Red Eye Presents:

VASTNESSESS

by Valerie Oliveiro

March 1-9, 2024

Land Acknowledgment

Relationality has unprecedented possibility, or connectedness. I’ve been thinking about the concept of relations. Two days ago, it came up in the context of a man self-immolating in front of the Israeli Embassy. I asked myself if he felt so alone, so unheard that such a statement of his immolating was all that was left. 

Having had the experience of being geographically and politically situated to observe the patterns of imperialism from outside of the US, being in the US automatically implicates you in a continual and excruciating Palestinian suffering that is now full-blown-beyond-genocide. People are trying to invent new words to describe this moment.  What doesn’t help is the binary that imperialism imposes—for or against—and activism almost necessitates taking that “other” binary position. 

It is so easy to feel alone. I have to say what feels more lonely is that I often feel I am preaching to the choir if I say something, even now. So I think I want to share how I have been feeling not alone. 

I cultivate a knowing and I remind myself that the long-range work that I do and the work of my relations are aligned toward justice and deeper peace.

I cultivate an awareness that all this work is related to all our freedoms, including mine.

I reach for people who are doing the same work if I need to, and they know I will reach for them.

I cultivate a space for my ancestors to walk with me, to guide, to teach, and to listen.

I want to acknowledge the relations who walk with me: Morgan Thorson, Karen Quisenberry, Jennifer Monson, Rosy Simas, Pramila Vasudevan, Emily Gastineau, Rachel Jendrzejewski, Rachel Mattson, Jeffrey Wells, Sam Johnson, Judee Shuǐ Xiān, Julie Tolentino, Cynthia Oliver, Meg Foley, Marcela Michelle, Sam Aros-Mitchell, Georgia, Shigeru, Doris, Howard, Sadie, Sasha, Anita Oliveiro (Teta), Nellie Chew Bee Tham, Elizabeth Oliveiro, John Victor Oliveiro, Lau Bong Soo, Ong Tze Boon, the rain tree in Sunset Way Park (Singapore), The Minnesota River, The Mississippi River, the Osprey over the last year, the Juvenile Bald Eagle at Bass Ponds, the Sandhill Cranes, the Common Mynah, all the bulbuls, the willow tree at Say Their Names, the squirrel who spidermans up my neighbors house every day, the birch tree on Park Ave, the mountains of central Idaho, the warm Pacific Ocean in South East Asia, Lake Nokomis, the horizon, wherever I am.

2019 was the year that started an immense personal growth spurt, aligned with the start of an arc that prioritized my own artmaking. After The Standard, I asked Sam Johnson and Chitra Vairavan to begin research in the spaces of the unprecedented. What really emerged from that research was an awareness of each of their depths of pattern and knowing. We go to what we know. Even when I look at the work-in-progress video now, I see a comforting familiarity, and that they created very much from some subterranean schema within.

Sometimes you have to make other work to get to finish the work you started. Sometimes, growth, and of course, the pandemic. 

While I have known and collaborated with Pramila for a long time with her work, it was in 2020 when I was making Soft Freedoms that we started to talk about collaborating in this work. Pramila has stunning devotion to her body, yet so much compassion and kindness for both what she has devoted her body to, and what her body has gone through so that she can still dance today. Now, post-cancer again, her work of acceptance and compassion for what is inherited, what is systemic, and what is earned from repetition has become my work too. Our discoveries through this process together  are the stuff of availability.

I’ve danced with Sam since I moved to Minneapolis 11 years ago—first with Morgan Thorson, then with Rosy Simas. When I work with Sam in my own work, I sometimes ask for available material in his body to experiment with, before other material for the work is available. Set and Reset, from his days as an apprentice in the Trisha Brown Company, emerges. Over the years I have realized how structural that material is to his dancing. We’ve made a cycle of material in relationship to that structure—and in the making of it, it really substantiated and supported the trajectory of grief that I had been feeling, and continue to feel. Moving, insistent, untrackable, deepening, labor, undulating. 

