LARS JAN and EARLY MORNING OPERA: HOLOSCENES Roundhouse Park, 255 Bremner
What if, going about your daily routines, you suddenly found yourself underwater?
This is the premise of Holoscenes, an ambitious water-based artwork by Lars Jan’s experimental multimedia performance lab, Early Morning Opera. Fittingly, its genesis was an ordinary event: reading the paper.
Jan, who’s based in New York City and L.A., couldn’t get out of his mind a 2010 New York Times photo of people caught in a flood in northern Pakistan, a place where he has family. Its beautiful composition reminded him of Raphael, but at the same time it was an image of utter devastation. He had a vision of a person inside a box of water, the water level going up and down.
Research on floods and climate change led him to the concept of the Anthropocene, the idea that we’re no longer in the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years but a new geological era marked by the impact of humans on the planet.
He was surprised that few are aware of this concept. “It’s an interesting metaphor or lens into our total inability to deal with the problem of climate change, but also with lots of long-term issues that require thinking on a scale at which we’re not really evolved to think,” he says over the phone from New York.
“I want to access the imagination as a way to make up for our lack of sensory capacity to think and respond to the long-term.”
To draw a connection between the massive forces unleashed in violent weather events and our mundane habits, he and his collaborators began a search for repetitive daily rituals that performers could enact inside an aquarium. Their complex collection process involved a world map, connecting with people near 52 random GPS points and an open call for daily-life videos. (Check them out at holoscen.es.)
“I was looking forward to tremendous diversity in everyday behaviours. But what I’ve found is really interesting: people in a lot of different places make tea in a lot of different ways, but a lot of our lives are just about making tea.”
Holoscenes is slated to travel to art venues in Florida and California next year. “Every new place we go, we’ll use new videos to make new behaviours in the aquariums and add to the old ones,” he says. “My hope eventually is to create a menagerie of 24 behaviours that rotate between three aquariums in a 24-hour performance – a triptych, complementing and counterpointing one another in strange ways.”
In Toronto, where Holoscenes will be presented outdoors to a mass audience for the first time, the EMO team – which includes a fountain designer, an aquarium builder and the head of aquatics for Cirque du Soleil’s Vegas show O – is working with one 4-metre-tall rectangular tank. Four performers each take a 90-minute shift, rising to the surface for breath and sinking as they struggle to continue their actions. Two are Toronto dancers Ben Kamino and Lua Shayenne, a connection made through the project’s Nuit Blanche producer, choreographer Jenn Goodwin.
An algorithm based on climate conditions controls the speed of the system, which can drain or fill the aquarium with 12 tons of water, heated to 32°C, in less than a minute. Underwater and surface microphones capture sound that’s mixed with compositional elements.
For future iterations, EMO is collaborating with climate scientists on information handouts and considering using local docents to facilitate audience discussion.
“It’s a massive undertaking for our group of creators and the producers, MAPP International Productions – everybody is doing something that’s very far out of their comfort zone. It’s a scale that we haven’t worked on before,” says Jan. EMO’s previous projects have combined provocative performances with innovative projections.
“I often think of the performers as test pilots, getting in this thing that nobody’s ever gone in before. We’re extremely serious about safety. Water is an incredibly powerful and dangerous force.”
Though he’s building on the tradition of zoos and aquariums as well as aquatic entertainments like Vegas’s Bellagio fountains and Esther Williams movies, Jan’s also critiquing the practice of collecting and exhibiting exotic specimens.
“An art piece that’s part of a global conversation inherently holds lots of biases. I want to take up the challenge of having a global conversation while also acknowledging that there’s a colonial history of searching far-flung corners of the earth for diversity for cabinets of curiosities or menageries in European courts. Aquariums are also ways of looking at the world’s diversity and having people who don’t get to travel see those things and understand that they exist.
“It’s very tricky. The point is to be in a public space and create something that’s entertainment but also a location for conversation and consideration about issues that are not usually taken up in a spectacle.”
Jan’s background informs his approach to the global and the local. Raised in the U.S., the son of an Afghan mother and a Polish father (whose Cold War history is the subject of a new EMO project), he’s been travelling since he was 19. He’s done public art projects in Afghanistan, where his mother now runs a girls’ school, recorded traditional music in Ukraine and apprenticed with a Bunraku puppeteer in Japan.
“Central Asia’s been very important to me,” he says. “Travelling to less populated parts of the world allows me to get back in touch with a long-form thought process that we lose in urban places. It’s really great for thinking about origins or associative daydreaming, a rich source of my artwork.”
Will people make the connections between global and local, everyday life and climate catastrophe amid the hurly-burly of Nuit Blanche? Though granting agencies he’s worked with try to quantify the impact of art, as an artist Jan doesn’t find this process useful.
“I’m going on the assumption that some instinct I don’t have control over is guiding me, and somehow it resonates inside other people. That’s been my experience of other artwork that I’ve loved, and I’m hoping that’s also the case for me as a maker.”
art@nowtoronto.com
