Popova

An immersive installation by Katya Popova and Katarina Miljkovic

Installation space, North Adams
MAY 10 - JUNE 16, 2019

In memory of Eva Hesse

”ELEMENTAL” is an immersive installation inspired by the basic structure of things. Its visual form explores the inner world of painting and cardboard, their visceral and abstract qualities—intersection, edge, line, negative space, texture, color, and movement. In the process, a series of juxtapositions-dichotomies emerge—archaic versus modern, organic versus man-made, heavy versus light, durable versus ephemeral, vertical versus diagonal.

The installation is composed of sculptural visual elements, real-time video re-projection, and sound. The sound mirrors the visual net of “the structures” by utilizing an algorithmic process of evolution of a complex modular texture based on simple rules. Intersection with the visual is established through sonic material, entirely derived from the sound samples of objects used for the installation and their interaction. The resulting sonification of the visual separates sounds from their objects and projects them into the space creating a living acoustic environment of shadows and echoes.

Composer Katarina Miljkovic investigates the interaction between science, music, and nature through collaborative musical performance. Miljkovic has been working on the sound mapping of the elementary rules from Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science. Her work in this field has been presented at conferences and festivals in the US and Europe.

Katya Popova is a multidisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of physical texture, shadow, and sound. Her works explore what could have been by tracing the physical gestures and material qualities of everyday things. She often works in collaboration with sound artists. Her installations have been exhibited locally and internationally.

Katarina Miljkovic and Katya Popova both teach at the New England Conservatory. Miljkovic is a Chair of the Music Theory Department. Popova teaches courses on Visual Art.

During World War II, the site that would become MASSMoCA in North Adams was transformed from Arnold Print Works textile mill into the Sprague Electric Company.

Outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, Sprague was a major research and development center, conducting studies on the nature of electricity and semiconducting materials. After the war, Sprague’s products were used in the launch systems for Gemini moon missions… From the post-war years to the mid-1980s Sprague produced electrical components for the booming consumer electronics market. - MASSMoCA, “History”

In 1969, an amplifier engineer for the Gemini moon missions, Alan R. Pearlman, founded a synthesizer company in Lexington, Mass. (120 miles east of North Adams). ARP Instruments introduced their 2600 model in 1971: one of the first commercially available sound synthesizers and made with Sprague “Orange Drop” capacitors.

Orange Drop (2019) is a poetic re-rendering of sounds that have historically inhabited the spaces of this site. Using objects found in North Adams (industrial metal pieces, conveyor belts, and other debris left here in the wake of global capitalism), the two artists construct an array of sonic sculptures in Building 12. The New England textile mill architecture of Building 12 is itself the third agent shaping sound with its vaulted cross wooden beam ceiling and brick.

An ARP 2600 is installed among the sculptures and resonates an ode to archaic technologies and architectures. The artists move through space and sound the sculptures in harmony.

Live performance and documentation installation 26-28 February 2019. Audio documentation recorded binaurally.

MASSMoCA “History” MASSMoCA.org Accessed 24 February 2019 https://massmoca.org/about/history/
Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco Analog Days Cambridge: Harvard, 2004
Craig R. Waters and Jim Aikin “The Rise and Fall of ARP Instruments” Keyboard Magazine (April 1983)
“Owner’s Manual” The ARP Synthesizer Series 2600 Newton Highlands, MA: Tonus, Inc, 1971 with thanks to Nicholas Whitman, Carl Schmidt,  Carolyn Clayton, and Instrumental Library at NEC.

Made possible with support from Assets for Artists

DIRECTIONS:

Performer 1

• Enter through the Northern entrance

• Moving as slowly as possible between actions,
  make these sounds one or two times:

Metal ball roll
Wheel roll
Pendulum into plastic tree
Heavy metal seesaw on floor
Metal spring roll
Pendulum into boxes
Plastic cloud unicycle
Conveyor belt drag

Performer 2

• Enter through the Southern entrance

• Improvise in response to the actions of Performer 1

Pipes overhead with metal rods
Packing paper drag
Plastic tree crunch
Linear chimes
Grid chimes
Cowbell
Plastic cloud crunch
Whatsit chimes

Time based performance, 3 hours

Time flies in front of the screen — is it a story of imminent death or eternal bliss?Allowing ourselves to forget and be forgotten, to be drawn into its alternative reality… Creating intimate space to loose oneself in its meditative travel.

PERFORMERS: KATYA POPOVA, ADAM TUCH
SOUND/VIDEO: ADAM TUCH

Context: DAP (Dorchester Art Project), July 21/2018

Multimedia shadow performance

What comes first, sound or visual? Who is the puppet and who is a puppeteer?How the sound can be expressed through an amalgam of shadow gestures and the visual textures? The multimedia performance "Sonic Puppet" grew out of artistic curiosity towards these matters.

Sonic Puppet was performed twice — as a collaboration-trio and as a solo project.

Time based performance; 30-1 hour.

“Water is fluid, soft and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which
is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding
will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox:
what is soft is strong.” — Lau Tzu

Based on graphic score

Trombone:
John Cushing

Water sounds/movement:
Katya Popova

"Originale", an interpretation of a theatrical performance by Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1961, staged at the New England Conservatory in June 2018 during SICPP summer festival. This is a except from the 18 teen minute performance of "The Artist". See the review by "The Boston Musical Intelligencer": classical-scene.com/2018/06/21/inmates-sicpp/.

Set of instructions: "The Artist" creates and then destroys her creation.

Direction and performance by Steven Drury.

A shadow performance for the Whole Tone Opera production after the poem by E.E. Cummings by Dominick Argento — “Who knows if the Moon's A Balloon..." performed by Nora Maynard.

