Devised Performance
Asclepion Performance, Dream Scene, 2017
We are a group of interdisciplinary artists and writers developing a multimedia performance based on The Wayfarer, a Russian symbolist play written in 1911 by Valery Bryusov. This project is part of a decades-long collaboration that began over twenty years ago and continues to evolve in response to place, memory, and time.
This summer’s residency at the Goldey House marks a pivotal phase in the work. We'll focus on devising and filming new material on-site, using the retreat’s wooded environment to echo the play’s setting—a cabin in the forest—and to create visual and sonic textures that reflect the story’s disorienting, dreamlike atmosphere. Working together in an immersive, rural context will allow us to experiment freely with performance, sound, and video. We’ll generate raw material that will anchor the next stage of the project.
Amy McKay painting in her studio
This process-based approach is central to our collaboration. Rather than aiming for a single, polished outcome, we embrace the project’s mutability. The footage and texts we produce this year will inform a future performance planned for next summer—another iteration that will fold in accumulated memories and temporal layers, including reflections on our own evolving relationships and the changes wrought by time.
This process is also a formative aspect of Amy MacKay’s painting practice. As an artist working in the intersection of painting and performance, the video and performative material generated at Goldey will become the emotional and visual source for a new series of paintings, future extending the life of the project into future exhibitions. In this way, the work continues to echo long after the event itself. The Goldey House residency offers us the time and space to deepen this process, to gather, remember, perform, and begin again.
BIOS
Amy MacKay (she/her) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA from UC Irvine in 2018 and BA from Bard College in 2007. Through an intensive research based process, she makes paintings based on documentation of site-specific, performative events she stages with people in her life. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as La Beast Gallery, Baert Gallery and the Honolulu Museum. MacKay is also one of the founders of the after hours gallery in Los Angeles, and the arts initiative Group Practice.
Julie Rossman (she/her) is a director and multimedia visualizer living in Brooklyn, NY. She has directed and collaborated on dozens of plays and performance projects in NYC and beyond, and holds a double BA in theater directing and Russian studies from Bard College. During the day she works as a graphic designer specializing in data visualization at the National Audubon Society.
Jess Camacho (he/him) is a queer, Mexican-American writer and director who splits his time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Jess got his start in the industry as a showrunners assistant on a major network drama and has gone on to develop projects with Anonymous Content, Denver and Delilah, and Likely Story among others. He holds a degree in fine arts from Tufts University and is repped by United Talent Agency and Entertainment 360.
Braden Marks (he/they) is a writer, performer and psychotherapist based in New York City. He holds an MSW from Hunter College, an MFA from San Francisco State University and a BA from Bard College. He has published translation work, written for stage, written for television at ABC, and worked on various documentaries for American Experience at PBS and others. These days he is focused on exploring and cultivating the healing space found at the intersection of therapy and art.
