Legacy

A new performance by Sara Wookey presented by Automata Arts Los Angeles

tumblr_llyvwrdY7x1qje7eco1_500.1AUTOMATA PRESENTS: Sara Wookey’s new solo performance/lecture

Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects

The performance considers dance as a disappearing act, an erasure as construct, and questions recurring subjects floating in the public sphere- such as the preservation, ownership, and value of dance itself.

Through image, movement and text, Sara reflects on being a subsidized artist in Europe in the 1990’s, a freelance artist creating site-based projects in Los Angeles, and a selection of responses to her well known Open Letter to Artists. She spins together large themes of legacy in dance, the economic condition of artists, and strategies for making it (including a humorously touching, yet failed, fundraising campaign on Kickstarter), into a digestible, funny and poetic consideration of dance in our time.

MARCH 15 & 16, 8:00PM
MARCH 17, 4:00PM

SEATING IS LIMITED: Please purchase your tickets in advance at Automata Arts 
$15 General
$12 Members/Students/Seniors

Short Darwin films online

while-darwin-sleepsI’ve just been watching a series of short films exhibited online by the artist-moving-image agency Lux in honor of the 200th year of Darwin’s birth. They’ve put up four short films that consider, in their words, “Darwin’s complex legacy”.

There are a couple of real gems there; go have a look. In particular:

Paul Bush’s While Darwin Sleeps 2004 (illustrated) is a four-minute film that animates 3,000 dead long-dead insect specimens, cunningly using their very diversity to bring them alive again.

And Ben River’s wonderfully slow and measured Origin of the Species 2008 is a portrait of an unnamed auto-didact hermit, fascinated by the big questions of life and nature. In occasional moments of voice-over reflects on them from the solitude of his woodland hut. Among the gems of wisdom he dispenses is this one, which I particularly love:

“Man’s brain. It evolved real quick. And it’s trouble. It’s just trouble.”

Go to the Lux collection of Darwin-related films.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology