Similar to my sounds and sips event of years past, this was a great time to get together and enjoy an unstructured flurry of sounds and tones that I think is an amazing environment to feel alive in. And a great time to play my clarinet!
Kismet Arts Tangent
Art Collective
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I spent three hours on Christmas Eve in my living room exploring movement with a peach colored sheet to some meditative music, livestreaming to Facebook.
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Last summer, I had an idea to write a screenplay for me and my friend Robbie Bruens. I enlisted help from one of his collaborators, Jeg Jooper, who was the cinematographer of Treefeelers.
The logistics was tight. I would bus down to LA for five days and work around their schedules for two evenings of shooting. Robbie arranged some photogenic locations (we needed a bedroom and a bathroom). We shot at Echo Lake Park, Pershing Square, a shop near Santana Row, and a few Hollywood residences.
The shooting process was a lot of fun. My collaborators, Robbie and Jeg, were respectful, easy to work with, and provided input and logistical concerns where they thought it was needed. I felt very supported and inspired by our three person team.
This was my first script I’ve written* (by myself*). I’m normally interested in improvisational work. I put asterisks in there because I scripted some non-scripted parts. There is dialog that is off the cuff (Robbie’s words) and there is dialog that is read from the script. I’m pretty fascinated by that process, essentially giving a fictional frame to essentially an interview.
During the video editing process, the words that I wrote seemed stilted and awkward which I think adds to the dream quality, but I was more charmed by the natural verbage that improv provides.
Speaking of the editing process, I found it to be um, rushed. I care about my projects, but this one sat in my to-do pile while I waited for my musician darling to produce some music for the movie. By the time I got the movie into the editing room, my vision for the project was a bit fuzzy and I felt less driven towards the unpleasant details of editing. And truth be told, it was on a friend’s computer, so I didn’t feel at leisure to go away and come back. It was edited in one sitting.
I had recorded the sound separately. We didn’t have a sound person and I am not too savvy with processes about that. I ended up using the table reading as the final spoken word part. It was kind of funny. I’ve seen movies that do that, where they do the dialog in a voice over kind of way, (like in Ant Man 1 and 2), though in this, Robbie does his own lines and the mouths rarely line up. Ha! Ah! I keep telling myself that it is in fact a step below from Student Work. I just like doing this. I don’t study it and I don’t see myself becoming an industry professional. It’s the amor in amateur.
My approach to this project was not to think about refining it too much and letting it breathe raw qualities.
Future projects like this, advice to me in the future, I would love to have more control over my environments and create more whimsy with practicals like bizarre lighting and props, make up, movement. I love making movies, but it’s hard to do it in a city where I can’t take all my art-making supplies and lighting equipment. I would love to make a script with someone else too. It was nice having a script but I felt less driven to zhoozh it. Feeling beholden to a second co-producer would have made me more considerate in the refining process, or to a refining process.
A note about the Credits– I like keeping it simple but I also knew that I would have a post about it where I can give credit formally.
Robbie Bruens, actor, muse, coordinator and improviser
Jeg Jooper, cinematographer (work involving drone footage and rollerblading camera work!)
Katarina Countiss, actor, creator, “costumer”, writer, video editor
Music: “Bedroom Shapeshifting” Written and Performed by Cassidy Barnes
“Picnic Night” Written and Performed by Cassidy Barnes–The classical guitar piece is Canarios by Gaspar Sanz 1674 (public domain)Amelie Fantasy — 9 min 37 sec
Special Thanks to Christine Medrano and David Clifford Turner
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Photo Credit to Jenny Yang (copy pasted from the program)
a set by Michael Shrader
psychobotany
with original live music by brother’s quarrel with David Samas, Kevin Corcoran, Michael Schrader, movement by Fenner, Andrew Gabriel Rose, Annikah Peabody, and live projection art by Katarina Countiss
about psychobotany
this is a container– the movement is based on authentic movement and contact improv– the music, movement, light and shadow combine for a sensual experience of a kind of dreamlike state that’s never the same twiceSpecial Thank you
to Beauty Supply for hosting this event in their new space in Downtown Oakland. They are a valuable resource for the local arts scene.
:: About the opener
Michael Shrader of Santa Fe, New Mexico will be presenting a lighthearted soundscape using a variety of sound therapy instruments with digital augmentation. The intention in mind is to gently journey you through a subtle shift in consciousness, gently assisting your landing into wherever your mind may choose.
