Project Row Houses Courtyard
2521 Holman Street, Houston, Texas 77004
FREE - Reservations Encouraged
Multimedia artist Janet Biggs offers a performance based on heroic individual stories of struggles with Alzheimer’s disease. Presented in collaboration with the University of Houston Blaffer Art Museum and independent curator, Janet Phelps, If Ever I Would Leave You merges the intimacy of a fleeting memory with the rigor of an optical seizure. Taking its title from one of the artist’s grandfather’s favorite songs, If Ever I Would Leave You looks at loss, desire, chaos and control in the face of a fading sense of self.
Biggs combines projected video images from her own memories with images culled from the local community to create a new narrative. Live actors, musicians and vocalists perform a dance of repeated rituals, reflecting the futile struggle to maintain control amongst the fraying fabric of a mind.. Using cutting edge scientific research on memory implanting, altering and erasure, Biggs creates negative memory evoking her earliest experiences of autonomous identity, power and freedom. The performance ends with a lone vocalist singing the title song. As each verse is sung, more and more words are absent until there is only silence.
COUNTERCURRENT COLLABORATION + BLAFFER ART MUSEUM
If Ever I Would Leave You is supported through the Innovation Grants program of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts which is funded in part by the Houston Endowment, Inc.
More
Less
