kyra rice

Life within an ever imposing world economy based in the contradiction of perpetual growth on one hand, and scarcity and competition on the other has created a forbidding cultural schizophrenia. The connections we have--to one another, our sustenance, and more deeply, our most personal inner resources--are dulled, stifled and convoluted as results of the primacy on a single means of exchange.

We live within a modality of setting ourselves against one another in pursuit of what we assume or fear is scarce—energy, audiences, funding, beauty, sex, health, sanity—to the point at which our truest deepest selves have become scarce; our knowing of how to live together and take care of ourselves, the land and each other has become too large and complex of a task for this cultural myopia on a single means of exchange, all the while "specialists" are for hire, the remaining indigenous peoples need lawyers to live, and the world's great oceans are closer to dying than thriving because of the detritus of this economic system.

Social, environmental, and economic change can only happen from within ourselves and spread outward. So long as we are intertwined in this ever expanding and dominating economy based in the primacy of a single means of exchange that is driven by the feedback loop of perpetual growth > scarcity > competition > more growth, it is inherent to human evolution to examine its effects on our every-day lives. How has that feedback loop effected our ability to recognize the recourses at hand and therefore our capacity for informed decision making from the most influential to the seemingly most mundane like what we throw "away" or how we move through the world—how well do we know our own body's efficacy?

The body is the source of an infinite variety of movements and a nature resource from which to learn, yet the limiting effect this myopic cultural schizophrenia has on our imagination and intuition are rooted in our most creative centers, have been for several generations and has created a default through-culture of warring and waste, whether globally, socially, or within our own bodies. My work aims to activate levity, ritual, and catharsis through solo and collaborative movement and performance research. I believe it is from a place of identification, awareness, and release of the internal and external ‘scores’ we have confined ourselves to within a modality of scarcity and competition that we may build the skills within ourselves that are required to live and create from "new definitions of power and a new economics." (Audre Lorde)

Teaching
"I had a great time and my body feels happy! I appreciate the clarity of your teaching: Your body and words speak the same thing, and that makes even complex concepts simple to follow and understand. Could not have asked for a more welcoming introduction" to the Axis Syllabus.
~Ronja Ver

Performance
"One of my most favorite truest MOMENTS from 2011 confirmed my initial faith in Kyra Rice as one of those rare birds who can take the most frenzied poetry, spiritual meanderings and mathematical thoughts and choreograph a beautiful, haunting, concrete, MUSICAL, totally immersive and above all abundantly generous and GIVING world out of it -- 2012 and NYC you've got a lot of expectations after the magick that CAME BEFORE"
~B.J. Dini
League of Burnt Children

From Best 10 moments of queer performance in the last year are… (and why):
"Kyra Rice and Michael Velez‘s simple duet on Union Square for QAZ. No music, no gimmicks. All lovely."
~Philip Huang, THEOFFCENTER Blog Salon

"Awesome show in the Oakland Hills."
~Philip Huang commenting on the IHTF presents: Intimacy of Place

ORGAN DONOR
Kyra Rice in collaboration with Michael Velez, with Ronja Ver and Tyler Holmes

Part dance, part installation of bodies, part an experiment in intimacy, we attempt to reveal and challenge the breakdown of immunities—corporeal to global. Reclaiming connectivity to something bigger than the self we harvest common ground between seemingly disparate places insisting on shared resources, evolving in the body and love as our primary means of survival.

Video research and part of the installation:

Listen here: http://soundcloud.com/blackjews/kyra | images

collaborative notes by Kyra, Honey, and THEOFFCENTER during the making of 45x45:

Emael de Los Angeles's curatorial questions for CELEBRATE! San Francisco are:
- How are San Franciscans celebrating the human experience given present circumstances?
- What innovations/best practices are being developed in local communities and industries that can be replicated on a broader scale?

