[microsound] SAN FRANCISCO

[jeff gburek <tsazmaniac@xxxxxxxxx>]

i created from and will improvise upon fragments of
artaud's voice for this unsound body performance in SF
tonight and tommorrow... 



"wife, life, tripe, damnit and THAT"
a performance of electro-acoustic sounding of the
unsound body 
by Djalma Primordial Science
dedicated to the spirit of Antonin Artaud
February 25, 26, 2005 at 8pm, 
Jon Sims Center for the Arts, 1519 Mission Street, SF,

$12, tel: 415-554-0402, www.jonsimsctr.org 
 www.djalma.com 

"Then you will teach him to dance inside out/ as in
the delirium of our accordion dances/and that inside
out will be his true side out"

Based in part on the banned 1948 radio-broadcast of
French surrealist poet Antonin Artaud?s "To Have Done
With The Judgement Of God", this work by Djalma
Primordial Science cleaves to the roots of Artaud?s
hallucinatory prophecies. The famous French poet was
submitted to brutal electro-shock therapy during WWII
and yet emerged to write and perform his greatest
works which are drawn from in this presentation by
Djalma Primordial Science. 

"wife, life tripe, damnit and THAT" is a work with
teeth and current political relevance as Artaud?s
monologue concerns the imagined practice of the
American public schools usurping the seminal fluid of
male students for the artificial cloning of armies to
spread the superiority of American products throughout
the world. Performed first by Artaud in 1948 on the
eve of the Cold War, this work today sounds fresh,
almost written into the present climate of
war-mongering and consumerism, as if no time had
elapsed at all. The original radio broadcast has been
digitally stretched, spliced and manipulated by by
Jeff Gburek and this new treatment of the text is
supplemented by improvised textures on prepared
guitars and live signal processing.

Although the text presents Artaud?s vision, the work
of movement theater artist Ephia explores the feminine
elements of Artaud?s personality which emanated into
his writings during his electro-shock therapy and came
to be called "the unborn daughters of my heart". These
semi-fictional daughter/lover/warrior/liberator--s,
these innocent and filthy girls endure great hardships
in their attempt to liberate their lover/father.
Neneka is the youngest daughter, hence simultaneously
the oldest, as this was also the name of Artaud's
Turkish grandmother. Neneka is a fetal kitten slipped
from the womb too soon, a spill on the floor, a
formless body and dripping caul, a smudge. She is
discovered in "the puddle state of electro-shock," a
terrifying place of trembling void. 

"And my whole inward electric body, the whole lie of
this inward electric body which for a certain number
of centuries has been the burden of every human being,
turned inside out, became like an immense turning
outward in flames, monads of nothingness bristling to
the limits of an existence held prisoner in my lead
body, which could neither get out of its lead coating
nor stand up like a lead soldier." 

The extensive research for "wife, life, tripe, damnit
and THAT" took Djalma Primordial Science to Mexico?s
Sierra Tarahumara in October 2003. Artaud visited the
Tarahumara Indians in the 1930?s seeking to learn
about the visionary experiences of those who "eat
right out of the earth the delirium that gave birth to
them" and whose vigorously physical spirituality
Artaud thought offered a remedy to Western
technological decadence. "wife, life tripe, damnit and
THAT" a site-specific performance dedicated to the
spirit of Artaud premiered April 25, 2004 in Austin,
TX at a welder's studio: large machines looming, metal
pipes bursting with flames. The next incarnations of
this project appeared September 23, 2004 in
Birmingham, AL at Omni Studios the site of an old
slaughter house, October 21, 2004 in New Orleans, LA
at The Jewel Gallery the site of an old brothel, and
October 29, 2004 in Phoenix, AZ in Teatro Caliente
Festival.

Further incarnations will appear in 2005:
January 31, February 1, 2005 The LIDA Project Theatre,
2180 Stout St., Denver, CO
February 25, 26, 2005, Jon Sims Center for the Arts,
1519 Mission Street, San Fransisco, CA. 
March 8, 2005 at NISUS/Galeria Galou, 237 Kent Ave.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 
March 13, 2005 at Meet Da Lama Festival, Copenhagen,
Denmark

DJALMA PRIMORDIAL SCIENCE:
DJALMA PRIMORDIAL SCIENCE is the seven year
collaboration of dancer Ephia and experimental
musician Jeff Gburek. Intensely committed to
improvisation (as a way of life) their unpredictable
approach to performance constantly seeks to deepen and
defy itself. "Our unsound bodies can be found within
the low rumbling of the wind, within the shuddering
and irregularly-shaped space of the heart?s murmur."
Djalma?s process begins with elemental transformation
of the body: the dancer?s bones reluctantly wring
themselves out leaving a trail of moisture on the
brow, her limbs become delicate tissue paper catching
fire, her form evaporates and condenses again. Like
the origin of sound in movement: the dance is not only
seen but felt, transmitted directly from the body of
the mover into the body of the viewer. 
Jeff Gburek correlates his work with reconfigured
guitars, field recordings and altered electronic
sources to the physical search of the unsound body as
Ephia practices it. Body (extended) becomes ear
entering an (in)animate realm of subtly shifting
textures, iso-events and disruptions that impel the
clattering machinery of dream, a terrain of
chaotically ordered microcosms, cuts concealing grain.

