Announcing our first live performance since 2020!
March 26th and 27th, from 5-6:30p
at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena with
Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener and Julie Tolentino
Tickets are on sale now!
Press Release:
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. The event takes place on Saturday, March 26th and Sunday, March 27th, 2022, from 5-6:30p at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, a forward-thinking spiritual community in Pasadena (est. 1885). 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.
“The notion of ‘home,’ and safety has new resonance in the wake of the pandemic. This project explores some of these new meanings and implications,” says Chloë Flores, homeLA Executive + Artistic Director. “It is a critical moment for the performing arts, which took a major hit during the pandemic, and we are thrilled to be able to present this exploration in person—as it’s meant to be experienced—with all its intimacy and immediacy.”
For the last nine years, homeLA has featured Los Angeles homes with site-specific artist’s work that responds to the architecture, history, and ethos of dwelling in Los Angeles. In 2019, 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. With the support of a 2020 Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts grant homeLA is pleased to present its first live performance event.
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.
For this event, 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.
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. homeLA is fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts.
About Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena
Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church is a vibrant, modern, inclusive, liberal religious community with deep roots in Pasadena that date back to 1885. Today this progressive, spiritual community seeks to respond to the needs of our changing world. Unitarian Universalism has its roots in progressive, western religions; but today, the faith honors all traditions that seek the sacred through compassion, tolerance, and action.
About Rashaun Mitchel + Silas Riener
Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their ongoing work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. Together they have been artists-in-residence at LMCC, Mt Tremper, pieter, Jacob’s Pillow, New York City Center, The Watermill Center, MANCC, BOFFO, New York City Center, The Center for Ballet and the Arts, NCC Akron, and Baryshnikov Arts Center. Their work has been commissioned by Danspace Project, Madison Square Park, The Joyce Theater, BAM/Next Wave, The Barbican, EMPAC, The Walker Art Center, MCA Chicago, REDCAT, The Wexner, On The Boards, The LAB, Marfa Sounding, Culture Summit Abu Dhabi, SFMOMA, and MoMA PS1.
About Julie Tolentino
Julie Tolentino (she/they interchangeably) is a Filipinx-Salvadorean artist whose performance/installation practice explores the interstitial spaces of race, gender, relationality, and the archive. Their collaborative projects include video, devised objects, scent, soundscapes, and texts drawn from "outside" learning spaces of activism, alterity, advocacy, loss, and caregiving. Tolentino's work has been presented at museums, galleries, and festivals and will be featured with Ivy Kwan Arce in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. She is the senior Provocations editor for TDR (The Drama Review) and host of artist/writer residencies at Feral House*Studio in the Mojave Desert.
Throughout the 1990s, Tolentino ran queer club spaces in New York such as Clit Club, Dagger, and Tattooed Love Child; was a member of ACTUP New York, Art Positive, and House of Color Video collective; and in recent years, the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective. They co-created the Safer Sex Handbook for Women for Lesbian Aids Project/GMHC with Cynthia Madansky. Recents: Herb Alpert/Ucross Residency (2021); Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship (2020); Queer Art Sustained Achievement (2020); Foundation for Contemporary Art-Performance (2019); Pieter Dancemakers Grant (2018); BOFFO Fire Island Artist Residency, Fire Island, NY (2018); Bridge Project Community Engagement, San Francisco (2017-18); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2014-15); New Museum, New York (2013); PACT Zollverein Residency, Essen, Germany (2012); Choreographers in Mentorship and Exchange (2012 with Jmy Kidd and 2010 with Doran George); Art Matters (2010, 2015); Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios, London, UK (2002); and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (1999). She has been a guest artist and lecturer at Bard, Pratt, NYU, UCLA, New School, Columbia, and Cal Arts amongst others. Tolentino received an MFA as the Dean's Distinguished Fellow in Performance/Dance at University of California at Riverside 2018-2020. They are the Alma Hawkins Chair in the World Arts & Cultures Department at UCLA, Winter 2022 and is currently a scholar-in-residence at NYU Steinhardt (2021-2022). Tolentino is a 2022-2023 Queer|Art mentor with Ahn Vo.