Very excited to present: Kevin Corcoran and David Samas will be performing live music for psychobotany
David Samas is a composer, curator, conceptual artist, instrument inventor, and social sculptor with a background in shamanism and magics. A queer, native San Franciscan from mixed immigrant/refugee roots, David got his a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art in 2000 and studied poetics at the New College of California and Naropa. He performed with the SF Boys Chorus, SF Opera and SF Symphony, receiving a GRAMMY in 1994 for Best Choral Performance. His artworks hang in the Di Rosa collection and showed at the Diego Rivera Gallery,Canessa Galleries and the SF Asian Art Museum. He has performed at the Exploratorium, Grace Cathedral, YBCA, Cal Shakes, Bing Hall, the Asian Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, CCRMA, the Lab, and Center for New Music, where he also curates the Window Gallery for Invented Instruments. He served as artistic director of the Turquoise Yantra Grotto (a house concert series of free improv and ethno-modernism), the Meridian Composers in Performance series, MicroFest North, Thingamajigs Festivals, and is the director of Pet the Tiger Instrument Inventors Collective and the Harmonic Series Gamelan. He gives back to his communities by teaching math and physics through inventing workshops with Thingamajigs (Oakland) and advocating for the legal personhood of all sentient beings.
Kevin Corcoran works with percussion and field recordings with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of art, music, ecology, and communication. As a drummer/percussionist he is most interested in techniques which extend the sonic possibilities of the instrument emphasizing textural sound, atonal sympathetic vibration, sustained tones without audible attack and the use of found objects.
As a recordist he collects sounds in urban and rural locations. These sonic environments are presented displaced from their origins with an intent to create temporary imagined acoustic places and are often combined with percussive sounds and used in installation artworks.
He has performed throughout the United States, Europe and East Asia collaborating with artists working in various disciplines.
:: psychobotany has featuring a recurring mover, Annikah Peabody
Annikah Peabody
Mixed media artist, landscaper, and sad sad clown.
:: psychobotany has featuring a recurring mover, Andrew Gabriel Rose
If Martha Graham was the mayor of Baltimore and they found a magical wish-granting emerald in an underground chamber beneath city hall that the mayor could only use with the help of 13 juggalos from the future, together they might wish for something like Andrew Rose to come and build a marble and granite funk academy with his bare hands on a new island, conjured by his dancing in the harbor, where funk professors from around the world might gather to teach the world to love. Furthermore, fuck Milton Friedman.:: psychobotany has featuring a first time mover, Fenner
Fenner is an performer, director and producer living in West Oakland. Trained in ensemble devising processes, clown, Suzuki and ancient Japanese theater, they also frequent axis and butoh dance halls. Around and sometimes with theater Fenner is also an adventure cyclist, musician and host with the most.
:: psychobotany has featuring a live projection artist, Katarina Countiss
Katarina Countiss is an Oakland based multimedia artist-designer. Keywords: zines, embroidery, Instagram, drawing therapy, psychedelics, autofiction, petals, performance making, improv uke, overhead projector, art nitesBill Russell was the documentarian of the night. A big thank you to him for without him these videos would not exist. He was at the SF Fringe psychobotany as a documentarian for that. It was great to feel the sense of evolution and continuity.
The movers: Andrew and Annikah were a part of the original team from Psychobotany at Safehouse and the fringe shows. It was great to have Fenner on the team for the first time. I worked with Annikah and Fenner on The Boy Who Cried “Naked!” It was great to see them again and working with each other. The chemistry is lovely.
David Samas, leader of the Brother’s Quarrel, is the composer and live musician of psychobotany music so far. His enthusiasm and reliability as well as music magic was appreciated. The additions of Michael Shrader and Kevin Corcoran were harmonious.
As far as event producing goes, this was my most ambitious event yet. I reached out to the venue/team, Beauty Supply with a proposal. It was great feeling like I had control over the timeline and who I was booking and the space. In previous psychobotanies, we had to leave pretty much right after the show, so it was nice having some time to come down from the thrill of performing.
There was an element of something that I don’t want to publicly mention, but for my own sense of the show’s memory, that it was magical, and mostly safe, though I learned some lessons about labeling and supervision that I want to be more conscientious of in the future.
Also, I would add as a sole-producer– I would make the note of being more upfront about when payment is happening and making sure that all artists get some kind of photographic/videographic/aural documentation. It was an oversight for the opener not to have something after the show for their use.
The experience of the show: it was exciting to feel nervous, it was sad to feel that not everyone who is important to me came to see it, it was ecstatic to see the elements coming together. It was a miracle– I loved the stories that emerged from the movements on stage. The thing about this show is that the movers are instructed to move “authentically.” The free associative quality makes the show a treat for me because I don’t know what’s going to happen and I know most about what’s going to happen. The stories were amazing. I had my stained glass window silhouettes and Annikah wore a full veil, so there was a mystical church storyline and overall, it felt like Holy Mountain because of how stately some of the action was.
My role of lighting artist was a treat. It’s always great to be in control of a machine that makes colors and textures happen with ease. It’s an overhead projector, old school style– it feels like a microscope, it feels like a spotlight. I feel like I’m dancing with them, picking up on the stories and vibes and adding and being inspired. An interplay of responding, and sponding. There were parts like, I’m done looking at that story, moving to another area of the stage, and other parts where I think Andrew was talking to me, like he knew I was out there looking at him and said here’s this projection surface for you.
