a grey thought
summary
Concept + Performance — mary grace phillips (grace allerdice)
Lighting Sculpture + Installation — Kevin Byrd
Sound — Erin Palovick + Dylan Chambers
Costumes — mary grace phillips (grace allerdice)
Photos — Jason Travis
Video — Jonathan Bouknight
October 2014
presented by The Goat Farm Arts Center
+ Elevate Atlanta 2014
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This performance was part of a public art installation in downtown Atlanta in Fall 2014, and we transformed a commercial dumpster into an activated light sculpture surrounded by sand.
With sound, we explored the heartbreak and beauty apparent in the every day through improvising, mixing the words of American poet Jimmy Schuyler into a soundscape rife with simplicity and expectation.
As a performer, the 90-minute movement score was rife with the imperceptible changes, moments of lostness, sacrifices + heightened awarenesses of transformation.
selected proposal notes
Rubble is the future. Because everything that is passes.
–Anselm Kiefer
“A Gray Thought” is a performance & installation that explores the arching concepts of time, sea and after.
Sand is the pulverized rubble of what is left. Passed on, sand is the passage of time. An hourglass. The ocean’s sand. Kiefer says we came from the sea.
The performance seeks a remembrance of this after and its remains.
Inspired by the writings of Jimmy Schuyler, the soundscape will be sourced from his words while the dance is performed high up with colors and textures reminiscent of his “bright white nights” and the old skyscrapers of the sea.
The installation is composed of fine, white bunker sand commonly used in golf courses. Fluorescent lights and 2x4’s protrude from the surface of the sand, angled and diminishing into it. They are the remains of construction, rubble, in a moment of transformation, on a return to what is left — sand.
