Racer Session #465 | Jocelyn Beausire | March 31, 2019
*Due to a technical error, there is no audio for the first ~20 minutes of this video. Our apologies!
Greetings, Racers!
This Sunday, we’re excited to welcome multidisciplinary artist Jocelyn Beausire to the session. Jocelyn is a performance artist, researcher, and designer who grew up in a town of 10,000 people and 50,000 cows in southern Wisconsin, and who transplanted to Seattle in 2013. Jocelyn has always been fascinated by the impact and creation of place, and the ways in which our bodies and others’ relational identities are shaped by external environmental spaces. In her words:
“I view my performance work as an extension of both music and the built environment, as an temporal, emotion-based place-construction based in my body and relationship to the environment and audience. My background in music and music composition, studying under Kari Ragan and Huck Hodge, has lead me to a minimalist, process-based style, and an emphasis on live, multi-sensory performances rather than performance for documentation. My work engages the topology of being through tapping into the audience’s perceptions of my body within the space as other, self, relation, and augmenting or exaggerating that perception over the course of a single or group of performative actions. I wrangle with contextualizing and recontextualizing my body as a place of constructed and performed gender, as an artifact of my ancestors, and as a site of present action.”
Jocelyn is also presenting with us later this year in our Vermillion Series, so this is a great way to preview her performance style. Keep reading for some words from Jocelyn on this weekend’s performance, and make sure to get yourself to Racer on Sunday to see it all happen at 8pm!
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Woman with steak dinner and radio
“I will be presenting this piece as a solo improvisation, as a preparation of my body for performance by consumption of space (both external distances and intimate internal volumes). Followed by a solo improvisation by Noel Kennon.
My performance work is an extension of my research in the built environment and vocal music, examining the ways identities are constructed and performed by action, place, sound, and internal and external interstitial spaces. In my performances I place myself within multiple overlapping aleatoric, parameter-based processes to expose and explore the way my identity is perceived by my audience. In doing so, I undermine the nature of performance by giving control to the audience and placing value on vulnerability, dependence, powerlessness, and uncertainty, and in turn engaging internalized and performed ideas of youth and femaleness.
Diagram of “Woman with steak dinner and radio”
In this Racer Session I will be experimenting with the idea of Preparation as Performance, deconstructing the division between the two and positioning performance as an extension of the everyday (and, in turn, the everyday as an extension of performance). I am particularly interested in questioning the power hierarchies of audience/performer, particularly in an improvised setting.
I invite the other improvisers at the session to question the nature of their performance, and how they relate to the audience, their bodies, and the physical space, through solo improvisations. What private, informal rituals can you bring to the stage, and by honestly presenting them, how can we strip away our power/authorship and reach for something more deeply personal? When you play, how does your body move and does it reveal? How do you fight it? What would happen if you let go, and let perceived weaknesses be what you present?
I am very excited for the opportunity to perform for and with the wonderful community of folks at Cafe Racer, and hope that this session can be an opportunity for people to step outside the comforts of their instrument and expertise, and experiment with vulnerability and informality and uncertainty and aloneness. See you all Sunday!”