Two exhibitions:
Anna Halprin / MATRIX 246
and
Apichatpong Weerasethakul / MATRIX 247
February 15–April 21, 2013
BAM/PFA
Woo Hon Fai Hall
2625 Durant Ave. #2250
Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
T 510 642 0808
Anna Halprin / MATRIX 246
MATRIX 246 presents three performances of legendary choreographer Anna Halprin’s seminal dance Parades and Changes (February 15, 16, and 17), as well as a gallery exhibition with scores, photographs, and other documentation of the piece throughout its forty-eight-year history. Halprin reunites with her original composer, electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick, to stage the final performances of a work that, by using everyday movements and domestic rituals in dance, marked the onset of postmodern choreography. Before every staging, Halprin, the composer, the lighting and stage designers, the dancers, and the crew develop task-based actions that respond to the particular time and site of the dance, making each performance an exercise in collaborative problem solving. Responses to the dance have varied from an outright ban on the work by the New York City Police Department in 1967 to adoring fan mail from a cattle farmer in Sweden. Parades and Changes opened the current BAM/PFA facility in 1970 and the new production celebrates the architecture and history of our building as we prepare to move to our new Downtown Berkeley location in 2015.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul / MATRIX 247
MATRIX 247 presents artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2007 installation Morakot (Emerald), a single-channel video shot in an abandoned Bangkok hotel. Best known for his award-winning feature-length films, Weerasethakul uses the spatial qualities of the gallery to create a transformative environment, breathing life back into the abandoned hotel.
In the 1980s, the Morakot Hotel served as a haven for Cambodian refugees fleeing the Vietnamese invasion. After the Thai economy collapsed in the late 1990s, the building was vacated and has stood empty ever since. Weerasethakul’s camera slowly moves through the Morakot’s abandoned corridors and rooms, capturing the natural light as it streams through the windows and illuminates the drifting dust, progressively adding more digitized particles to create a mesmerizing constellation. Three ghostly Thai voices speak of faraway places where lovers await their return—places punctuated by violence, but also by the croaking of frogs and the strains of country music. A low-hanging green lamp casts an ethereal glow over the gallery, but the moving images onscreen exist in a more fantastical absent world, a dreamscape for wandering in and out of consciousness.
MATRIX 246 and 247 are organized by Assistant Curator Dena Beard.
The performances of Parades and Changes are made possible in part by The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by generous grants from ArtPlace, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Fleishhacker Foundation, Meyer Sound, and The Apartment, Vancouver. The performances are a fiscally sponsored project of Dancers’ Group.
The MATRIX Program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis and the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.
Gallery hours
Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm; open till 9pm on L@TE Fridays; Closed Monday and Tuesday
Press contact
Peter Cavagnaro, pcavagnaro [at] berkeley.edu
*Images above:
Left: Anna Halprin, Parades and Changes, 1970. Performance view, San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop for the opening of the University Art Museum, Berkeley (now BAM/PFA); September 29, 1970. Photo: Paul Fusco.
Right: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Morakot (Emerald), 2007. Film still. Single-channel video projection; color, sound, 10:50 minutes, looped. Museum purchase: bequest of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, by exchange.