I’m excited about doing more psychobotanies. I feel like it has a lot of benefit for experimentation. The timing of the show was 2 30-minute cycles instead of a 45 minute with 5 9-minute sections. It was a different dynamic and at first I thought, what makes it psychobotany if not for the timing, but it felt like psychobotany.
I was telling my therapist about how much I love this show and how it feels like a crystallization of a lot of my interests. Thank you to all who came to witness it in person. Thank you to everyone who held space for it.
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This event was attended by a single person and an audience in the fb stream of live video–
It was nice to use a microphone and have the event mostly be about reading her work. It was a great way to force myself to drop into the pacing of her words and the painterly approach she had to this short story.
I talked to my therapist about how I felt like Virginia Woolf did when she committed suicide. That she felt like she was a burden to her partner. Her madness, her shame, her sense of love to let her husband free of the pain of having a partner that was unable to remain stable.
Heart-breaking. I read A Room of One’s Own and it was mostly a reminder about how everyone should have universal basic income.
I think I wanna read the Lighthouse because it’s about painting. Not quite sure yet.
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My last zine describes my foray into embroidery in such a way that I would recommend requesting that if you want to get the fully pensive scoop on my inspiration through this new medium.
Long story short, I took a class with some miracle money that I came into and it has altered the course of my life forever.
I talk about it at parties. It’s a thing that is like having a new family member, I have embroidery. Love love love.
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Photo credit: Madhav Ver
Photo credit: Madhav Ver
Photo credit: Madhav Ver
Program insert 1
program insert 2
The postcard for the show that never got produced
photos from devising session (photo credit Sabrina)I think if I wanted to (and I might add to this later) I would write a lot about working with an ensemble on a devised theatre project. The emotions of working with people, new friends and old, and the alignment of our interests and talents.
It was good timing for me personally because I had exited a collective that wasn’t feeling quite like a team and that gave me a lot to chew on about my expectations and responsibilities as a member of a group to communicate better.
Fenner who held the script and created and executed the leadership role has been a friend for a few years and it has been great to be a part of this work that really shows their strengths as an eccentric innovator of post-modern theatre.
It was interesting thinking about initially how I wanted to bring so much of what I do into the show, but a bit of that got cut. I enjoyed the feeling of having less responsibility than I usually do in productions. (I’m usually solo or in a capacity where I am making a lot of decisions about the content).
I would add more about the content of the show, but I imagine that there are a few runs in it left and I don’t want to spoil it for you!
I would do it all again. I felt very supported and we did a lot of improv in our initial devising process which is one of my old dreams. Ever since watching Whose Line is it Anyway on TV in middle school, I felt myself get pulled to the stage.
I kept thinking that past Kat, if she traveled to me working on this show, she would be like yeah “I always knew I would be this cool.”
The Boy Who Cried Naked from Kaya Mey on Vimeo.
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The Boy Who Cried Naked,
An original play developed for The Above Ground Theatre Festival at Mojo Theatre in San Francisco, CA Summer 2019.Directed by: Sabrina Wenske
Scripted & Produced by: Fenner
Devised by: Michele Owen, Annika Peabody, Kaya Mey, James Greene, Kat Countiss, Sabrina Wenke, Fenner
Puppet Master: Kaya Mey
Dramaturge & Pun Support by: Emily Haycock
Filmed & Edited by: Jason Eagle, Kaya Mey -
In this Keep Begin Detach at Em Wolfman in Oakland California. It was a cozy time in the back with some christmas lights, telling stories about Georgia O’Keefe’s life and a little about her work.
I borrowed a book of published letters of hers from the library. It’s lovely to think that what we write to our friends might be a way that history remembers us. And the mundanity of our lives become special not because the world changes and our lives that seemed normal are increasingly exotic and foreign.
There’s a moment in this video where I take some time to talk about trauma. I read an a amazing book by Janina Fisher called Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors.
I didn’t realize that one of my guests at the Keep Begin Detach was a psychologist. It’s very fascinating who shows up and I’m honored everytime I meet someone new at one of these things and get to share with them our shared passion for lovely people of the past.
A lot of her popularity was affected by her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz.
As a subject of his photography and a partner in marriage, Georgia O’Keefe had access to his art world connections. At some point she sought to separate herself from him and had other photographers take her portrait. The zine at the event contained images of her and not her work, though two letter excerpts. I brought that book of letters which also contained vivid color prints of her work that did them more justice I think than trying to reproduce them in black and white. And as a note, I did color edit (increased the contrast) the photos in the zine so that they would print on the black and white printers.
Kismet Arts Tangent 