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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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