Lonesome Land (A Social Dance, A Vehicular Orchestra)

Filed under Performance, projects

Event Information

Artist: Mary Walling Blackburn + Chris Marionetti

On Friday, September 14, Mary Walling Blackburn and Chris Marionetti present Lonesome Land (A Social Dance, A Vehicular Orchestra), at New General Catalog in Greenpoint.

The structure for this performance is derived from an old social practice in the West Texas desert where isolated ranchers would temporarily meet in an equidistant shared space, tune their radios to the same frequency, and dance within an area created between their trucks. The provisional and immaterial nature of this human communion guides Lonesome Land.

In Lonesome Land (2007) a suite of octophonic songs have been composed for a social dance that will take place within a circle created by eight vehicles. The stereo of each vehicle will function as instrument and contribute a segment of each song. The drivers and their passengers are invited to dance along in the center, illuminated by the car headlights.

The title comes from Bertha Muzzy Bower’s popular western novel Lonesome Land (1912), where Bower’s characters experience the “blind unreasoning terror of the empty land”. But this Lonesome Land is situated within a marginal space in New York City. Furthermore, the ensueing contemporary pathos, not unrelated to terror, is rather more in relationship to global isolations than it is to facing unmitigated agrarian space.