ON A.I.R. - Conversations with Artists in Residence – Details, episodes & analysis

A conversation between legendary composer and sound-gatherer Stuart Dempster, and artist Tonya Lockyer, celebrating the Cistern at Fort Worden State Park and its part in Deep Listening and new music development. 

“Our conversation is about deep listening and creative friendships and lost sounds, the intricacies of harmony and reverberation, how parks should protect their sounds as much as they protect their fauna, and what it's like to create seminal moments in music. We travel from the streetcars of San Francisco to Carnegie Hall, but it begins right here at Centrum in the sonic depths under Fort Worden, in the Cistern.” – Tonya Lockyer 

Hosted by Tonya Lockyer

Produced by Tonya Lockyer and BC Campbell 

Engineered and mixed by BC Campbell 

Recorded: Summer 2023

Length: 55 minutes

Special thanks to Centrum, Michelle Hagewood, Renko Dempster, Shin Yu Pai. 

Mentioned in the Podcast 

* indicates recorded in the Centrum Cistern

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann

Pauline Oliveros Official Website 

“7-Up” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band* 

“Lear” from Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis*

“Trog Arena” from Troglodyte’s Delight by The Deep Listening Band

Courtesy of The Pauline Oliveros Trust and The Ministry of Maåt. Members ASCAP (PoPandMoM.org)

“Balloon Payment” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band* 

“Melodic Communion” from Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel by Stuart Dempster*

“In C” by Terry Riley

“Standing Waves” from In The Great Abbey Of Clement VI by Stuart Dempster

Overlaps and kinship abound in this nourishing conversation between Christi Krug and Alyssa Graybeal, whose respective careers in writing, memoir, and coaching yields a generous conversation full of juicy advice and heart.

Alyssa Graybeal

Alyssa Graybeal (she/her) is a queer writer and cartoonist whose work explores chronic illness and disability. In particular, she is fascinated by questions of creativity and entrepreneurship, and how navigating the world in a disabled body increases creative capacity. Her first memoir, Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World, explores the emotional landscape of connective tissue disorders Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan syndromes. This book won the 2020 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award and will be released in spring 2023. She lives in Astoria, Oregon.

 Christi Krug

Christi Krug (she/her) experienced invisibility as a child in foster care, and today helps writers of all ages to feel seen. In poetry, memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction, she honors the inner human experience. She blends modalities as a poet, presenter, visual artist, outdoor enthusiast, and yoga teacher, and is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. A Pushcart nominee for poetry, she has performed in vineyards, libraries, ballrooms, Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater, Waterstone Gallery, and Yosemite National Park. She served as Creative Resident for North Cascades Institute in 2019. Recent writing has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Kosmos Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Nightingale & Sparrow, Nat. Brut, Griffel, The Good Life Review, and The Sun. For 25 years, she has been teaching writers at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington and continues to do so virtually after a recent move to the Oregon Coast.

This is part three of a four-part series put together by Centrum and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Hazard to ask “what is queer ecology?” of climate scientists, ecologists, choreographers, poets, and creatives who each share unique perspectives on how queer and trans identities can and do play important roles in shifting the way we think about the sciences and our relations with the more-than-human. This project is part of Woelfle-Erskine and Hazard’s 2019-2020 Centrum Northwest Heritage residencies, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.  

In this conversation, Hazard and Woelfle-Erskine speak with Jocine Velasco about the urgency and many threads of exploring questions around queer ecologies.  They reflect on the relationships between climate and social behaviors, working with and in acknowledgement of Indigenous, prison, and climate justice issues, and an array of experiences and questions that inform their work.

Jocine Velasco immigrated from the Philippines with her family to the gulf coast of Florida when she was a child. Velasco was an urban farmer in New Orleans before began pursuing a Masters in landscape architecture at University of Washington where she is working on a thesis which reimagines Puget Sound prairie ecological restoration through an anti-colonial and abolition framework. Velasco writes poetry, does watercolor and collage whenever she can.  

This is part 2 of a four-part series put together by Centrum and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Hazard to ask “what is queer ecology?” of climate scientists, ecologists, choreographers, poets, and creatives who each share unique perspectives on how queer and trans identities can and do play important roles in shifting the way we think about the sciences and our relations with the more-than-human. This project is part of Woelfle-Erskine and Hazard’s 2019-2020 Centrum Northwest Heritage residencies, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.  

For this conversation, Woelfle-Erskine and Hazard meet up with Melecio Estrella and Andrew Jones to talk about the ways their practices in the performing arts and earth sciences intersect with queer ecologies. We learn about the processes and thoughts that have brought vertical dance, activism, and Earth science together and together the group starts to outline new possibilities for understanding how queerness and queer identities are integral to relations with the human and non-human.

Melecio Estrella has been a Bay Area performing artist, director, and teacher for the past 19 years. He is co-artistic director of Fog Beast, artistic director of BANDALOOP, and a member of the Joe Goode Performance Group since 2004. Recent notable directorial engagements include the opening of The Momentary at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, AK (Feb. 2020), The National Art Gallery of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur (2019),  The Big Reveal at the Asian Art Museum of SF (2019), Art and About in Sydney Australia (2018), and the JFK Centennial Celebration at The Kennedy Center (2017).