Accent is placed on receiving from the environment
rather than producing. The works of Djalma Primordial
Science---appearing throughout the United States and
Europe in theaters, galleries, music venues, derelict
buildings, gaping holes in the earth-- draw on the
particulars of landscape and architecture in order to
dismantle and reconfigure the illusory SPACE of
"theater" into a real situation of intensely felt
experience. For more information please visit:
www.djalma.com 

PRESS: 
"Djalma Primordial Science is making real art. They
have been using a hammer for a flute now for years,
and are very skillful at making use of the new
language the tools suggested to them. It may take an
audience member a while to get used to this new
language, but drinking in the syntax fundamentally
alters the way you breathe, the way you are? This work
doesn?t try to make friends; it is exactly what it is,
just as a hurricane or an oil spill is what it is.
Ephia takes her body apart and puts it back together
wrong, so that her hand receives the messages the
spleen was supposed to get, so that the eyes are in
the soles of the feet, leaving her blind and
trembling. We go with her on the journey of this new
body across the room, and back again, and across the
room, and back again, because the journey is not
through space but through states of being. In a way
this is journalism, a clear communication of the news
from a foreign country."---Alexander Fearnside,
Albuquerque Magazine

"Fascinating sense of instrumentation and
undissectable movement: hypnotic and dreamlike until a
pitch of physical and sonic intensity forces you to
look around the audience to see who is going to
crack...a captivating work which really challenges the
boundaries of the observer?s consciousness." Professor
Eugene Douglas, Department of Theater and Dance,
University of New Mexico. 

ARTIST BIOS:
Ephia studied dance with Min Tanaka , Kazuo and
Yoshito Ohno, Anzu Furukawa, and Akira Kasai.
Following her interest in ritual dance, she traveled
to study under reknown teachers in Ghana, Java and
Bali. She holds a BFA in dance from Columbia
University (NYC). She danced in the company of the
late Anzu Furukawa in Berlin, appearing in Furukawa?s
final production, Goya: La Quinta del Sordo. In 1998,
she began her collaboration with musician Jeff Gburek.
In the seven years of consistent performance and
teaching with Djalma Primordial Science, Ephia? s
deeply physical practice has gradually been recast as
the UNSOUND BODY, characterizing her concentrations on
instability, frailty and magma as movement imperatives
and her strong desire to scratch away the veil of
illusion from theater, leaving a spare and potent
bodily encounter within the shifting landscapes of
sound, time, and place. Her production Null Achtzehn,
a requiem for the nameless victims of the WWII
Holocaust, has appeared in the theaters of Germany,
Italy, and Poland. Djalma Primordial Science was a
company in residence at the Tricklock Company's
Revolutions International Theater Festival 2002. They
performed the 12-hour-long Naufragio Ballante at The
Land/ an art-site. After an extensive tour of the U.S.
in 2004, their production MYOPIA the secret boxcars of
pubescence was presented in Amsterdam in conjunction
with an Excavations within the Unsound Body workshop
sponsored by PIA. Current undertakings include the
transmedia project ASYLUM: a study of place/ghost and
Wife, Life, Tripe, Damnit & THAT, an homage to Antonin
Artaud featured in Teatro Caliente Festival 2004 in
Phoenix. In addition to their annual seven day
workshop in the desert of New Mexico, INTEGRATING
WITH/DISINTEGRATING INTO THE LAND, they regularly lead
workshops for actors, dancers, therapists, and all
those interested in unleashing a deep internal
expression. 

Jeff Gburek has been playing guitars for 29 years and
has been performing widely throughout Western Europe
and the USA. During the 80?s he developed a
personalized steel-string acoustic style influenced by
Indian raga and Arabic maqamat, providing the
technical backdrop for his more challenging table-top
guitar & electro-acoustic treatments. He employs
traditional & prepared guitar techniques, along with
signal processing and field recordings, to create a
blend of improvisational-compositional music drawing
on the processes of musique concrete and the
philosophy of the unsound body, crossing and
re-crossing imaginary boundaries in sound. He studied
Javanese gamelan with Pak Suhardi in Yogyakarta and
has performed with gamelan ensembles in Cirebon, Jogja
& NYC. Other projects include the Berlin-based
electro-acoustic trio ZYGOMA with percussionist
Michael Vorfeld and sampling by Michael Walz.
Additional appearances with reknown East German
trombonist Konrad Bauer and English guitar pioneer
Keith Rowe, confirm a continual interest in European
experimental music. In the USA, he has worked with
Indian sitarist Neel Murgai, Kyle Bruckmann, Chris
Forsyth and Daniel Carter and recorded the Javanese
rebab for Indian dj Nitin Sawhney. A CD of guitar
solos and electro-acoustic compositions called
ENERGARIUMS has just been released by the German label
NUR/NICHT/NUR. (visit www.energariums.com for ordering
info). His 10 Improvisations for Shortwave Radio was
broadcast as part of the Nonsequitur Foundation's
AetherFest 2003, an international festival for radio
art. O?um Kasr, Mother of All Ports, Track 3 from
Energariums, is part of the touring exhibit Del
Acuerdo Y Del Conflicto in Spain which is going to
Cuba next. new reviews at bagatellen.com    





		
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