THEATER / MOVEMENT
Paul Outlaw & Joe Seely
DUET
Monday, October 17, 2022 at 7:30pm
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) / Ahmanson Auditorium
250 S. GRAND AVE LOS ANGELES
Paul Outlaw is eternal. He is legion. Outlaw discovers booty left by those much too faint of heart to unbury the chests of pain and torture that are the Black experience in the United States. That he finds joy only attests to the specificity of his excavations. The joy is not in the material. The joy is in knowing that many chose to survive and pass down this sensibility for any strong enough to learn it, earn and use it. Paul Outlaw finds joy in forcing you to re-witness the terrible, the atrocious, because it is part of your American dream.”
—Anna Beatrice Scott, performance artist/ethnographer/educator, COLA 2012 catalog
Painful, crusty: Two seasoned satyrs wrap themselves in a velvet artifice of memory.
DUET is a new devised performance work-in-progress that explores boyhood, maturity and mortality through storytelling, movement, masks and video.
Original text, dramaturgy and images: Paul Outlaw and Joe Seely
Masks and accessories: Joe Seely
DUET was presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art as part of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs.
Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is organized by Alex Sloane, Associate Curator of Performance and Programs, with Amelia Charter, Producer Performance and Programs and Brian Dang, Programming Coordinator.
Paul Outlaw is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based multidisciplinary performing artist whose award-winning projects have been presented across the United States and in Europe. The central themes of his artistic practice are the constructs of race and sexual identity, and how violence has haunted them throughout Euro-American history. Paul played the title role in Pepe Danquart’s SCHWARZFAHRER, winner of the 1994 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. One of Paul’s current theater projects in development, BBC (BIG BLACK COCKROACH), will premiere in Fall 2023 at Los Angeles’ REDCAT (Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theater).
Joe Seely is an actor/performer and designer who has performed on film and stage internationally. He is interested in identity as a construct that both shields, extends and represses the identified. He has won awards for theater and puppetry design, most recently receiving a Los Angeles Critics Circle Award for his work designing phalluses at the Getty Villa. Prior to that he won an Ovation Award for puppetry design and LA Weekly Awards for production design and mask design. He created the masks and hands on view tonight because he needed to see them somewhere other than in his imagination. He is honored to be able to play with Paul, whom he adores.
DUET is our eleventh collaboration since 2011—five with Asher Hartman’s Gawdafful National Theater—and our first new work creating and performing as a duo.
A 15-minute version of DUET was performed at Human Resources LA in Spring 2022.
