Artists Reach Out: Stephanie Acosta

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Stephanie Acosta

Stephanie Acosta
(photo: Jessie Young)

Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her practice, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations. Blending performance with practice-based and studio research. Engaging ensembles in facilitated processes, she creates fleeting performance works that examine site, space, and perception in shared experiences. Acosta has presented her works with and for Museum of Art and Design, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Chocolate Factory Theater, Knockdown Center, the Current Sessions, Miami Performance International Festival, Anatomy Collective, IN>Time Symposium, the Chicago Park District, the Performance Philosophy conference, High Concept Labs, Read/Write Library, No Media, and Radius. Acosta has recently collaborated with artist Miguel Gutierrez, on multiple projects including Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us), commissioned for the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and This Bridge Called My Ass, premiered 2019 American Realness with a dynamic cast of Latinx performers, currently touring. Postponed World Premiere March 2020 the multi-platform work Good Day God Damn at the Chocolate Factory Theater LIC, NY, as performance work, Acosta will continue expanding on research of the cosmic and surreal in crisis, with a series of cinematic shorts and publication.

stephanieacosta.org

Video still from Extra Terrestrial (2018)
Good Day God Damn series
featuring Miriam Gabriel and Leslie Cuyjet

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Deeply. I’ve been working on a multi-platform series of works called Good Day God Damn that has been building for two years, and was about to premiere its evening length work at the Chocolate Factory Theater. It has been postponed but also deeply compromised in context. Good Day... is, at its core, a series of works around the concept of a multi-crisis existence, its absurdity, and the impossibility to process the immense webs that make up our world. The aesthetics and specifics then evolved around the American landscape, the cinematic thriller, extraterrestrial engagements and road trips. My ensemble, made up of dancers Leslie Cuyjet, Miriam Gabriel, Angie Pittman, and Jessie Young, have been working with me on and off in the studio with movement research score development, video art pieces, and writing. We ended up with a work full of a terrifying amount of foreshadowing. An example:

In a micro play called Looking Up by Cuyjet, two characters stand outside an institutional space modeled on the Met, with a public; that institution shifts into a civic one, a court house, and the public into a protesting crowd, then finally into an impenetrable edifice, and a revolt. During this absurdist little ditty, an oracle, played by Young, whose entire face and suit is constructed of face shields, sees the full-tiered shift in a flash of minutes and a planet played by Pittman orbits them all, attempting to provide salvation but unable to slow enough to bring it. 

That is a scene we wrote over a year ago, and costumes I designed during a previous residency in the first year.  I think one of the things artists and all of us really will have to address is context, how to grasp a global experience, and global grief, the disproportionate effects and relief that follows, the ripples are going to be constant and will need listening and action. 

Beyond that we had further west coast and EU touring coming up for This Bridge Called My Ass that are all now postponed or canceled. My co-curated series (with curator Alexis Wilkinson) was hoping to return this Fall after our sabbatical year but will now have to wait and see as its full purpose was a way to offer curatorial performance opportunities for artists culminating in a live event about gathering and the salon vibe of living rooms and generous sharing.  We are now conceptualizing a translation into digital zine form as a way to continue to think about curating curatorial space for performance makers and cross-disciplinary discourse.

Otherwise, I’m working on balancing my rage. I am at the rage part of my grief. And it’s hard but maybe also the right response. Maybe it’s also okay to be angry because there is a lot to be angry about and a lot of fuel that can come from rage. So I’m working on how to focus my rage into power and action instead of the current self-destruction that can creep in.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I started participating in theater and dance early, and though it has had lots of titles, I have often felt avant garde theater is my origin practice. I also started with my first camera the same year I started dance and theater so the dualism of practices, studio practices that run alongside and parallel my performance practices has always been true. I often say I kept doing photography because after being in rehearsal all day I need the quiet solitude of a frame and a dark room. I don’t tend to illustrate one modality with another and can often have simultaneous works developing but often the overreaching research and questions is what is the umbrella. One practice or medium picks up where the other leaves off.

My particular practice is rigorous wandering, inquisitive rambling, discursive tending. In truth, I do have to say that theater is where I had a chance to ask all these questions first. Where thinking about objects and abstract environment building, along with soul-ravaging avant garde movement and performance experimentation, communicating and collaborating one idea through multiple departments and modes to come together in one experience for the viewer/receiver/audience, I learned that all there.

But it’s all those strange solo hours in studios through my 20s and graduate school that showed me how to contend with all those loud voices when you are alone, looking at a blank wall or empty studio, and knowing you are the one who needs to choose to make the mark. It’s rather horrible and beautiful.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

In many ways, I’m practicing more fidelity to practice, to repeated and returning engagements, like meditation, cooking, reading, planting, I’m engaging the specificity of daily life and incubating in micro ways the attention to what is being affected around me, what is shifting. That is the mode of attention I make work about and from, I cultivate in my work’s processes of listening, translating, warping, and reentry. But to apply it to myself more directly in this stillness is more of a return. I am envisioning a messy, regenerating, in all its violent, necessary, beauty, I hope for revolutions and radicalizing that allows artists to come back to the table and see their solidarity with labor, with populations they live amongst. I am envisioning an art world of consideration, wildness, and unquenchable inquiry where we allow life over capital to lead. Where we allow ourselves to see our roles as artists to include citizenry, solidarity in ACTION, and our role in a new tomorrow. We will have to build it, but that’s what I hope I have been preparing for. I’m not producing now, I am preparing for the road to come. I am working to face this continued world, and formulate futures.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I have always been working to formulate futures.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I am taking my time to manage myself, my complicated inner life and the role I have in control and acceptance. It's a form of consideration in a lot of my practices with my performers, but this deeper listening has evaded my personal reality because of the challenges of being a freelance artist.

We are dealing with a shifting, precarious and, for many, a dangerous world, and this pandemic is letting us see in real time just how quietly damage can be done on many scales. My practices almost all come down to varying modes of listening, considering, analyzing, interpreting, and then doing it all again. I’m allowing my practice of that to exist as part of my lived experience, not focusing on producing works but allowing myself to see the purpose of practice and making in the life I am living, and the lives being affected and lost outside my own reality, my own field, and home. I hope that my practice as it expands back into a wider world contributes to the nuanced consideration and calls to action and attention we need. I hope that I will keep focusing within my work on the cracks and margins of what is easy to see, that I and my teams will remember that this mess is the world we already had, it’s not new, we are being given a horrible opportunity to see its cracks in real time, and I hope that we don’t let that visibility go to waste. Perhaps that’s my hope for how my practice might function, my hope for how I might serve.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

I bless the “points of energetic entry” in the apartment often. My grandmother did it with holy water and incense. She told me when I was little to go around to all the entry points, but then couldn’t understand why I was going to the facets and window frames, and mirrors. We just agreed to expand the definition of entry points. It helps me consider for a moment what comes in and out, of the larger space, and the multiple interior environments within our space. I find it not only allows me to ground myself in the space but to widen the scope and consideration I give to the space as a whole. There’s a lot of ways in and out of most things, places, and ideas.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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