The Art of Resourcefulness in the Unconscious
Exceptional work merging shamanic channeling, contemporary art and electronic music. Transgressive masterpiece of live art. - Yannah Paradise, peformance artist
Claire Zakiewicz, in collaboration with performance artist and shaman Siw Laurent, presents a live soundscape and drawing ensemble where Laurent plays the role of a blindfolded 'automatic' draftswoman in dialogue and response to Zakiewicz's sounds, set design and the presence of the audience. This performance explores boundaries of duality and non-duality and degrees of taking and letting go of control in painting. This performance furthers Zakiewicz's academic research into the phenomenology and architecture of drawing.
Zakiewicz has been developing a visual and sonic language based upon fundamental principles in drawing that are multi-modal - translatable across sound, sight and movement. She designs sound, stages environments and choreographs movements that make use of the Meisner acting technique and philosophy relating to presence of mind, improvisation, time, space and phenomenology. Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound, performance and drawing.
I give control to an improviser whose gestural mark making is in response to the spirit of the sounds within the space. Their impulses are embodied patterns - vitality affect contours (dynamic time-shapes) navigating through anticipation, tension and resolution. It’s a mediumistic act that must then be completed by the viewer. - Claire Zakiewicz
Using Norse shamanic techniques and perspectives based on C.G. Jung’s theory on the collective unconscious, she enters an altered state of listening, submitting her body and voice to become what she is receiving with the purpose of retrieving vital universal information and guidance for the collective as a whole, which she expresses through a guttural language-less performance.
By stepping beyond my sense of identity and persona, a merging with the quantum field of the audience and the collective unconscious is permitted to happen. This allows for the development of a bodily, sensorial interaction where the rational mind is unburdened by the responsibility of living life, and rather receives support in life's burdens from a deep place we all have access to. Native tribes across the world live in the acknowledgement of this collective field of wisdom, and what we practice here is a reconnection to something seemingly lost and a retrieval of what belongs to us by birth. - Siw Laurent
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Itinerant Performance Art Festival, May, 2018
Siw Laurent: Active Body Listening
Claire Zakiewicz: Sound and Set Design
Dannie Lu Carr: Poetry
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I crafted characters such as a submissive blindfolded draftsperson who responds intuitively to sound through gestural mark-making. I moved further away from the source of control by manipulating the movements of an actor using shamanic channelling who drew in response to my improvised soundscape. Their role was to truthfully respond to the sounds moment-to-moment within a prescribed set of limitations. - Claire Zakiewicz
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Dispatch by Lenna Pierce for Hypocrite Reader
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'Wah Wah' at Noumena: Initiation (curated by Jana Astanov), June, 2018
The Plaxall Gallery 5-25 46th Ave, Long Island City, NYC
Siw Laurent: Active Body Listening
Claire Zakiewicz: Drawing and Sound Design
Mariana Alviarez: Sound Design
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The Mothership for Greenpoint Open Studios, May, 2018
Siw Laurent: Drawing and Active Body Listening
Claire Zakiewicz: Sound and Set Design
Dannie Lu Carr: Poetry and Voice
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The Mothership Salon, May, 2018
Siw Laurent: Drawing and Active Body Listening
Claire Zakiewicz: Sound and Set Design
Dannie Lu Carr: Poetry and Voice
Photo Credit: Andy Isaacson
Video Documentation |