Judee’s early memories of finding dance involve learning videos from K-pop from YouTube. “Lucifer” by SHINEE is the only one unearthed for this performance. Judee’s path is one of elasticity, versatility, and queer vitality through committing to the shifts, dancing with, trying material on, taking material off. Manifesting the complexities of each moment, moving the presentness of all at the same time. The devotion to all of it and the cultivation of spaces for possibility for herself and others. Getting in line with the nature of viral material, accepting its motion and potentiality for movement beyond her own body.

Jennifer and Emily are steady forces in my creative and personal life. Sometimes those relationships need to surface in ways that parallel how their love manifests. 

Finally, I’ve been working to integrate writing into my work in ways that expand perspective and positionality, and in that light, I invited Rachel Jendrzejewski, Emily Gastineau, Marcela Michelle and aegor ray to vector with the work, offering writing in any style, through a variance of formats and occurrence. Find the writings on Red Eye’s Instagram and Facebook pages or collected on Red Eye’s website here:

– Valerie Oliveiro

Material citations and references:

Asamyuta Hasta (single hand gestures), Samyuta Hasta (double hand gestures), Nritta Hasta (hands used in dance) from the Natyashastra

Ravana character excerpt from Dasavadaram choreographed by Dr. Bala Nandakumar in 1991, performed at Lakshmi Sundaram Hall in Madurai, India

Jessica Cressey one-legged pistol squat

“Queencard” by (G)I-DLE; choreography by Tae-eun & ShaSha

“Lucifer” by Shinee; choreography by Rino Nakasone

“Mong Nan Nan,” FLI:P; “See Tình,” Hoàng Thùy Linh (TikTok viral)

“Toca Toca,” Kotaro Ide

“Flower” by Jisoo; choreography by Kyle Hanagami

“Kill This Love” by BLACKPINK, choreography by Kyle Hanagami and Kiel Tutin

Set and Reset by Trisha Brown

Southwestern Mojave desert, east of the San Gorgonio Mountains

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Valerie Oliveiro (she/he/they) is a queer artist and activist in performance based in Mni Sota Makoce and born in Singapore. They are first a choreographer and performance maker. Their choreographic work surfaces inquiry through specific, cross-focal, multi-racial and densely relational perspectives, through the lens of SE Asian sensibilities. They also move between worlds of visual art, lighting design, writing, and technical direction. They have designed and performed in the work of Jennifer Monson, Morgan Thorson, Pramila Vasudevan, Rosy Simas, Chitra Vairavan, and Emily Gastineau, among others. Their most memorable performance experiences were at BASE (Seattle, WA), Danspace (New York, NY), New York Live Arts (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland) and Maui Arts and Cultural Center (Maui, HI). Their own choreographic work has been presented at Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery and Bryant Lake Bowl and Cowles Center and they have been supported by The Waterers, Racing Magpie, Minnesota State Arts Board, MRAC, and the Jerome Foundation. They are a Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye Theater, core ensemble member at Lighting Rod (a queer trans led performance group), and co-run a performance incubator MOVO SPACE for QTBIPOC dance artists. A 2023-2025 Jerome Fellow for Choreography, they also currently design the work of Meg Foley, dance in the work of Rosy Simas, and cultivate a long term multi-modality creative relationship with Jennifer Monson. 

Sam Johnson is a performance maker and doer. He often makes and does as a member of SuperGroup, but also with many other folks, mostly in Minnesota. He's currently learning software development and trying to convince himself that it's all dance. 

Judith H Shuǐ Xiān is a choreographer, improviser, and sound artist based in Minneapolis. She is a 2017/2022 Q-Stage: New Works and 2019 Momentum: New Dance Works recipient and was part of the 2022 Red Eye Works-In-Progress cohort. She is currently focused on researching ritual & meditation through experimental performance.

Pramila Vasudevan is of Tamil descent and is a transdisciplinary artist trained in classical & contemporary indian dance and interactive media. She is the artistic director of Aniccha Arts (2004), a site specific performance collaborative. She is an artist associate of Pillsbury House Theatre. She has been honored with a Joyce Award (2022), and also United States Artists (2022), Guggenheim (2017) and McKnight (2016) fellowships in choreography. Vasudevan has many influences and teachers that normally would be cited here as her artistic lineage, but this practice recognizes mostly savarna (dominant caste) names, not the Bahujan communities (oppressed castes) from whom their methodologies were appropriated; so this line is a placeholder until she finds a better way to navigate acknowledgement. She has been grateful to laugh and work with everyone who made VASTNESSESS come alive. It has been such a joy to bring forward so many of her connections with dances from so many parts of her life. 

