Hearts and minds collide in performance event
By Paige Parker
Feb. 5, 2009 9:53 p.m.
How do human attraction and logic intersect in the brain?
It’s a question worth an entire art project being dedicated to it, or so thought Negin Singh, creator of the upcoming Attraction/Logic performance event, taking place on Thursday and Feb. 19 at 8 p.m. at the NoHo Art Gallery.
“You walk around every day being affected by how you are attracted to people, and it’s difficult to understand emotions and to understand or to come to any sort of real conclusions about why you’re being attracted to this or that. That’s something I hope to leave to the audience,” said Phillip Kelly, artistic director of Theatre Unleashed, the company hosting the event.
Creator and co-director Singh, who graduated from the UCI drama department in 2008, and her friend and former UCLA student Jack De Sena are the brains behind the project. Singh initially planned the show to be a one-woman narrative based on her own experiences and mistakes in relationships, but the final product will be much different; Singh chose 15 different artists working with various mediums to respond to the topics of attraction and logic.
“The more and more I developed (the idea) the more I realized that I wanted other stories to be a part of it, and how much I wanted to create something that spoke universally,” she said. “That’s how the project was really born ““ with me realizing just how much questions needed to be explored by people who were different than I was.”
Singh had previously directed 10-minute performances in Los Angeles coffee shops with Theatre Unleashed for “Coffee Shop Tours” and sought the company’s involvement for her newest project. Theatre Unleashed agreed, sharing her interest in experimenting with art forms and venues.
“(It’s about) bringing together all of those different styles of art and performance together to create something that was a little more intimate and a lot different than what a lot of other theater companies are doing,” Kelly said. Kelly saw the venue for the show, an art gallery, as a great way to place viewers on the same plane as the performers.
Singh decided to reach out to the community in developing the event, inviting both artists and non-artists to participate in a collaborative and multimedia art piece. With the help of Theatre Unleashed, Singh and De Sena has put together what she calls a “performative investigation” focusing on where attraction and logic intersect in the brain.
After posting listings on Facebook and Craigslist looking for artists interesting in creating art about attraction and logic, Singh and De Sena received an impressive 70 applicants. The 15 chosen artists include choreographers, directors, visual artists, musicians, and others.
“The people who we ended up choosing were not only really talented … but also had this insane potential to create something even bigger,” Singh said. “And they all had this frustration with what was going on right now in the art scene and wanted to get away from that and do something that was really authentic and different and that was going to ask them to use their minds.”
The collaborative artistic process forced the artists to reflect on their own experiences with attraction and logic in a series of group discussions and meditations that took place over two months. Each of these meetings would focus on a different topic such as commitment, virginity, abuse, fear and childhood.
The group then met a second time each week to use what they had discussed to inspire works of art.
In addition to using their own expertise, the artists often broke away from their specific discipline during these sessions, daring to explore a new medium.
“Personally as an artist I think (this type of creative process) gives (artists) insight and refreshes their artistic brain for other things they do. So when you go back to your acting and performing you’re able to see things in a new light,” said Kelly, who will also be performing for the event.
After the sessions, Singh and De Sena chose what they believed was the most powerful work and brought it together in a combination of various art forms. Many of the individual pieces ended up melting together into a separate piece.
“My end goal is to bring (this type of performance) much more into the mainstream and not make it as scary for people to experience this kind of thing,” Singh said.
“I really want people who regularly go to theater or don’t go to theater to come to this and feel that this is something they can connect to. And (that) this kind of art is something that represents them. … Hopefully people will be able to see themselves in the art.”
