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Lucifer Landing II



(Performance, 45m, 2019, Abrons Arts Center)

Lucifer Landing is a two-part series of works conceptualizing Blackness and the geopolitical, specifically post- humanism. 

In Lucifer Landing I, González takes the ideas of poet June Jordan and CHARAS as starting points to create an immersive environment in PS1’s VW Dome, which is intended to function as an interactive sculpture on sustainable modeling.  Active in the Lower East Side during the 1970s, CHARAS was a collective founded on the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, proposing geodesic domes as an alternative model for social housing. Over the course of two days on April 19 and 20, González invites visitors to enter this environment one at a time — surrounded by a sonic-responsive lighting design and original libretto referencing celestial cosmologies. In this work, González proposes that solitary dwelling within this space can be considered a choreographic action unto itself. Lucifer Landing I will offer visitors a contemplative space to consider what they term “the entanglements between the state of dispossessed non-being that is Black life with the non-human and the architectural.” This extended exploration concludes on Sunday, April 21 with a choreographic representation of self-immolation.

Lucifer Landing II, presented in Abrons Arts Center’s Playhouse Theater, attempts to exhaust mechanisms of the ‘epic’ in human innovation and theatrical invention through the form of classical opera to fathom an end to idealizations of the ‘human’, and the possibility of living and dying well in this contemporary time.


LUCIFER LANDING LIBRETTO
i. OVERTURE

I. MARS : FIRE : TETRAHEDRON

projected text
There is a barren beige opening A making of silt and sod making up the wasteland “I” am no longer necessary as no one is in sight Perhaps “I”, too, do not exist And for that, I speak in we We, of objects, of alliterations, of architectures breathing Pulsing of fractal imageries and quelching climaxes A cough is less a disturbance More a sign of life – accidents as natural, as nature, as none Home, Home, Home, is what dreams concoct Lullabies of easy rocking under cotton knit and mother’s milk Mmh, mhmhmhm No embrace precludes the trappings of material life Bodies of scorn, sequestered, undone for the maturation of man, He The original sin Made in the eye of a God, Let us be forsaken As none of us ARE good, Nor innocent?
I am a mirage Make me dance and drink and fuck Until preoccupations confuse me to believe in self-control In autonomy In love mused in the manifestations of mine alone, Naivete will be the death of the angelic And the wicked No martyrs remain in the bondage of contemporary life, The bitter feedback of solemnity reveal unto me that I have been another fool of hope, hope, hop, pop Fool to the hallmark of the commons How would I not see the price tag attached to the appendages of my flesh? To the whom of my grandmother’s ovaries? To the saplings bred from the seeds scented of salt and thatch And cane once grounded in the follicles of her hair? We, as in now, remain in the tumult Amnesia is steady like the boil of tea Drink up, sweety A chronicle, A litany of nothing I need to touch your touch touching me
How real am I under here the touch touches tucking back like folded newspapers or a tuft of hair or rubber band balls, the core broke, knotted entangled waste. Can we find the waste? Can we unravel the knots or can the cannots or do nothing at all, is it working? The reminding tumble you can hear it you can’t hear it when you can’t feel it if it’s touching us. How close to an understanding of unraveling toothpaste tubes would actually help unjam the soda machine? The scientific method teaches us this much: To ask lots of questions. There are no bad questions, only good fucks It’s always good for whom to have more information? You can never do enough research when you already know you’re dead and dying. Is my colon showing? If they died yesterday would we be at our funeral? Can caring less do more? Can the tree hear me? Can the cheese remember her mother’s udder? Don’t forget me. I already forgot you hurt my heart Enter me Enter me Enter me Enter me Enter me Enter me

– Rudy Gerson and Jonathan González

II. Mercury: Earth : Cube

III. Saturn : Air : Octahedron

IV. Venus : Water : Icosahedron

V. Jupiter : Ether : Dodecahedron

ii. EPILOGUE


SOUND DESIGNERS
Rena Anakwe
Johann Diedrick
GENG
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

SET DESIGNERS
Jonathan González
Pamela Liou
Rena Anakwe

VIDEO DESIGN
Pamela Liou

LIGHTING DESIGN
Rudy Gerson

PROJECT MANAGER & ADMINISTRATIVE PARTNER
Nadia Schwartz Tykulsker

FOOTAGE FILMMAKERS
Pamela Liou
Rudy Gerson
Chris Cameron

PERFORMERS
Jonathan González
Face the Music
Studio 57
Anna Yeh
Roman Lafia
Tiyon Hargrove
Austin Celestin
Taja Graves-Parker

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