[As the piece begins in a dim glow, the floor is dappled with performers in heavy positions of repose. Curved spines and heavy joints shift almost imperceptibly.]
50min total running time (WIP)
Performance Space NY
August 24, 2024
Brutality of Fatigue is a performance of durational, somatic movement scores developed to inspire a collective disintegration of Western Standard Time, as defined by scholar LMJ Bruce. Over the duration of an hour the performers fall into the vastness of fatigue and dysphoria, moving towards an experience of infinite interiority.
Score/Choreography: Lu Yim
Sculpture: Lu Yim + Cynthia Chang
Performance: Ella W-S, Cynthia Chang, Lu Yim, Nami Yamamoto, Takahiro Yamamoto
Costume: Lu Yim + Cynthia Chang
Lighting: Maggie Heath
Filming/Editing: Henry Craddock
Sound: Éliane Radigue
[Lu is in frame with the audience seated behind them in chairs. In real time, Lu slowly and meticulously moves between squatting and low crouching positions. The stage lighting shines against their sapphire blue shirt and black satin pants.]
Pageant, Brooklyn, NY Nov 10-11, 2022
FORM 1 is a solo performance conceived in 2019 and debuted in New York City at Pageant in 2022. The performance features a looped sound and movement score that outlines intervals where Yim, tests their endurance and capacity to repeat a score built in collaboration with chronic fatigue and chronic pain.
Sound and Movement Score: Lu Yim Performance: Lu Yim
[The dancer is wearing black shorts and a shirt. They drag a golden fabric across the wood floor of the church. The musician reciting text sits behind them on the stage.]
Stone Circle Theater
Ridgewood NY
May 2024
SYMPATHETIC SILKS REDUX is a 20 minute duet between Yim and sound artist Lauren Tosswill, working with live text that comes from somatic detailing and somatic rambling. Influenced by our body’s histories and the way they present themselves alongside and inside the room. A dissociative pain-space becomes one that is poetic and housed within the unknown world of the performance itself.
Movement: Lu Yim
Sound/Text: Lauren Tosswill
Curator: Nola Sporn Smith
[Three performers form a sculptural clump with objects draped in iridescent and reflective fabric.]
45min total running time (Excerpt)The Woods, NYCFebruary 18, 2024
SYMPATHETIC SILKS is an experimental group performance devised by Yim and performed with Cynthia Chang and Nami Yamamoto with sound contributed by sound artist Lauren Tosswill. While a score gives shape to the work, it’s broadly improvisational and depends on the bodily state of the performers and the setting in which it is performed. The work attempts to convey the realities of physical exhaustion and hyper-embodiment. Responding to the improvisations of their collaborators, the performers pass through a series of time-based and situational cues that direct how they physically interact on stage. The title of the work references the cliche magic trick in which silks are knotted together in an illusory fashion that allows them to be rapidly separated. The performance is set in the cliche as metaphor, suggesting various dysphoric conditions where the performers are paradoxically united and disorganized, together and separate.
Choreography: Lu Yim
Performers: Lu Yim, Nami Yamamoto, + Cynthia Chang
Sound: Lauren Tosswill
Lighting: Maggie Heath
Video Editing: Ang Zheng
Sympathetic Silks was funded in part by the Queens Art Fund
[A person is lying on a sidewalk with their eyes closed and a slight grin. Their sun-dappled face and dark curly hair fill the frame.]
Headwaters Theater
Filmed in Portland, OR
October 2022
Pieces of Earth We Eat is an experimental performance, written for a group of transgender and nonbinary performers in Portland, OR, and adapted for camera during the Covid-19 quarantine period.
Emerging from an anxious landscape of neoliberal utopianism, Pieces of Earth We Eat is a poetic articulation of the experience of being, participating in, and also actively resisting harm. It performs for an empty theater in a time of crisis, both in a state of dreaming and of mourning.
Performers: Claire Barrera, Cristi Miles,
Ezri Reyes, Maya Vivas, and Lu Yim
Writing/Direction: Lu Yim
Vocal Compositions: Lu Yim
Sound Score: Emir West, Mat Larimer
Sound Engineering: Mat Larimer
Videography/Editing: Marit Liang +
Cai Indermauer
Costumes/Makeup: Harley
This project was funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and made possible with the support of the Headwaters Theater subsidized space rental program.
[From a standing position two performers, Lu + Kgo, interlock their arms and torsos and move as one unit across the floor of a long narrow gallery.]
Reveals the Missing(Excerpt)
Holding Project at Vacation Gallery, NYC
September 2019
Choreography: Lu Yim
Performance: Lu Yim and Kgoe
Sound: Lu Yim
Costume: Lu Yim
Documentation: Marit Liang
Press Release
To view extended and higher quality versions of these performances, please visit Lu’s vimeo by clicking here.
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