Andersmith / Materia – SPLIT

A split bill featuring the work of Andersmith and Materia.

Abstract, pedestrian, virtuosic, and quietly austere, Andersmith’s weather // body is a visual poem about physical and environmental change over time. Two performers ask how we consider our bodies in relationship to the spaces around them as a visceral landscape is built, rearranged, swept up, and discarded. Text and movement are inspired by multi-generational interviews, structure and design, considers climate change, weather patterns, and star fields. A singular guitar scores the piece.

Poetry, dance, sound, video, vital materiality. Through their ritual presencing practice, Materia immerses experience in worldly sensibilities with two simultaneous improvisational performances in Los Angeles and New York City. Live stream projections and feedback loops link performers, nonhuman entities, and ghostly matter in a technologically mediated environment that relocates potentiality and scatters attention in spiritual ecstasy. By activating a practice of being space-shared, this diffusion and distribution of vital capacities rejects individuation and extends human sensibility beyond the bounds of the body in and as an inseparable we, with all things human, nonhuman, past, present, and future.

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Andersmith is an LA-based multidisciplinary collaboration that brings together movement, theater, and music to create work that deals with the quotidian and the extraordinary, the body and effort, and the blurred line between what is real and the absurd. Led by Arletta Anderson and Adam Smith, their work has been seen at CounterPulse, ODC, Joe Goode Annex, the Exit Theatre, and beyond. They were 2017 artists-in-residence at CounterPulse (SF) where they developed weather // body, then returned in 2018 to premiere Good Strong Hands as part of the inaugural CounterPulse Festival. Prior to relocating to Los Angeles in 2019, they received commissions from the University of San Francisco and Shawl-Anderson in Berkeley, CA.

Materia is an improvisational artist collective that expands the capacities of embodiment and being. Utilizing poetry, dance, sound, and 21st century media to connect to a deeper sense of self and world, its members, human and nonhuman, engage in poethical practices of being (with). Minimally comprised of poet Joey De Jesus, vocal artist B Taylor, and dance artist Sammy Roth, along with others, the group has performed ritual improvisations at Basilica Hudson, St. Mark’s Place, and Spectrum NYC. For more see www.sammyroth.com/performance and https://dejesussaves.wordpress.com/.