Who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
( and if you and I should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves”

― E.E. Cummings

Singing: Nora Maynard
Visual content, design and puppetry: Katya Popova

In this piece I wanted to create a unique character of Death that moves away from the traditional symbolism associated with Death’s image (i.e., the typical dramatic representation of a male figure cloaked in black from Bergman’s films or a skeleton from Durer’s engravings). Instead, this image invites audiences to see death as beautiful, natural, and nurturing, pointing the way towards eternity.

The play takes the form of a dance performed in three parts that represent the three different stages of Death’s transformation: birth, dissipation, and rebirth. Her “white” presence is counterbalanced by the puppeteer (her antipode), dressed in black. At the end of her act, she turns into a shadow of herself and disappears. Overall this performance is a fusion of Eastern and Western theater traditions (inspired by Philippe Genty). 

The ambient electronic sound creates juxtaposition against the tactile paper textures of the play. 

Puppetier, director: Katya Popova
Electronic sound created by Kevin Butwill

Puppet Showplace Theater, Puppet Slam, Brookline, 2015

It is an interpretation of the old popular Russian fairytale about the adventures of Kolobok (flour ball). 

Kolobok is a puppet performance in three acts. In the first act, Kolobok is born into the house of an old couple. His parents love him, but he runs away into the forest and meets different animals (during the second act), who are interested in eating him. Kolobok is singing a song, bragging about his powers to escape and manages to get away from all of the animals (Bear and Rabbit) until he encounters the Fox (during the last part), who tricks him and devours him in the end. 

Even though the play is based on a simple children’s folk story, for me it creates other layers of meaning showing Kolobok as a “dreamer” and an “artist”, who tries to find inner freedom, escaping from family bonds. It is a story about creativity, but also self deception. Overall, it is a profound narrative about the human condition. 

The performance involves hand puppets with puppeteers, as an integral part of the act. The set design consists of shadow screen and design elements (brown paper). It is fifteen minutes long. 

Overall the music was influenced by Stravinsky’s “Peter and the Wolf”. It is an arrangement for the “wind section” (saxophone, trombone and flute) and the keyboard / synth. Words are not important for the play and are substituted by sounds and gestures: trombone plays the part of the Bear, while saxophone stands for the Rabbit and flute represents the Fox’s sound. All the themes connected to Kolobok’s motion and singing are interpreted by the synth/keyboard. The score is written by Musa Qubailat (New England Conservatory graduate). 

“Kolobok” was rehearsed several times in different settings (see the next page for visual references, but its visual style would change in future performances. 

A shadow play, retelling the story of the world in a 15 min performance/loop—from birth (creation, construction) through growth (development, learning) to war (destruction, deconstruction).

Direction and puppets: Katya Popova
Live music by New England Conservatory students: Billy McShane, Jake Rudin, Nick Neuburg, John Cushing.
Puppet Showplace Theater, Puppet Slam, Fall 2015

A play in three acts about the artist in search for his creative freedom.

Written and directed by Katya Popova
Puppeteering by Katya Popova
Acting by Alexander Kozin
Music by Daniel Veksler and Marios Nikolaides

Proposal for The Micro-festival of unfinished puppetry,
“Les Sages Fous”, Trois Riviere, Canada

Praised by artists and studied by psychotherapists, rhapsodized and criminalized, obsession is of dual nature: it inspires and moves us toward the loved object, even to the point of that object’s destruction. This project explores the tragedy and beauty of this dual nature through a transformation of material and form.

Sound by John Mallia
Puppeteering by Ariana Lee

Director: Evgeny Ibragimov

Аннотация: В искусстве не существует «своих» и «чужих», «наших» и «не наших». Это единый и уникальный мир, в котором каждый может найти свое место и творить вместе с другим художником. «NASHIИНАШИ» – это межжанровая работа, приоткрывающая зрителю таинство создания как кукольного, так и уличного и музыкального театра. Это уникальный сплав разных выразительных средств, эксперимент с кукольным приемом – от традиционных перчаточных верховых кукол до марионеток и театра теней.

Исполнители: Бессокирная Елизавета (Севастополь), Иван Дементьев (Московская область), Деркач Анна (Йошкар-Ола), Дроздов Дмитрий (Камышин), Куприянова Евдокия (Нерюнгри), Лемешевская Владислава (Великобритания), Лодоева Оксана (Улан-Удэ), Максимук Роман (Эстония), Мамедов Рустам (Узбекистан), Панина Татьяна (Красноярск), Подковырова Мария (Москва), Попова Катя (США), Порываев Саша (Севастополь), Саркисян Армен (Армения), Сетьков Евгений (Курск), Старцева Анастасия (Нягань), Таранова Вита (Симферополь), Тарахчян Анна (Армения), Умнов Андрей (Московская область), Цыганец Екатерина (Кемерово)

I took part in the Butoh Performance "Tree", directed by Ellen Godena.
Read More

8 Bits is a live performance, involving eight movement artists and one narrator. It is an international collaboration.

The project was born out of a 2015 theater program in Russia, where international artists first collaborated and realized their common goal to use art to forge stronger bonds between peoples whose countries are in conflict with each other.

As time goes by, technology becomes more sophisticated, smaller, faster and more convenient, thus changing our way of thinking and feeling . . . our memory. 8 Bits asks of fast-paced modern societies: "How do we communicate and learn?" It creates visceral dialog between spoken language, body language, and computer programming language, both revealing their differences and exploring the process of understanding itself.

See more information at http://nashael.blogspot.com/

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
— Leonardo Da Vinci

“Where there is power, there is resistance.” — Michael Foucault

Resistance is an inner force we all experience as human beings. My project attempts to reconstruct different stages of this experience (vision, overcoming, frustration) and explore its emotional state. 

This project is inspired by the work of Lucio Fontana. 

Direction and design by Katya Popova
Movement by Yuka Takahashi