We are excited to announce the launch of BAU AiR TILT, a new biennial residency in collaboration with BAU. The first artist in residence is TILT associate artist Billy Mullaney who begins on February 28 and will present his research in a public sharing on March 28.
For this four-week residency BAU and TILT invite an artist working in dance/performance and other interdisciplinary performative formats offering space and support for research and creation.
Billy Mullaney (1988, US) is a performance maker whose work typically begins by analyzing non-theatrical formal structures such as academic lectures (SEMESTER), tarot card readings (Welcome, I Have Been Expecting You), and promotional trailers (The Glory Machine). He is particularly interested in the mode of spectatorship each form engenders: How they address the spectator, organize attention, and dictate meaning.
Drawing on his background in theater, choreography, and performance art, Billy makes performances that subvert and short-circuit the representational logics of these forms. In the spirit of a puzzle, he deconstructs familiar structures to display their inner workings and aesthetics, and to indicate the political stakes of accepting their configuration of reality.
Billy is artist associate at TILT. At Bau, Billy will conduct intermedia research investigating comic books and reality TV.
Comics
Comics employ a fundamentally different logic of representing time and space from theatre. There’s an entirely medium-specific code of structuring attention from panel to panel across the surface of a page.
During his residency Billy will be developing setups where narrative elements flow between live performance and comic books. Questioning what elements of character are best represented in each medium. What expectations of genre come from incorporating comics as a form? In what ways does each form enlist the spectator's imagination to represent impossible environments such as dreamscapes, parallel realities, or a fourth spatial dimension?
Billy’s research with comic books will feed into The Premonitions Bureau Vol 1, a specufictional noir dream-detective story hybridizing theater and comic books. The Premonitions Bureau Vol 1 is an entry into TILT’s LUNARIS-verse, featuring characters, dreams, and plotlines crossing over from other recent performances.
Reality TV
Preoccupied by reality television's claims to 'reality' as such, Billy is also researching the filmic and public-relations strategies that such programs deploy to construct their brand, and the required unseen machinery and labor to sustain it.
What elements register as 'real' per se about these contrived scenarios? What choreographies of surveillance, image production and capture need to be organized around whatever reality TV trains its cameras on? How does such an inherently theatrical genre fare on a literal theatre stage?
Billy’s investigation of reality tv is a deepening of his earlier research with live-projected film capture from The Glory Machine, indicating the political and aesthetic stakes of forcing perspective and serially editing live performance.
Billy will work with performers, illustrators, video technicians, theorists, and former reality show contestants to devise scenes for the Public Sharing on March 28th.
Credits:
Billy Mullaney
With Olesya Lakshtanova (internship), Barbara Miše, Aline Olmos, Fred Raposo, Chun Shing Au