Andrew Jones is an Earth scientist who works at the interface of human and environmental systems.  His research uses quantitative models and data analysis to understand climate change and human-Earth system interactions at decision-relevant scales.  He also collaborates with social scientists and interacts closely with stakeholders to understand how science can effectively provide actionable insight into strategies for increasing resilience of energy water, food, and urban systems.  Andrew is an Adjunct Professor in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley where he teaches courses on the intersection of science of and society.  He has participated in a number of science-art collaborations over the years including The Climate Music Project and several dance-theatre works with performance group Fog Beast.  He also helped to organize and facilitate a series of thematic residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts at the intersection of artistic practice, scientific practice, and climate equity.

This episode is part of a series put together by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Hazard to ask “what is queer ecology?” of climate scientists, ecologists, choreographers, poets, and creatives who each share unique perspectives on how queer and trans identities can and do play important roles in shifting the way we think about the sciences and our relations with the more-than-human. This project is part of Woelfle-Erskine and Hazard’s 2019-2020 Centrum Northwest Heritage residencies, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.  

In Part 1, Michelle Hagewood sits down with these creative folks to learn more about what brought them to this work, what it means to them, and what the past couple of years have looked like in their work, play, and pandemic-affected lives.  We learn a bit of what we have to look forward to in the interviews that will follow. 

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a Seattle-based artist-scholar whose work includes photography, video, street theater, and scientific investigation as participatory performance. Cleo’s scientific collaborations with tribes and grassroots groups investigate projects to restore rivers and coastal zones to benefit salmon and recharge groundwater to adapt to changing climates, and have been funded by the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and the National Science Foundation. Cleo is the author, most recently, of “Fishy Pleasures: Unsettling fish hatching and fish catching on Pacific frontiers” (Imaginations 2019) and the forthcoming monograph Underflows: Transfiguring Rivers, Queering Ecology (UW Press).

July Hazard is a poet from Kentucky who’s currently in Seattle, with parts left behind in a long list of cities, rivers, and truck stops on the way. July’s current research investigates the altered shorelines of the Black and Duwamish rivers, the assembly of poetic voice under the guidance of animals, and the forest relations of trans and queer youth in rural Appalachia. July teaches in the University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas Department and Program on the Environment.

Together, they collaborate with other artists, scientists, and activists to investigate hidden flows and suppressed ways of being, and to evoke new relations among people and the more-than-human world. Often, these collaborations form uprisings of an ever-shifting art & science collective called the Water Underground. Their shared work has been seen at venues ranging from derelict rail yards and street protests to museums and science conferences—including SomARTS, CounterPulse, the Crocker Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery, the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, and the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, the Bay Delta Science Conference, on Sproul Plaza during Occupy Berkeley, and wheat-pasted around Oakland, California. Their performance installation “Tell A Salmon Your Troubles” won the inaugural Making and Doing Prize at the 2015 Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting.

For our third installment of our series of conversations in our Emerging Artist Residency program, we listen in on Gabi Dao and Vo Vo who cover a wide breadth of topics that connect to their sound practices and interests in subjectivity and memory. They discuss a myriad of ideas around digital representations and our current times. 

Gabi Dao is an artist and co-organizer at Duplex, a DIY project space + studio collective based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) SLAY-WA-TUTH Nations. Her interdisciplinary practice insists on counter-memory, intimacy, hyphenation, multiple truths and blurred temporalities through the pursuit of sculpture, installation, moving image and sound. She prioritizes complications, questions and productive confusions against the aesthetic systems of homogeneity, complicity and control. Often, her work begins with interests in ‘patchwork’ conceptions of time and materiality, tracing histories of the everyday through themes of globalization, consumption, belief and belonging. She has shown her work at Kamias Triennale (Quezon City, Philippines) Unit 17, grunt gallery, Audain gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver, Canada), Terrain Biennial (Los Angeles, US), Blinkers (Winnipeg, Canada), Images Festival (Toronto, Canada) and International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).
 

Vo Vo is a radical educator of 10 years in over 20 countries in Inclusion, Refugee Support, Trauma-Informed Care, and Racial Justice. Editor of an internationally renowned publication for People of Color, speaker, curator and musician who has toured in Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the States. Anarchist and local festival organizer. One of the festivals they curate is IntersectFest: A Festival For and By People Of Color – now in its fifth year. It has featured over 200 Black, Indigenous, and POC artists, including dancers, poets, filmmakers, curators, visual artists and more. Their recently initiated career as a visual artist has seen them primarily work in textiles, embroidery, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, discuss histories of imperialism and colonization, and invite interaction from participants.

The second in our series of conversations with Centrum’s 2020 Emerging Artists. In this installment Michelle Hagewood chats with Dawn Stetzel about the evolution and processes within her work. Stetzel generously shares her thoughts on how the work deals with safety, edges, and elements of the ridiculous.  She talks through the way the works are performed and documented, and the nuanced ways in which she approaches thinking about place.  

