Monday, March 18, 2024

Michelle Lai

Michelle Shiu-lin Lai is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary performance artist whose work transitions between movement, text, and image. Lai investigates the primal poetics of space through a process-based extraction of text through body memory/history, & butoh influenced sensitivity training. Lai recently performed her work in the debut of band Linear Ghost at the Bluewhale, Downtown LA- a collaboration with artist musicians Robert Jacobson, Breeze Smith, Darryl Tewes, & Tim Maher. Lai performed solo work “This Mouth and the Space of Nothing” at A+D Museum downtown LA (2016) and frequently collaborates with a range of artists across different media including film/ video, visual, sculpture, & sound. Lai has created works in performance art trio PO1 with Heyward Bracey and Kio Griffith, presenting a series of multi-media explorations of body, self, time, & identity. She has performed in works at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, the UCLA Fowler Museum, the John Paul Getty Museum, Hammer Museum, Grand Park, among other institutions and sites in California, the Eastern United States, & in temple ceremony abroad at Junjungan Village, Ubud, Bali. Lai practices architecture and continues to train and perform with Oguri & Roxanne Steinberg’s Venice-based Body Weather Laboratory (2009-present). Excerpts of Linear Ghost @ the Bluewhale: Improvisatory collaboration of artist/musicians: Robert Jacobson: guitar & bulgarian tambura. Breeze Smith: drums. Darryl Tewes: bass. Tim Maher: drums. Michelle Lai: poetry & movement (Michelle Lai performing her original poetic texts: This Mouth & the Space of Nothing & 5 million Dollar Chandelier in a Cave)

A-Stigmatism, Diavolo Brewery, multi-media collab poetic narratvie titled “Stigmatic Mountains: Sleeping Position 2″ by Michelle Lai
 
 

The book mentioned in the interview was The Peregrine, here is a link to book The Peregrine by J.A. Baker.

 

A multi-media collaboration by PO1: dance/choreography Michelle Lai, dance/choreography Heyward Bracey and video artist Kio Griffith. photography: Stella Chong 16 Faces was developed as a part of the 2014 “T Memorial” event (a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing China) at ARC in Pasadena, California.
A multi-media collaboration by PO1: dance/choreography Michelle Lai, dance/choreography Heyward Bracey and video artist Kio Griffith. photography: Stella Chong 16 Faces was developed as a part of the 2014 “T Memorial” event (a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing China) at ARC in Pasadena, California.
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  1. […] Michelle Lai has been recently contemplating the question, what is my work? Lai is an interdisciplinary performance artist. She has been dancing and performing works for the last eight years involving poetry and the language of dance. More recently, Lai began incorporating live poetry into her work. Lai also dances with Body Weather Laboratory in Venice, California. Lai’s live poetry work began around her first trip to China. She embarked on a 90-day writing experiment, writing daily for the 30 days prior to her trip, the 30 days during her trip, and the 30 days following her trip. When she was finished, she took the writing to the dance studio and began extracting the poetic elements, incorporating it into performance using her body. For her live poetry, Lai uses a loop pedal in real time to record and loop her own voice. Her dances are largely improvised to suit the moment. Lai’s writing begins, “China is an indoor cat.” The work progresses from observing her roommate’s indoor cat, seemingly at home in the outdoor world she only observes, to Lai’s own experience going “home” to China, a place where she had never been. Lai’s work is not easily collected and, while her dance work is funded, her art is “supported,” says the artist. For Lai, the true meaning of her work is the practice itself. […]

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