“Circle dancing is magic.  …and before long not one of them was touching the ground, they were taking two steps in place and one step forward without touching the ground…  and I was falling like a stone.”     

    - Milan Kundera (Book of Laughter and Forgetting)       

Pieced together from an international collaborative, the performance work constructs a series of tableaux negotiating the edge space of landscape and circularity in the shared quotidian spaces of a city.   Extracting for movement and image from Milan Kunderaʼs “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, and what he terms the "magic of the circle dance", the mixed ensemble cast and a roaming camera move in and out of architectural patterns, place, and placelessness, exploring the nuances between memory, response, replication, and transformation.  Within this, construction sites are engaged as metaphors and realities of people’s lives in pieces, transition, and looking for foundation. Compositions for music box, folk/pop songs, and disparate frames of silence create a score.  Video shifts amidst the mixed topographies of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Volos, Genoa, Seoul, and Berlin.

Performance:  Isak Immanuel (SF), Yuko Kaseki (Tokyo/Berlin), Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos (SF), Monique Goldwater (SF)

Musical Compositions / Sound :  Antonis Anissegos (Greece/Berlin), Végtam Váltam (Mexico City), Barton McGuire (Oakland)

Installation and Video:  Isak Immanuel

Performance for Video (in addition to the above):  Diego Agullo (Madrid/Berlin), Michelle Baard (Amsterdam/Berlin), Hironori Sugata (Osaka/Berlin), and SF guests

March 5, 6, 7,  2010

Installation Performance

The Garage, SF - USA

December 11-19,  2009

Work Developed in Residence

Djerassi Artist in Residence, SF - USA

September 3, 4, 5, 6,  2009

Installation Performance

(as “Circle Games and Continuous Cities”)

Dock 11, Berlin - GERMANY

Supported in part by Zellerbach Family Fund, RAW at the Garage, and Dock 11 Berlin.

Fiscally sponsored by CounterPulse.    

* the project began with research in Berlin, Genoa, and Volos in June 2009 in collaboration with cokaseki.

Additional collaboration in Berlin: Diego Agullo, Lena Meierkord.  The SF installment of the work contained a video segment from Seoul, Korea done in 2006 (also part of the project “clothes x sun / ot x sun”).  

photos:   Isak Immanuel/Tableau Stations and video stills

Entries in a catalog:

“The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.” 

-  Georg Simmel

“There are exiles in every community, among them, they form a great nation, ...if they only knew it.”  

 -  Jan Morris

“The catalog of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.”    -  Italo Calvino

“To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.”   -  Jean Baudrillard

“To reply, to fold back, a city of silence.    The making of a possible city, through the night, a making and unmaking of signs.”    -  Kate Mikan