Studio Theater in Exile Presents “Sculptures in the Audience”

Sculptures in the Audience. 

Jo-Ann Brody (video and sculpture installation).

From April 26- May 15 in the STIE theater @ HVMOCA, Thursdays and Saturdays 11:-5:00.

Description: Mara: “For many years, Brody, Barkman, and I have collaborated on a theater piece to go with the opening of her shows at CERES gallery, NYC. This past year with COVID restrictions in place, we opted to create a video of the Perfect Mind reading that would be paired with a tour of Brody’s and Liz Nydoye’s work. The installation of Brody’s sculptures in Studio Theater in Exile audience brings performance and art into an intimate relationship.”

ARTIST AND PERFORMER

BRODY: Brody started with clay sculpture; she moved to cement to create larger, life-sized women. Both materials are from the earth and retained their earth tones; currently she is working in paper mache—still figurative but now with color and collaged image from her photography and from magazines and books. The forms are familiar, but the addition of image and color adds a new dimension. There are references to her surroundings encountered on daily walks.

ARTIST

Lizz Ndoye continues her love affair with her doll “creatures” – soft, fabric, humanoid figures that she makes and installs in tandem with her large canvases and drawings to depict aspects of their doll culture and existence and ability to heal.

PERFORMERS

Mara Mills, Artistic Director, STIE. And DramaturgeMara is a writer across many genres and a stage director for over 40 years. Her love is original work and interesting formats that break the rules of proscenium theater. With Livia Strauss, President Hudson Valley MOCA, Mara has collaborated for 16 years on image/word projects. Studio Theater in Exile is now housed at HV MOCA . NOTE: “For many years, Brody, Barkman, and I have collaborated on a theater piece to go with the opening of her show at CERES gallery, NYC. This past year with COVID restrictions in place, we opted to create a video of the Perfect Mind reading that would be paired with a tour of Brody’s and Liz Nydoye’s work. ”The installation of Brody’s sculptures in the audience brings performance and art into an intimate relationship.”

As a writer/actor, Donna Barkman has performed her solo plays, “Hand-Me-Downs: Scenes from a Life with a Little Help from Antigone and Mother Goose,” and “Sticks and Stones and Women’s Bones,” in New York City and environs. produced in NYC and Westchester. She wrote and performed two pieces in The Ides of March at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Sticks and Stones and Women’s Bones, directed by Mara Mills was written based on Scar Tissue, an art installation by Jo-Ann Brody and performed in 2017 at HVCCA. Her poetry has appeared in The Westchester Review, ragazine.cc, Bray Arts Journal, Chautauqua, Boston Literary Review, and others. Her poetry has appeared in Chautauqua, Boston Literary Review, String Poet, Per Contra, Pennsylvania English, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, and others, as well as in many anthologies. Ms. Barkman served as a juror for the Bronx Council on the Arts Poetry Competition and has regularly written and performed poetry and short plays for many ekphrastic events at Upstream Gallery and Hudson MOCA for in Westchester, and Ceres Gallery, New York City.

About the poem: Thunder, Perfect Mind is a poem written by an unknown woman circa 400 A.D. (C.E.) . It is part of a collection of Gnostic Texts found at Nag Hammadi. It is thought to have originated in Alexandria, written in Greece and translated into Coptic and is the only manuscript known to have survived. Scholars assume it was written by a woman since its form and content follows early Jewish, Egyptian, and Gnostic poems said to be “… the self-revelation of a powerful goddess.” (Patricia Cox Miller: Professor Syracuse University)

More info: https://www.africanamerica.org/topic/thunder-perfect-mind-nag-hammadi

Adapted for performance by Mara Mills; Videography, Jeremy Gratt.