Emily Gastineau (she/her) is a choreographer, writer, performer, and editor, rooted in the Minneapolis dance community since 2009. Key concerns (or deep patterns) in her body of work include objects, desire, value, citation, spectatorship, collectivity, and the generic. She engages with language within her choreographic practice as well as through arts writing and publishing. Former projects and affiliations include: Fire Drill, Criticism Exchange, Fresh Oysters Performance Research, DAS Choreography (Amsterdam University of the Arts), and Mn Artists (Walker Art Center). Emily is a Co-Artistic Director of Red Eye, and this spring she is teaching in the art department at the University of Minnesota. www.emilygastineau.com

Jennifer Monson has had an ongoing practice of collaboration with Val since 2008 that traverses questions of improvisation, experimentation, and the spaces between concept, practice and slow action often based in a connection to place/land.  She is the founder of iLAND-interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature Dance and a professor of dance at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. She is delighted to be performing in this work alongside these brilliant, dedicated artists who show up with so much laughter. This performance is for Shigeru.

Liminal Space Technician matt regan approaches Sisyphean challenges with a modicum of knowledge, elbow grease, and a can-do spirit.

Jeffrey Wells is an interdisciplinary performance creator, performer, designer, and technician working in Minneapolis for the past 18 years. He is a co-founder of the performance ensemble SuperGroup. He has worked with many performance makers including Rosy Simas, Pramila Vasudevan, Eric Larson/Toot Performance, Kaz Sherman, Fire Drill, Mad King Thomas, and Judith Howard, among others. Jeffrey is also a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. 

Jess Kiel-Wornson (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist, set designer, and educator based in the Twin Cities. Her work uses cultural artifacts, low-brow narratives, and devalued materials to examine and challenge the oppressive power structures built into our bodies, buildings, and stories. She loves gossip, feminist science fiction, performance theory, and floral prints.

aegor ray is writer, organizer, and freak living in Minneapolis. He is writing a novel. 

Marcela Michelle (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and producer living and working on Mni Sota Makoce. Her work often deals with concepts of simultaneity, im/mutability, and the platonic ideal host. She is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in the inaugural Cross-Disciplinary field, a 2020-2022 Hennepin Theatre Trust Teaching artist in Residence, and a 2019 mentee of the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation. Marcela has shared worked with Walker Art Center, Pangea World Theater, Rough Magic Performance Company, Wanderlust Productions, Teatro del Pueblo, and  Playwrights Center. With Lightning Rod, she has received commissions from Guthrie Theater, Northern Spark, and Pillsbury House + Theater. She is the former Artistic Director of 20% Theatre Company and the current Artistic Director of Lightning Rod, a QTGNC centered arts organism. She is a part of the queer bartending collective Mama San and a facilitator for HOPE Communities TRCSTR program. Upcoming work includes cocktail collaboration for Sadie Barnette's New Eagle Creek Saloon at Walker Art Center, and Red Eye’s Isolated Acts (NW4W). 

Rachel Jendrzejewski (she/her) is a writer who often collaborates with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists to unpack wide-ranging performative vocabularies. Her work has been developed and/or presented by Red Eye, Walker Art Center, Hair+Nails, Weisman Art Museum, Los Angeles Performance Practice, Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, MASS MoCA, RISD, and ICA/Boston, among others. Publications include ENCYCLOPEDIA (Spout Press), IN WHICH _______ AND OTHERS DISCOVER THE END (a collaboration with SuperGroup; Plays Inverse Press), and MERONYMY (forthcoming, 53rd State Press). She is honored to be a Playwrights’ Center McKnight Fellow for the second time and a co-artistic director at Red Eye. MFA Playwriting, Brown University.

For Shigeru (at my first dance)/ 

when DD tried to tell me 

she was a washing 

machine, 

you were there