Susie J. Lee Moves from the Gallery to the Theatre
Ying Zhou in Susie J. Lee's "For these Unclosings."
One of the words most frequently associated with Susie J. Lee's work is "ephemeral." Since her MFA work showed at the Henry in 2006, she's become a rising star in the Seattle art world, even scoring notice as an "Artist to Watch" in January's ARTNews, by creating works that capture a moment that's always slipping away into the imperfection of memory. She made a digital rainstorm in the main space of the Lawrimore Project in 2007, created rooms that converse with visitors, and used a variety of digital and non-digital techniques to explore the effect of light on surfaces.
So, having started with time- and movement-based work, it sort of naturally follows that Lee has moved on to outright performance. Tonight, at New City Theatre, her first performance-installation opens, a collaboration with dancer/choreographer Ying Zhou called For these Unclosings (Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m.; $15). Earlier this week, we met with Lee as she and her crew were finishing installing the impressive technical array that makes the performance possible.
The genesis of For these Unclosings came about three years ago, when Lee and her friend Ying Zhou began playing with the idea of projecting lines and images on a dancer's body.
"I was really interested in what's the metaphor?" Lee explained. "What could the line actually represent, what could a dot represent? And so we started in the improv developing things, like when you draw the line on arm or something, it feels like a finger touching it, or the memory of a caress. Or when it's cut in front, it's a border."
Originally, Lee started out with a digitally projected loop through which Zhou moved, but after a couple years of on-again, off-again work, when Lee finally decided to devote her energy to bringing the project to fruition, they decided that they needed something more spontaneous than pre-recorded video. So, through a friend, Lee contacted Andy Wilson, who works in research at Microsoft in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group.
Wilson developed an original program for the show that enables the remarkable performance Lee has put together with Zhou and a trio of other artists. VideoDraw, Wilson's custom software, uses a projector and infrared camera array, operated through a digital tablet, to allow artists to draw on Zhou as she moves in real time. (It's seriously cool technology; we got to play with it a little.) There's two separate arrays: one directly overhead, and one projecting from the front, which lets the operators work on Zhou from two perspectives.
The sensitivity of the technology, which responds to pressure from the stylus in a way similar to a pencil on paper, as well as offering a variety of digital effects, allowed Lee to build out the piece and explore what's at the root of her art: memory. In four movements, Zhou and the artists operating the drawing tablets, explore the experience of processing memory.
"There's kind of this overall arc in the piece, which is, how do you go from a position of closed to open?" Lee said. "The title...is basically this idea of, how do you take something that might be difficult, like memory or experience, and get to a place where you're sort of 'unclosing' or 'letting go' of things. And it's not linear, in the sense that they're just these snap-shots, but they're these states of how you remember things," she explained. "And so, one of them is the kind of longing, nostalgic kind of thing. Another one of them is very playful--like how sometimes if you're walking down the street, and you're thinking about something in the past and you just start laughing or something like that."
Aside from Zhou, Lee has brought together a talented group of collaborators to pull off For these Unclosings. The two tablet operators are Keeara Rhoades, another noted local visual and video artist who Lee's known since grad school, and Reina Solunaya, a local filmmaker and theatre artist. The music was composed and is performed live by Emily Greenleaf.
Working with such a large group of collaborators was a new challenge for Lee, who was used to working more or less alone to create her work. "About seven or eight months ago, I wasn't sure what kind of collaboration this was going to be," she recalled with a chuckle. "I knew they'd brought in this original work, and so I was like, is it really our project? And then the dancer, Ying, actually said, because I was like, 'What do you guys think?' and it was this very democratic thing, and she was really quite outspoken and verbal, and said, 'Look, Susie, this is your piece, I wanted to work on a piece with you, I wanted to work on your piece, so you actually have to make a decision.'"
For now, the show is scheduled to run two weekends at New City Theatre. But Lee is certainly looking for other opportunities to put on the piece elsewhere, possibly even in Italy, where she's represented by the Galleria Tiziana Di Caro in Salerno.
