Nothing is Broken

• movement #1 – What if I just…?
• movement #2 – Who is Commanding Who?
• movement #3 – I Remain in the Dark
• movement #4 – Out of Sight, Out of Mind
• movement #5 – Nothing is Broken

This piece is filled with questions. Nothing is Broken is a portable mini opera that resembles a ceremonial rite and the initial inspiration was Beckett’s tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” Maybe it was inevitable then that what would end up was this existential opera. After all, if one presents a question, it assumes that they are waiting for an answer and it’s really more of a realization or acceptance that the answers may never come or will they? We, as a society, are in a place of questioning right now. And we, as individuals, also find ourselves in a sea of questions. Therefore, taking delight in the asking of questions, without necessarily providing answers, seems to be the appropriate course of action at this point or is it?

Performed by Julie Adler & Sylvia Desrochers
Music by Julie Adler, text/lyrics by Julie Adler & Sylvia Desrochers
Staging by Sylvia Desrochers

This is the audio recording of the entire piece.

Presented at REDCAT: STUDIO ‘08 in Los Angeles, CA and Theatro Caliente in Phoenix, AZ as well as at Beyond Baroque and Dangerous Curve Gallery in Los Angeles.

© 2008 all rights reserved

Chair follows the sorrowful existence of a woman, chair and environment. A perspective of abandonment and a fable of gendered performance and capital gone awry in an office space in downtown Los Angeles.

“Initially mundane images of a trashed office building are complemented with rhythmic electronic music; eventually a strange conglomeration of woman and chair appears, like some creature from the near future. The office cyborg scuttles from room to room in a genuinely eerie depiction of what could happen if we all keep working so hard.” -Res Magazine

Chair and Performance by Julie Adler
Audio-Visuality by N_DREW (aka Andrew Bucksbarg)

Chair has also be seen at 312 online and the Milk Bar.

©2002 all rights reserved

From the Emissary to the Wanderer.  They have messages for each other.  Geophonic intersections Voices in the Strata (sphere).  She crosses paths with Her.  A geostrophic occurrence?  Or a geodesic one?  A stone’s throw…into infinity or a microsecond.

This video contains highlighted excerpts from a performance by Jacki Apple and Julie Adler in Santa Monica at the Arcadia Club as part of the All Stars of Performance Art curated by The Dark Bob. ‘A Stone’s Throw’ first premiered at Hot & Sticky, a performance art anthology, compiles performance artists inot a continually lively often startling and ever unpredictable evening, which was curated by Deborah Oliver. It was then presented at the New Experimental Variety Show for Side Street LIVE and at All Stars of LA Performance Art Act III hosted by the Dark Bob (with John Fleck, Andy Dick, The Dark Bob, Dan Kwong, Linda Albertano) at the Arcadia club, Santa Monica pier.

“Julie stood motionless with a bucket on her head while Jacki recited a somber poetic litany. Not funny, not mean-spirited, the piece was a welcome change from all the slapstick that preceded it. Did the capacity crowd listen? You could hear a pin drop.”
Dianne Bates, LA Times

(this was the original audio piece that was the backbone of the piece)

©2000

as part of Marin’s 21st Century Dance & Music Collaboration
@ Marin Center Showcase Theatre

Choreography by Heidi Landgraf
Music by Julie Adler

“With four performers, one of them singing Pandora Snailfly (composer Julie Adler) and Clarissa Berger’s fantastical costumes, Landgraf managed to create an insectarium of creatures yet to be classified by Darwin. …Caught’s itsy-bitsy spiders, I was quite sure, had escaped from Alice in Wonderland.”
Rita Feliciano, Dance Magazine

©2001

2 TV monitors, live audio, two bobble heads, live legs – a performance and collaboration between performer/artists Julie Adler & Andrew Bucksbarg. A fanciful exposure of legs, virtual heads and the space in between. Figurative, literal, disembodied and obvious and then not so. Built around improv, the towering head videos are singing or making sounds, expressions being tried, they responding to each other. Legs follow suit, down below, getting in the way and finding one.

This was originally premiered at the Bank Building, Los Angeles, CA and then presented again as part of the New Experimental Variety Show at Side Street LIVE.

©2001

This piece began as a sculpture.  I had the notion of being not just on the bed but inside of one. So I gutted the inside of a box spring mattress, fitted it with contact mics, florescent lights and a clear plastic top.  I rigged the base so I could slide in and out of it.  Then I found a piece of music that matched perfectly the sentiment of being trapped and yet finding a way to express that and then get free of it, thus I sang Joy Harjo’s ‘I Give You Back’ as the anthem of Inbedded.

