Riting: Rebecca Bruno and Alison D’Amato in conversation with Alexx Shilling
Alexx Shilling: What are some of the motivations or questions that brought you to Procession Relic?
Rebecca Bruno: Procession Relic is part of a larger research project, Life Keeping Recipe for a Relic, in which I am wondering about how to relate regenerative cycles (as seen in agricultural methods focused on soil health) with choreographic practice. I am exploring this link in ephemeral works like this performance, and through sculpture and painting in the context of a residency at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. The project is about trying to contain both hopeful and dismal outlooks in confronting issues related to a changing climate. For instance, menstrual blood is a robust fertilizer, but it is divorced from soil in current conventional modes of land cultivation. By processing menstrual blood dilutions through a bio spectrometer – a machine that measures the molecular contents of a substance by shining light through it – one is able to translate the nanometer measurements of the blood’s light absorption into color schemes. I am hoping to then create a small light show depicting the readings of menstrual blood that are both inside and outside a spectrum visible to humans. This process is at once exploring a biological link between women’s bodies and the earth while existing as a detached or distanced object. A question arising from this (taking embodied information into material processing) has to do with what kind of containers these objects become?
One thing that has stayed with me while working on Life Keeping Recipe for a Relic, is the physicality of the earth’s soils’ capacity for breathing and how land cultivation has and continues to interrupt this process. Our soil actively absorbs, holds and releases carbon.
Another question for me has been, what is a kind of dance that is synonymous with ‘no-till farming.’ Is it a ‘non-doing dance?’
In advance of the LAX Festival we asked Riting.org to partner with us in profiling the twelve pieces in the festival. Rebecca’s performance, PROCESSION RELIC, opens on October 11th, 2018, at Bootleg Theater in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and runs again on October 12th and 14th. Details can be found here.
Riting is an experiment in writing that engages with performance happening now in Los Angeles. Riting is a ground for encounters between artists, their critical community, and the public they belong to. Riting brings together a multiplicity of bodies and a polyphony of voices. Riting supposes there is no definitive untangling. Riting assumes mutuality of investment in the ecology of performance activity in this city.