Dawn Stetzel is an artist living in the USA on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Living in a place of tides and tsunamis where “land is not always land, sometimes it is water”, has informed her work regarding home and perceptions of safety. She has an MFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and recently exhibited her performative sculpture at the Portland Biennial in Oregon.

This episode kicks off a series of conversations with the 2020 Emerging Artist Residents who recently spent the month of October at Centrum in Fort Worden State Park. Today, we’re starting with Russna Kaur and Chase Keetley, whose conversation explores each of their relationships to place, space, and home, navigating racialized expectations and contexts, and the values and ideologies that inform their practices and pursuits.

Russna Kaur (b. 1991, Toronto, ON; lives and works in Vancouver) is a mixed media artist whose work explores alternative ways of addressing her identity as a Canadian of South Asian diaspora through an experimental painting practice. She graduated from the University of Waterloo earning a BA with a major in Fine Arts: Studio Specialization (2013) and the Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019) where she received a Master in Fine Arts. Kaur was awarded the Gathie Falk Visual Arts Scholarship, the University Women’s Club of Vancouver Graduate Scholarship, the Audain Faculty of Art Graduate Teaching Fellowship and was shortlisted for the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship. This year Kaur was awarded a Burrard Arts Foundation Artist Residency in Vancouver and is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Painting Prize for emerging painters in British Columbia and the IDEA Art Award.

Chase Keetley is a multi-disciplinary African-Canadian artist whose work is based in the Black Experience. He primarily investigates the mimicry and use of Blackness like the appropriation of cultural practices and iconography rooted in the Pan-African Ethnography. Through breaking down the identities, desires, and investments of non-Black people and how they live vicariously through Black Culture without actively dismantling the issues that coincide within its existence.

In the summer of 2018 he started a community organization called Black Arts Vancouver. Chase has dedicated a majority of his practice to the research on British Columbia’s Black History, in order to provide proper information and education in their workshops. As well as provide secure spaces for Vancouver's Black youth to not only learn about themselves, but where they stand in history apart from the white settler narrative.

Incoming Northwest Heritage Centrum resident, Alice Gosti, invites Bebe Miller to have a conversation about dance, movement, and the context of their practices in the current moment. The two choreographers discover overlapping formative pedagogies and talk through the spatial experiences of zoom, intimacy and vulnerability in their bodies of work, the cultivation of collaboration and play, and the multiple influences of place, language, and connections with people. Listening to this conversation is a dance for the mind and offers new ways to think about how we move through the world.  

Alice Gosti is an Italian-American choreographer, hybrid performance artist, curator and architect of experiences. Alongside her company members, she has been working in public spaces and exploring unconventional performances since 2013. Gosti’s work uses the world, landscapes, and pre-existing architectures as stages. Recent productions include How to become a partisan (Velocity Dance Center, 2015) and Material Deviance in Contemporary American Culture (On the Boards, 2018). 

Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, commissions and residencies including being a recipient of the 2012 Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance Award, the 2012 ImPulsTanz danceWEB scholarship, a 2013 Bossak/Heilbron Award, part of the 2015 inaugural Intiman Theatre Emerging Artist Program as a Director, a 2015 Artist Trust GAP Grant, a 2015 and 2017 Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Award, a 2017 Artist Trust Fellowship, a 2016 NEFA National Dance Project Production and Touring Grant and, the inaugural Italian Council Grant from the Italian Government. 

In 2013 she founded the Yellow Fish // Epic Durational Performance Festival, the world’s only festival dedicated to durational performance. Gosti is also a recipient of Centrum’s Northwest Heritage Residency program in 2020.  

Bebe Miller first performed her work at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop in 1978. Her choreography has been commissioned by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company and a host of colleges and universities. Since its forming in 1985 Bebe Miller Company has performed nationally and in Great Britain, Europe, South America, Australia, Africa and the Caribbean. Over the last decade the Company has produced a variety of digital archive projects referencing the company’s creative practice. Her latest ebook, How Dancing Is Built: The Making of In A Rhythm, is available online. Bebe is one of the 2012 inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients, as well as a 2010 United States Artists Ford Fellow. She has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, was a 2015 Movement Research Gala honoree and a 2020 Danspace Project Gala honoree, to be celebrated in 2021. Bebe was a Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance from 2000 through 2016, and has received honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Following up on episode 7 with Aaron Asis we continue to follow along and meet some of the voices that informed Fort Words at Fort Worden State Park. In this second installment, Asis interviews Ella Sandvig, a resident and employee during the Fort Worden Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center era, and also Timothy Caldwell, a local historian intimate with the nuances and stories of the Fort during its military eras.  

Fort Words is a public art installation created by Asis to celebrate the inspired conditions and historic significance at Fort Worden State Park.  These temporary installations are drawn from local oral histories, collections of historic texts, and public testimonials to give voice to these battery sites and share stories of the Forts dynamic history with park visitors — through October 31st, 2020. 

Fort Words was developed with support from Centrum, Jefferson County Historical Society, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Fort Worden Public Development Authority, Coastal Artillery Museum, Friends of Fort Worden, Ignition Arts — with special support from the Port Townsend Arts Commission, and Washington State Parks & Recreation. 

See the Fort Words website here.