCI students. In conjunction with the event, the cofounders created the CTSA Lifetime Achievement Award and have presented seven awards between 2015 and 2021. Since its inception in 2015, the program has been supported by the University of California Institute of Research on the Arts Grant, the UCI Art Department Discretionary Funds Award, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts Dean’s Office, and UCI’s Illuminations Grants.
Jesse Colin Jackson (JCJ): CTSA Research and Innovation’s big question is what is the nature of arts research? And how can we support arts research as a school? These turn out to be questions without obvious answers. From a faculty point of view, we understand that all of the creative work we do is called research. Then there is a narrow group of research activities—I think of the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) as a central location for this type research—that cannot happen in the absence of the university. As the Associate Dean, Research and Innovation, I am trying to tease out those specific things that the university has enormous impact on. If we do not support them, then they will fall apart, and suddenly an entire type of research will not be possible. The university understands research in terms of novelty in ways that we are not always attuned to. There is a lot of novelty in the xMPL, because everything is experimental and everything is new. Even the re-creations of existing performances are still novel because we are trying to bring back important moments that very few people experienced, for example.
Deborah Oliver (DO): For our series The Art of Performance, the whole program is historical.
Ulysses Jenkins (UJ): The original purpose of the xMPL was to celebrate new, exciting digital work. I also want to add that The Art of Performance in Irvine has really been celebrating artists that have been on the cutting edge in a historical perspective from Simone Forti to Rudy Perez to George Herms. We are really honoring those doing pioneering work early on and setting the ground for our students to continue in their legacy. The fact that we have been able to have these artists bring their legend to our campus infuses the pedagogy. It is what we do. It is what we are trying to communicate to the outside community. This is why you want to attend the programs or come to Irvine when we start having live shows again.
DO: Our mission is dedicated to experimentation and live art. We have done five events since we started in 2015. Once the xMPL became available, Ulysses, Simon Leung, and I had been talking about how important it is to augment our teaching and research, and mostly give students a firsthand experimental experience with live performance, so it is not all textbook and theory. We realized how close we are to Los Angeles and how many resources we have in terms of artists. We have been mounting this program with a minimal budget of somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 for every show, which is extraordinary. Obviously, we did not make a budget that includes our in-kind services obviously and everything else.
UJ: Right now, we are in the beginning of the process of doing this with a trio of artists, including Barbara T. Smith, Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz. This week has been really fascinating working with Barbara, who is an alumna of UCI's first graduating class in 1970.
JCJ: Tell us more about that. You have Barbara interacting with your class. How has that been working?
UJ: You would be marveled at what we did this week—just Barbara talking about her practice and showing it to the students and all the questions the students had for her. That is a real kind of living context. This quarter, we are going to be doing collaborations through Zoom performance, which is going to be very interesting from the perspective of—how do we integrate the different styles of performance that we are going to get from Barbara? It is exciting actually because here is a woman who is eighty years old and has as much spunk as these students. In this little Zoom frame in which we are looking at each other, she just comes off as a teenager. I pedagogically infer that we are going to do a happening for the course. We start talking about Allan Kaprow and she just lights up because she worked with Allan herself, so that was really amazing. Next week we are going to talk to Kit Galloway, who has this enormous library of virtual material. That is going to open up the students in a whole other way.
JCJ: What an opportunity to create this conduit to existing historical figures, past historical figures and current students. It is so great to hear about Zoom doing good for once. This is happening in the performing arts departments, where suddenly they can easily connect students to people in New York.
DO: I hope this does not stop because it makes it a lot more reasonable to have people drop into your class this way. I am sure all of us will use this resource to be able to augment educational pedagogical ideas by inviting artists in this way. I think Ulysses has a very special relationship with Barbara. We are focusing the upcoming Art of Performance in June around this piece that she created in the early nineties called 21st Century Odyssey. We are also very excited for Kit Galloway to participate because he ran the Electronic Cafe, which hosted Ulysses’ events, Travel Hut, and Barbara's event 21st Century Odyssey. Let alone his own Hole in Space piece, which was connecting live moments of communications from East Coast and West Coast for three days. He had satellite connection between Lincoln Center and a spot in Culver City. It is just extraordinary, and now we are living that 24-7.
JCJ: It is so apparent in all of our teaching that people do not understand the pioneering nature of artists and their role in technology. It is a fact that throughout the history of technology there have always been artists on that leading edge doing things with the technology that anticipate the future. Artists have the ability to see the future through creativity. Of course, we are all beating the same drum here.
