“Performance doesn’t just magically appear on a stage. Behind every work, there are years of creative development, months of rehearsal and a continual pursuit of support."
Annie Saunders is a multidisciplinary director and live artist, and the founding artistic
director of site-specific performance company Wilderness. Her installation The
Home for Domestic Violence Awareness Month won the UK APA awards for Best Experiential
Campaign and Best Use of Technology for Good in 2020. Irish composer and vocalist Emma O’Halloran freely
intertwines acoustic and electronic music, writing for folk musicians, chamber ensembles,
turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, film and theatre. Wild Up, the
popular Los Angeles-based new music ensemble under the direction of Christopher Rountree,
has been called “…a raucous, grungy, irresistibly exuberant…fun-loving, exceptionally
virtuosic family,” by The New York Times. While in residence with CAP UCLA,
Saunders, O’Halloran, Rountree and the members of Wild Up will be
developing Rest, an interactive performance installation that looks at
multi-sensory experience, the nature of consciousness, the suggestibility of the mind, ‘dopamine
fasting’ and sensory deprivation. The piece gives a visceral opportunity to feel and consider
what rest means in the modern world. Development and research will include interviews with
consciousness experts to conversations with everyday folks talking about their earliest sense
memories and their relationships with their smartphones.
https://www.wildup.org/project/rest/
https://about.me/anniesaunders
https://www.emma-ohalloran.com
Meklit is an Ethio-American vocalist, composer and cultural activist, making music that sways between
cultures and continents. She is known for her electric stage presence and innovative, deeply
personal Ethio-Jazz songs. Her performances have taken her around the world, from Addis Ababa -
where she is a full blown star - to San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, Nairobi, Cairo, Montreal, London,
Zurich, Rome, Helsinki and many more. Meklit’s latest album “When the People Move, the Music Moves
Too” was named amongst the best records of the year by Bandcamp and The Sunday Times UK, climbing to
the top of the iTunes, NACC, and European World Charts. Meklit is Chief of Program at Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow,
and a former Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University. She has collaborated with the likes of
Kronos Quartet, Andrew Bird, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and musical legend Pee Wee Ellis. Meklit
is co-founder, co-producer and host of Movement, a new radio series and live show telling stories of
global migration through music.
www.meklitmusic.com/
Eiko Otake is a movement–based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as half
of the internationally acclaimed Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has been performing her own solo
project, A Body in Places. Eiko & Koma created 46 performance works, two career
exhibitions, and numerous media works. Always performing their own choreography, Eiko & Koma
usually designed and handcrafted all aspects of their works including sets, costumes and sound. They
presented their works numerous times at American Dance Festival, the Walker Art Center and five
seasons at BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Eiko & Koma were honored with the first United States
Artists Fellowship (2006) and Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). They are the first collaborative pair
to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1984), the first Asian choreo-
graphers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award (2004) and a Dance Magazine
Award (2006). Eiko’s solo activities earned her a Special Bessie citation, and the Anonymous
Was a Woman Award. She visited post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima several times with photographer and
historian William Johnston. Documentation of these visits led to the creation of A Body in
Fukushima, a variable photo and video exhibition that has been shown in many cities. In
2017, Eiko launched her multi-year Duet Project: Distance is Malleable. In this project,
collaborating with a diverse range of artists living and dead, Eiko explores ways to maximize the
poten- tials of selected artist-to-artist encounters.
eikoandkoma.org/
CAP UCLA commissioned Eiko Otake in partnership with Cyprian Films to develop a filmed program at the Ucross Foundation in Ucross, Wyoming.
This residency is in partnership with Ucross Foundation. ucrossfoundation.org
Edgar Arceneaux investigates historical patterns through drawings, installations and multimedia
events, such as the reenactment of Ben Vereen’s tragically misunderstood blackface performance
at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Gala. In the artist’s work, linear logic is abandoned
in favor of wordplay and visual associations, revealing how language, technology, and how systems
produce reality as much as describe them. Seemingly disparate elements—such as science fiction,
civil rights era speeches, techno music, and the crumbling architecture of Detroit—find a new
synchronicity in the artist’s hands, ultimately pointing to larger historical forces such as
the rise of the surveillance state. Arceneaux’s installations have taken the form of
labyrinths, libraries, multi-channel videos, and drawn landscapes that change over the course of an
exhibition, only ever offering a partial view of the whole at any given moment. This fragmentation
extends to the artist’s use of historical research in his work, such as FBI documents
concerning civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., where redacted passages are presented on
mirrors that reflect the viewer’s curious gaze.
http://studioedgararceneaux.com/