HOUSES OF ZODIAC: A REFRACTED ANTHOLOGY
Eight Takes: Sketches on Love
Océano: A Pacific Ritual
Ophelia: A New Orleans Story
Houses of Zodiac: A Chimeric Journey
Music for solo cello by Paola Prestini
Performed live by Jeffrey Zeigler
Choreographed & Performed by
Dai Matsuoka & Georgina Pazcoguin
An Anthology of Four Short Films
Directed by Murat Eyuboglu
Inspired by the verses of Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Trethewey and Anaïs Nin, Houses of Zodiac, A Refracted Anthology weaves music, word, dance, and image into a cinematic experience with live music. Former Kronos Quartet member Jeffrey Zeigler performs the music of Paola Prestini, to which New York City Ballet soloist “Rogue Ballerina” Georgina Pazcoguin and Butoh dancer and Sankai Juku member Dai Matsuoka bring their own choreographies. Four interwoven short films are directed by Murat Eyuboglu. The composite work draws inspiration from sources as diverse as the choreography of Samuel Beckett, the conceptual art of Sol LeWitt, the natural world and more.
Eight Takes: Sketches on Love
Starting with its prelude, Eight Takes introduces the evening’s personae, taking its storytelling cue from Brenda Shaughnessy’s verses: “...isn’t love revision? / It could have gone so many ways / This is just one of the ways it went / Tell me another.” Fleeting scenes offer a window into Prestini’s creative process, while Dai Matsuoka and Georgina Pazcoguin get ready for performance. Jeffrey Zeigler’s performance is centrally featured, with camera angles punning on the idea of multiple takes. He is surrounded by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings 289 and 295, which later metamorphose into the cosmos through which the dancers drift.
Océano: A Pacific Ritual
Océano opens with the images of the Arctic and the Antarctic captured by the project’s friend Sylvestre Campe while Paola Prestini recites Neruda’s pithy verses. Performed on the Jogasaki Coast of Japan, Dai Matsuoka’s choreography responds to the music and the verses, while it also reflects on the personae who inhabit the subsequent works.
Ophelia: A New Orleans Story
While Océano explores the theme of solitude and unboundedness, Ophelia presents a persona whose world is very much defined by boundaries and conflict. In her collection of poems Bellocq’s Ophelia, Natasha Trethewey endows her eponymous character with voice, basing her portrayal on a unique set of portraits captured by Ernest Bellocq in the red-light district of Storyville in early twentieth- century New Orleans. Her work is in part a palimpsest, specters of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, as well as that of John Everett Millais guiding her pen. The Ophelia of Prestini and Pazcoguin is the flesh and blood embodiment of Trethewey’s composite protagonist. Their music and choreography bring to life the arc of her complex journey as a young biracial woman from the brothels of New Orleans to one who claims agency and steps into her own life.
Houses of Zodiac: A Chimeric Journey
The final and the longest section of the anthology Houses of Zodiac is inspired by Anaïs Nin’s 1936 prose poem House of Incest. Nin’s work is a sequence of surrealistic dreamscapes, opening with the depiction of a prenatal, waterborne experience. In the ensuing oneiric narrative, the lyric persona stumbles from room to room and house to house, as if to seek escape from a chimeric labyrinth. In the final paragraphs, the image of a tunnel with daylight at the end appears while a figure dances “with the rhythm of earth’s circles... dancing towards daylight.”
The choreography—featuring both Dai Matsuoka and Georgina Pazcoguin— explores aspects of Nin’s text while also reinterpreting the earlier pieces of the evening. The oceanic imagery depicted in Océano is recast through the prism of Nin’s text as a birth scene. The volcanic rocks and the Pacific sky of Océano give way to a galactic vault, which is a sublimated version of the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 289. A transfigured Ophelia returns. As each other’s doubles, the two personae explore themes of creation, abjection, guilt, atonement and emancipation as their fantastical ark drifts through the houses of zodiac.