DO: Yes, and the history of the Art department needs to be celebrated through our alumni. To be able to point and reference that and then bring them back after their careers have really exploded internationally and nationally, that was the primary focus of this effort. We did this regardless of funding and said we are going to make this happen. We were committed to that. We would patch monies together, and that has been the challenge. The artists do not work as intensely or closely in a classroom with every performance, but they all do at least one workshop where students are invited to participate. Some, in the case with Barbara T. Smith and George Herms, were more extended over a quarter. In both, there is a service to our students in this pedagogical research that we are doing with the artists that we bring in.
Learn more at the Art of Performance @ UCI website
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
Ritual, Performance, Utopian Consciousness and the Videophone, 2021
Co-Curated and Co-Directed by Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver/Producer. The Art of Performance will have it’s first Virtual Performance and Media Event held in the xMPL Lab and will present the pioneering work of Ulysses Jenkins, Kit Galloway & Sherry Rabinowitz of Media Image, and Barbara T. Smith focusing on the artists’ inquiry into the past, present and future of telecommunications through performance and dialogue in a cultural context.
PAST PERFORMANCES
George Herms in Moten Swing, 2019
Co-curated by Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver/Producer. A pioneer in the 1950s of California assemblage works made out of discarded found materials and objects, Herms’ sculptural works have been likened to visual poetry, a free-form conversation between individual components, much like a be-bop jazz riff. Some of his objects that also function as sound-producing percussive instruments, were assembled for Moten Swing, a performance/sculptural event with Kei Akagi and UCI undergraduate students. Mr. Herms was awarded the fourth Lifetime Achievement Award.
Simone Forti and Friends, 2018
Organized and produced in collaboration with Simon Leung. A pioneer in the postmodern dance movement, artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer Simone Forti was the third recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s, joined dancers and artists Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris and others at Judson Church Dance Theater in New York in the 1960s, followed by an international career. Joined by collaborators Corey Fogel and Abigail Levin and UCI grad student Michael Thurin, she restaged one of her Dance Constructions Huddle with undergrad students, and performed News Animations Solo Number One 1974, Cloths 1967.
The Rachel Rosenthal Company/Tohubohu, 2017
Co-curated by Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver/Producer. The second Claire Trevor School of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to the legendary “Grand Dame of Performance Art” in memoriam. Her company TOHUBOHU! Extreme Theater Ensemble directed by Kate Noonan celebrated Rosenthal’s work, life and teaching philosophy in an improvisation workshop, an evening of live performance, and a video compilation of excerpts of Rosenthal performing her award-winning solo performances. This ensemble articulates Rosenthal’s approach to interdisciplinary work through total free improvisation.
Rainbow Jam by Fallen Fruit, 2016
By UCI Alum David Burns and Austin Young, with soundscape by Fol Chen (Adam Goldman and Sinosa). Co-Curated Deborah Oliver and Ulysses Jenkins and Produced by Deborah Oliver. A collaborative artwork/performance score, and video inspired by performance scores from twentieth century art actions-scripts. This work was performed and recorded live for camera in a participatory workshop. Rainbow Jam was a performance script inspired by performance scores from 20th century art actions-scripts. Rainbow Jam was a meditation on paradise, meanings of community and symbolic metaphors about a world that is perfect. Everyone attending collaborates on this artwork; the collective reflections become a poetic series of instructions on how we envision a 21st century world and are performed and recorded live for camera with an ambient soundscape.
It’s Your Party by Nancy Buchanan, 2016
Co-Curated by Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver. This durational performance, is inspired by the ongoing "war on terror" and its consequences, is organized by Nancy Buchanan in collaboration with Stephanie Allespach, Amy Alexander, Arshia Haq and Marjan Vayghan. Much of the world is anxious to see what directions our powerful government will take following the upcoming Presidential elections. While our country is much observed by others, what do we, as citizens, know of the consequences of our government’s actions in other places? Or their history? How often are we presented with simplified clichés?
A Tribute to Rudy Perez, 2015
Launched and co-curated The Art of Performance @ UCI; Ulysses Jenkins and Deborah Oliver/Producer featuring a world premier performance by the Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble, a short documentary spanning his extraordinary achievements as a choreographer and dancer at the legendary 1960s Judson Church Memorial Dance Theater, to four decades of directing his own company in Los Angeles, and creating more than fifty works. Perez was presented the first Claire Trevor School of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award by dance critic Sasha Anawalt, followed by a talk with artist/critic Jacki Apple.