Last weekend at Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles Performance Practice’s LAX Micro Fest spanned Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, an attentive audience lit by sun and then moonlight through those sprawling Pieter windows. Lead producer and curator K. Bradford introduced a lineup that came, they shared, out of organic conversations with the artists.
LAX Micro Fest – “Opening Rainbow Grief Ritual: To honor the Land,” led by collaborators Lindsey Red-tail and Eres Medicina – Photo by Argel Rojo.
Friday’s opening began with an “Opening Rainbow Grief Ritual: To honor the Land,” led by collaborators Lindsey Red-tail and Eres Medicina. Performances by DaEun Jung, Anuj Bhutani, Tsiambwom “T” Akuchu, Nina Sarnelle, and Paul Outlaw graced the space. Folks returned the next morning for Saturday’s activities; I attended the morning programming.
LAX Micro Fest – Elizabeth Metzger – Photo by Argel Rojo.
Elizabeth Metzger read first, from an upcoming manuscript. Works about her son’s understanding of mortality felt fresh and tender and dark; she named the children dying in Palestine, and the room let grief wash over us. “The going is forever,” coincidentally the manuscript’s title, stuck with me long afterward. Other works engaged with Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, communing with nature and calling on Nefertiti.
LAX Micro Fest – Noura Alhariri – Photo by Argel Rojo.
Noura Alhariri shared selected prose about grief as a grapevine, her words winding and punching through the air between us. She told us how Palestinians know how to use all the parts of the grapevine: the leaves, the fruit, the stems. She told us how the grapevine searches; how “there is liberation in the searching, and we are most alive when we are doing it.” She told us how her grief feels and looks and tastes during the genocide of her people. She opened her grief to us frankly and graciously, and her vulnerability was a gift and a call to action.
LAX Micro Fest – B Gosse, Farrah Hamzeh, and Tuesday Thomas in “The Grafters” by Wesleigh Gates – Photo by Argel Rojo.
This iteration of Wesleigh Gates’ “The Grafters” pulled in collaborators B Gosse, Farrah Hamzeh, and Tuesday Thomas for an examination of trans women in the horror genre, infinite citations woven into a delightfully humorous (and sometimes reluctant) reclamation of tropes.
“As I’m sure you may have heard, trans women are women,” Gates quipped, the girl group stepping in and falling out of time to Ethel Cain, Robyn, and Q Lazzarus’ Goodbye Horses (yes, from that scene in Silence of the Lambs).
Stitching in the surgical sense gave way to the metaphorical sense, the cast appearing before us as composite/complete. Gates toys with who gets the final say — she calls a group of cis audience volunteers to demonstrate a human centipede, she lets the music cut out before she and the dolls exit.
LAX Micro Fest – Vanessa Hernández Cruz’s in her solo “Patient Zero” – Photo by Argel Rojo.
Vanessa Hernández Cruz’s “Patient Zero” concluded the morning performances. In her entrance and introduction, I was struck by her self-advocacy. Cruz’s work is deeply intertwined with disability justice: having known her a few years, the fact that she advocates firmly for herself and others was not surprising. Rather, it was the way this advocacy slowed and enriched her performance.
The work, a meditation on the decolonization and passage of time, was so open that it seemed to suspend the entire room. Cruz’s movement was more dynamic than ever before, and her pauses and punctuation commanded the space and score (an original piece by Cody Perkins). Beneath all of the expertly planned choreography, improvisation, and staging, there was my friend underneath it all. Vulnerable and exhausted and still pushing forward and backward and through her obstacles, she found her own time.
LAX Micro Fest – Vanessa Hernández Cruz’s in her solo “Patient Zero” – Photo by Argel Rojo.
“Grief is a time capsule,” her voice rang through the speakers. I felt the audience open themselves up in response, nodding internally and leaning forward to carry Cruz through her solo’s end.
In the programming that followed, Toogie Barcelo + Joe Berry helped returning audiences to digest the Friday evening and Saturday morning works with “Sound Body.” Afterward, a reception celebrated the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships Catalog Release. Lindsey Red-Tail and Yozmit the DogStar closed the night, with works “Infinite Spirals of Light – Emergence” and “PRNCX_DaDe,” respectively.
Sunday afternoon bookended the festival with meital yaniv’s “rattle death rattle,” rafa esparza’s “threshold,” and a Dance Church led by Kate Wallich to sweat it all out.
For more information about Los Angeles Performance Practice’s LAX Micro Fest, please visit their website.
Written by Celine Sauquillo Davis for LA Dance Chronicle.
Featured image: LAX Micro Fest – “Sound Body” by Toogie Barcelo and Joe Berry – Photo by Argel Rojo.