The first performance was actually in the parking lot of Cal Arts, as a test run.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The second was more elaborate set up in the Modular Theater as part of the Cal Arts Interdisciplinary Festival.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The third performance of this piece took place in a smaller theater and included a presentation of Next to the Pale,  an original video incorporating another sculpture/prop (see: Chair), along with other theatrical elements imbedded into the performance, such as a juxtaposition of Barbra Streisand imagery and that of myself through different stages of my life and hooded bodies inhabiting the desert, and the stage floor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is also the audio recording of the vocal performance of ‘I Give You Back’

Based on the Greek myth of Philomela as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and more currently eschewed by the poet Ted Hughes, this piece begins with a modern ‘Greek chorus’ of 4 talking heads that recites the basic tale: a young woman, Philomela, is raped and her tongue is cut out by her brother-in-law, Tereus, a king who then confines her to a lodge in the woods. Philomela reveals the crime to her sister by working the details in embroidery. Her sister, seeking revenge, serves up her son Itys for Tereus’ supper.

This piece deals with trauma and transformation and its is Philomela’s inner struggle to find another means of expression, another voice. It is a struggle to find her own language, to inhabit and claim the transformation that has been forced upon her, to make a kind of sense of her experience. It is also a struggle of the survivor and the artist and of the imperative of bearing witness. All action takes place in the ‘lodge’ and Philomela’s habitat is a pile of used dirty mattresses with a manhole gutted in the middle and a long plexiglass tube extending from the side of it which is in the unique Modular Theatre of Cal Arts. In fact, this work was primarily conceived from a visual/design perspective, and incorporated much more of a sound ‘scape’ rather than a traditionally scripted narrative.

Leah Mercer – Director/ Producer/Creator/Writer
Julie Adler – Producer/Creator/Writer/Scenic Designer/Composer
Rande Dorn – Choreographer
LeeNah Yeo – Scenic Designer
Wren Crosley – Costume Designer
Doug Ridgeway – Technical Director
Jovin Lin – Lighting Designer
Eric Kuehnl & Greg deBeer – Sound Designers
Erika Michelson – Stage Manager

With:

Heidi Landgraf, Grady Cousins, Rande Dorn, Paul Archibeque, Brian Stanton, Tara-Beth Connolly, Diane Archibeque, Kelly Doyle, Julie Adler, Jessica Tunick, and Kate Conklin

Special thanks to: Jacqui Bobak, Theresa Chavez, Susan Solt, Chris Barreca, Mona Heinze, Darcy Huebler, David Rosenboom

Presented May 13-15, 1999 in The Walt Disney Modular Theatre as part of the Cal Arts Interschool Project Fund & the School of Theatre present in association with the Cal Arts School of Music and the School of Art.

Chair on wheels.  Extended torso, more limbs.  I decided to wheel this around the streets and it eventually became the video piece here as well as the main prop in a theatre piece called ‘Vaginamouth’ for Los Angeles Women’s Theater Festival as well as the featured ‘character’ in Chair, a video collaboration between myself and multi-media artist, Andrew Bucksbarg.

In “Next to the Pale’, videography by Julie Adler and Lara Bank
Music: ‘Birds in Warped Time II’ Somei Satoh
New Albion Records ©1987

©1997

Risking self-contempt, in the spectacle, ’shut up, you’re making a scene.’ How can I make a spectacle of myself and call it liberating? Questions to consider when creating something, I made a 4 1/2 foot high steel pedestal with red velvet base and revolving top.  Standing tall, and wanting to feel what it is like to be on display, I created a music recital around the prop.  The video includes excerpted highlights from a full (1 hour) length recital as well as an improv another evening.

Click here to view the embedded video.

with: Lisa Sylvester (piano) & Erin Barnes (percussion)
music included works by Aaron Copland, Ravel, Hildegard von Bingen
in the Main Gallery, Cal Arts

The pedestal also had a ‘mobile’ setting, meaning, I had an alternate poll, reduced to 2 1/2 feet that I transported in my car to various locations.  The energy to turn the pedestal came from my car.  We (the pedestal and I) went to the Walmart parking lot in Canyon Country as well as a local cul-de-sac.

Click here to view the embedded video.

©1997

A spontaneous improvisational performance in Placerita Canyon, CA by composer/performer/collaborator Joshua Yang and myself.

©1997