INTtalks - Interdisciplinary Practices

Lex Braes - Visiting Associate Professor Pratt Interior Design

I'll focus on three live performances I made in collaboration with dance and theatre over the last 10 years, to show how interdisciplinary practices inform my own art making and teaching practices.

1. Eve Best: New York Shakespeare Sessions - improvisation live set painting in collaboration with actors, musicians and opera singers Twelfth Night text structured improv, 2010

2. Annie Wang: The Full Circle - choreographed improv. to music by Pauline Oliveros, “Fool’s Circle”. Performed live Showroom Gowanus Brooklyn 2016 Nov 2014

3. Mariko Endo: LTT (Line To Take) choreographed improv. to music by Dary John Mizelle Performed Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden, N Salem NY July 2019

Presentation pics and video clips will show the preparation involved in improv collaboration sessions and also to the final performance with the audience.

With a focus on three live performances with an audience and how each informs the other, not only in a linear direction but inter-relationally across time line and disciplines. The preparation period is long and can be slow before it gains the materiality and substance from which to begin building on.

I learned much from the Shakespeare Sessions and will talk specifically about that. Then there was a whole year where I met weekly to collaborate with a kinetic movement artist that never got beyond an in-process stage, but that experience was inspirational to achieving the Full Circle score with Annie Wang.

Collaborating with Bhutto dancer Mariko Endo also benefited and gained substantially from the previous scores. Now the stress and friction points were more visible earlier in the process for both of us, that also allowed us to have a meaningful interaction earlier on and this proved productive over destructive. I’ll present a few examples as they come up to shed light on where interdisciplinary practice in collaboration is useful and even helpful to gaining deeper understanding of one’s chosen discipline, regardless of the field of practice.

Website: www.lexbraes.com

If you have any questions please email int@pratt.edu

Or visit our website here