homeLA at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church

March 26 + 27, 2022

homeLA presents homeLA at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church, a site-specific performance event and installation with dance artists, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and interdisciplinary artist, Julie Tolentino, curated by Chloë Flores.

The church is home to a diverse community with bodies of various abilities, gender and sexual orientations, and racial and cultural heritages, and serves as the site for artistic inquiry by Mitchell, Riener, and Tolentino who will present work in response to notions of home as a long-standing progressive spiritual community through an interdisciplinary performance event for a roaming audience. 

homeLA was invited by former Neighborhood Church Senior Minister, Rev. Lissa Gundlach, to explore a partnership with a spiritual community amid a lengthy reparation process, addressing its association with founding member, Nobel-Prize physicist and eugenicist, Robert Millikan.

The church’s home includes The Cole House (1906-1907)–a Craftsman commissioned by Mary E. Cole and designed by American Arts and Crafts architects, Greene and Greene, on Millionaire's Row in Pasadena.  The residence was repurposed for the church in 1968: the upstairs bedrooms became offices and the downstairs living areas remained communal.  The interior is dark with wood paneling that absorbs the light filtered through the numerous windows and stained glass. The Craftsman sits behind a 100-year-old Sequoia grove amidst a flowing landscape and sprawling campus.

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener will present, Time Being, an outdoor performance that proposes dance as an act of healing, a tool for spiritual connection, and a space to celebrate, commemorate, and express devotion in contemporary society. Audiences will encounter dancers navigating their own desire lines and engaging in incidental and focused hot-spots of choreography throughout the church’s campus. Recorded audio scores and live sound meditations will guide the audience through the experience, allowing each observer to choose their path through time while illuminating connections between the environment and each other. Dancers include Marjani Forté-Saunders and Jen/Zhen/珍 Hong (洪慧珍). Live music will be performed by Phillip Greenlief. Costumes will be designed by George Venson (Voutsa).

Time Being is the latest performance conjuring of Mitchell + Riener’s practice “Desire Lines.”  A “desire line” in landscape architecture refers to an unofficial route or social trail: sometimes the shortest distance between two points, sometimes simply a good way to follow one’s curiosity. Desire lines represent an accumulated record of transformation in public space. This phenomenon is applied to a permissive dance-making project that invites one to reimagine the self and its environment.

Julie Tolentino will present, LOVE COME QUICK, an unfurling of visual and movement experiments by Julie Tolentino, her sister, Rita, and Los Angeles based video, sound, movement artists and students.  Drawing inspiration from the Cole House, its Greene & Greene architect-siblings and their Eastern-influenced craftsmanship, Tolentino centers Rita as a way to offer tribute and gratitude for her influential energy, impact, and style.  LOVE COME QUICK champions other ways of encountering one another’s radical presence and explores ways to encounter exchange, (re-)opening, recognition, and joy. Sonic layers created by artist/musicians Marc Manning and Neighborhood Church choir director, Dr. Zanaida Robles, will draw viewers closer to the voice and messages evoked from the iconic house and its grounds and accompany the movement play between bodies and surrounding natural structures. LOVE COME QUICK features live and projected imagery created with videomaker, George Gallado-Kattah and the performers.

Press

Culture Spot LA - Site-Specific Postmodern Dance in Pasadena

LA WEEKLY - Arts Calendar March 24-30

LAist - The Best Things To Do In LA And SoCal This Weekend: March 25 - 27

homeLA at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church is produced in partnership with the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena.

This programming is made possible through a 2020 program grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.  This activity is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov.