5 Questions with Fringe Artists Tiny Seismic
Tiny Seismic - Peiling Kao (electroViolet) & Kara Miller
Fringe 5 Questions by Carlynn Wolfe
Who do you enjoy collaborating with?
I enjoy collaborating with dancers, filmmakers, installation artists, and musicians. Dance at its core is a collaboration. What I enjoy about collaboration is the aha moment, that place in the creative process where streams of consciousness collide and something greater than the individual part is perceived or becomes manifest, where the vast scope of ideas are possible when people from different art disciplines come together because you have several people reflecting on a concept. I'm also really interested in how digital bodies create a duet or company with live dancers and how this shifts our understanding of location and form. In improvisation each performance is a journey because every audience is different. The audience brings an equal presence to the collaboration of a performance. What is fun about co-producing a show with other artists and their works is finding parallel vibrations between the art. I am always grateful for the generosity that abounds with my collaborators.--Kara Miller
electroViolet opens to the collaboration with different mediums that share the same aesthetic approaches.--electroViolet
What inspired the title of this work?
Peiling created the title "Tiny Seismic." For me, the idea of Tiny Seismic is the holistic idea that we are all connected. One shift in any person affects another. The tiniest fissure of change can have a large affect on community. We have a responsibility to care for the actions we take.
One of the works I'm presenting is "Mango Dream." The title of the work was inspired two years ago while eating a delicious dessert in Seoul, Korea called "Mango Dream." I was sitting at a table with a group of women from all over the world who had come together to collaborate and I had this incredible experience of how strong each of these individuals were. Women artists are a minority in most sectors. This dance is about systematic oppression that amounts to underrepresentation and how stories and ways of knowing are passed on from grandmothers, mothers, and sisters. Mango Dream moves from birthing dream to reality, and, there is always a choice. Inspired by stories and ways of knowing stories and ways of knowing are passed on from grandmothers, mothers, and sisters. Based on structures of improvisation and dance film projection design, anything is possible.
We are also presenting excerpts from "Degrees of Separation." This work was collaboratively created in the spring for a festival in France by several local artists.
Degrees of Separation (excerpts) explores layers, relationship, intimacy, exposure, the in-visible, and body as land and water. The question of the body is geographical, spatial, empathic, and collective transmission through time and space. Collectively we came up with the title and concept, and then explored issues such as deforestation, animal cruelty, and caretaking for the earth and all beings. The original work was very site specific with a series of four solos in a large lobby followed by an ensemble dance and media installation in a loading dock. The dance is improvisational and has already had many rebirths in different shows so we are right now exploring and expanding a very short excerpt from the original work that is in alignment with our show concept Tiny Seismic.--Kara Miller
electroViolet is a duo between myself (Peiling Kao) and Gretchen Jude (my artistic and life partner). We have been practicing improvisation as a form to explore collaboration between movement and sound on equal footing and find the synchronicity without dictating and directing. Body electric 1.1 is electroViolet’s debut in Hawaii. We dedicate this piece to our beloved Oakland, California, where we lived and made art for 8 years before relocating to Hawaii in August 2016. In December 2016, a devastating fire killed many artists in the Ghost Ship warehouse space. This brings to the forefront the issue of affordable art space and how artists (and others) need safe, accessible places to live and work. Body electric 1.1 is infused with this energy—the urgency to develop responsiveness to unknown futures—the essence and essentialness of improvisation. --electroViolet
Where is the best place to create?
Place shapes process. Before I start any dance or new media installation I meditate on the space or environment the work will be performed in. My process is then to gather or create visual images and text, and go to a dance studio or site specific spot to improvise. From there I begin to craft the concept in physical movement and projection design.
The place is my heart. The place is my practice of dance and yoga. The place is my body and subtle being. My body is land. The place is a collaborative We where I is understood as We in the reflection of memory, ancestors, land, sea, sky, you, me, us as everything the small I create emerges from within and without of the big We portal of life giving flow. The We is not universalized. This We I express through the lens of my own localized experiences and understanding in creative process. The place of this collaborative We is a sense of being in and relating to self, community and environment.--Kara Miller
When did you start dancing?
I have been dancing since the day I was born. I began formal dance training when I was 9 years old in a barn in Indiana. I come from Indiana from an area with rolling hills, limestone quarries, lots of farmland, and auto factory workers. My ancestors are German, Swiss, English, Irish, and Native American. I have lived in New York and in California. All of these places, life experiences, family, friends, and colleagues, are part of informing my understanding of creative process of dance and new media work.-Kara Miller
Why Fringe?
Fringe is a creative space to explore alternative concepts outside the norm. Right now dance and new media performances are still very experimental in the contemporary dance scene.-Kara Miller
Since we relocate to Hawaii in August 2016, we are eager to connect with local artists, share our work to the community, and meet artists from outside of Hawaii. We believe Fringe is the space to bring experimental, abstraction, and unfamiliar creation to the audiences.--electroViolet