Peter Marks in HA-M-LET. Photo: Jazzyshots/STUDIOteatrgaleria. Courtesy of CalArts.
Presented by the CalArts Center for New Performance in partnership with Hauser & Wirth, the one-night-only event is a multilingual, multimedia performance installation that repurposes Shakespeare’s iconic revenge tale for today’s information age. (November 8th)
Valencia, Calif. (Oct.21, 2019) – On Friday, Nov. 8, CalArts’ Center for New Performance (CNP) partners with Hauser & Wirth to present the U.S. debut of HA-M-LET from critically-acclaimed Brazilian performance and media artist Peter Mark. The special one-night only performance take place at Hauser & Wirth in the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District. CNP is the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Peter Mark’s theatrical remix is a multilingual, multimedia solo performance housed within a projection cube. Shakespeare’s themes of madness, deceit, and familial conflict take digital form as Mark’s tumbling thoughts and projected animations reach a vivid state of saturation, swirling around the artist as he grapples with the images he has unleashed, and their flickering ghosts.
“Shakespeare’s text can meet whatever you throw at it – and that includes GIFs, memes, and the most contemporary images,” said Mark. “Just as Hamlet didn’t know how to cope with what was required of him by the ghost – the image – of his father, I wanted to explore that same connection between body and image; how the past, present, and future can all be layered; and how images can beckon us to act beyond ourselves.”
Sourcing material from the original play, internet pop culture, home videos, 2D and 3D animation (including three original animated films), live footage, music, costumes, and choreography, HA-M-LET transforms projected image into landscape, body, narrative, and biography, shifting at a rate that pays homage to Hamlet’s own velocity of thought.
The artist has cast and filmed his Brazilian parents in the roles of King, Queen, and Ghost, rendering the conflict of the play’s narrative as both textual and real – simultaneously liberated and confined by the layers of media. In the video, Mark’s parents speak in English, while Mark speaks Portuguese, further exploring the idea of what it means to be translated, mediated and grappled with.
Conceived to be performed in non-traditional performance spaces, the piece uses the cube and props as an anchor, while the projections and live performance can morph and scale to the environment around it, shifting between intimate and epic tone. The performance’s set, costumes, and assembled bricolage remain as installation pieces in the aftermath, telling yet another story about the relationship between image and reality.
HA-M-LET was first performed publicly in Warsaw last year, as part of the CalArts Center for New Performance residency with STUDIO teatrgaleria, one of Poland’s premiere experimental theaters. The project has been in development since 2017 – alongside a similar, yet-to-be-debuted remix of Romeo and Juliet. HA-M-LET was developed in association with Automata Arts.
HA-M-LET will be performed twice, beginning in Hauser & Wirth’s courtyard.
WHEN: PERFORMANCES
Friday, Nov 8 at 7:30pm
Friday, Nov 8 at 9:00pm
WHERE: Hauser & Wirth
901 East 3rd Street // Los Angeles, CA 90013
Presented in partnership with Hauser & Wirth, more information at hauserwirth.com
CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP)
Founded in 2002, CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP) is the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts. Established to provide a unique artist- and project-driven framework for the development and realization of original theater, music, dance, media, and interdisciplinary projects, CNP extends the progressive work carried out at CalArts into a direct dialogue with professional communities at the local, national, and international levels. CNP offers seminal artists from around the world resources to develop new works that expands the language, discourse, and boundaries of contemporary theater and performance. By infusing the work of transformative artists with the talent, vitality and impulses of emerging artists in the CalArts community, CNP fosters the future of live performance.
Hauser & Wirth has built a reputation for its dedication to artists and support of visionary artistic projects worldwide. In addition to presenting a dynamic schedule of exhibitions, the gallery collaborates with renowned curators to present museum quality surveys and invests considerable resources in new scholarship and research. Since its earliest days, the gallery has mounted historically significant exhibitions. The inaugural exhibition in 1992 took place at Hauser & Wirth’s first gallery, located in the first-floor apartment of an Art Deco villa in the heart of Zurich; it united mobiles and gouaches by Alexander Calder with sculptures and paintings by Joan Miró. Since then, the gallery has continued to forge an academically rigorous, ambitious program of historic exhibitions, providing a natural home for a number of major 20th-century European and American artist estates, and encouraging a continued and engaging discourse around their oeuvres. These include Louise Bourgeois, The Estate of Philip Guston, The Eva Hesse Estate, Allan Kaprow Estate, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, The Estate of Jason Rhoades, Dieter Roth Estate and The Estate of David Smith.