It was our feeling we wanted to explore "collaboration" as the answer to the questions asked by the curatorial statement. In doing so we wanted to specifically approach the following:

When defining what are "present circumstances" we came up with the following list
* loss of cultural centers
* economic downshift
* 'piece of the pie' is getting smaller and smaller
* art perceived as commodity
* there is still a disconnect in SF with art as catalyst for change
* environmental degradation as it affects urban ecology
* notions of fear as centralized power/resources become scarce

When asking about best practices we answered the following
* de-centering as action - as queer-approach
* identified current landscape as ecosystem
* once decentralizing occurs how and why are nexus formed?
* sharing resources in order to make art happen
* reexamine / regroup
* exercising trust as means of collaboration
* creating spaces to fulfill our desire to work together

Metaphors / Images
* all struggling to grab a piece of a perceived smaller and smaller pie
* core as decentralized version of old self
* groups within groups
* searching is about perception of lack
* recognition as creative catalyst

Each core performer (Rotimi Agbabiaka, Kyra Rice, Rachael Dichter, Harold Burns, Ernesto Sopprani, Honey McMoney and Julie Phelps) is contributing one or more scores for improvised movement, ensemble work, speaking, etc., that relate to the outlined intentions. My goal is to weave those scores together creating a performative experience that is at once in recognition of the individuals involved while revealing the creative brilliance that can occur as a result of the collaborative process; something that is much bigger than the sum of its parts.

45x45 is part of a Performance Intervention Series produced by The OFFCENTER. I found it essential to this work to answer the following questions:

What are we intervening on?
* centralization
* hetero-normativity
* traditional theater/audience settings and passive audiences
* venues being anything other than co-collaborators
* primacy of funding
* perception of lack
* individual artist ambition to be the "it kid"

How are we intervening?
* through an unrelenting recognition of talent and resources
* through collaboration
* performing the creation of a space to do our work

And so we ask: What does it mean to work together?
* recognizing and celebrating abundance of available talent
* artist supported in that recognition
* community supported by individual artist's contributions
* the community creates a structure within which to do our work
*being a part of something bigger that becomes more than the sum of its parts

What will this piece be a catalyst for?
*shifting perceptions of what is possible
*community building
*modeling recognition and usefulness of resource sufficiency

One core performer asked: Why intervene?
I think this needs to be answered by each performer and will be revealed through our collaboration and in the performance itself. But here are a few I came up with:
* working in isolation perpetuates old paradigm
* the shift can't happen in isolation
* localism is nurtured
* people moving through community can take skills they've learned outward
* this practice can be replicated on a broader scale

In October, 2009 I received a divination by Malidoma Somé who told me to be the first in any given situation to give maximum attention to touch. I had also recently begun to understand desire as an evolutionary impulse. Around this same time Jess asked me and Erika to participate in developing a piece for two shows whose themes were a direct inquiry into 'desire' and that we would be exploring the theme of desire through touch within the container of Gravity's Symmetry score.

When touching another there is a distinction between mutually beneficial touch and not. For me the distinction occurs when one of the touchers stops using it as a means to listen. When one stops using touch as a means to a mutual communication the one they are touching becomes an "object of desire" and merely a reference point for the ego's fulfillment.

I am also coming from the perspective of desire being an evolutionary impulse and touch being inherently linked to the expression of physical desire. My research in this work with Jess and Erika has been around touch as a 'listening' and a potentially evolutionary expression. I am also looking at touch as something that can be taken—which can arise in much more subtle interactions than outright assault, "copping a feel" or even "stealing a kiss". Also looking at the effects of receiving touch passively, of going through the motions of touch without much desire / freezing and how the toucher responds to trauma.

In this process the questions I have been asking myself are: Can I stay present and in integrity with my desire AND present and listening to the one I am expressing my desire with? Where does my desire actually reside? Is it in the touch? or is it in the currency of this invitation? Can I track when/if I get over taken by my desire? Can they? Am I desiring to touch the individual humanity that is turning me on so much? Are there moments where one becomes frozen and the other just taking? When one becomes frozen is it a turning off of sensation and therefore communication? What is being communicated in the motions yet desire-less? There are volumes of explorative work around sex and desire. But my inquiry and where I want to live as a discipline—is that place where touch is a mutual listening, a mutual conversation and expression of regard and desire for the other as a creative and co-evolutionary process.

It has been a chalenge to remain in my desire for this research with Jess and Erika. Challenging to remain in integrity with what is important to me in this research, in working with a known womanizer with the complications of the fact that I crushed on him in my youth. I struggled with trusting myself in being OUT with my desire to do this kind of research while being perceived as coming from a moral high-ground. My desire is to reveal the truth of this collaborative research: a lot of touching, moving together and Jess' sensual residue that "haunts" Erika's and my dance. It is a dance of my desire to reveal this kind of touch as it is sensed and perceived (or not) in its performance, and most of all to be giving touch maximum attention.