BEEN THERES THEN | voice + projections | ~ one hour + eight minutes | 2019 -
A multimedia performance and screen reading scooting around poetic memoir, speculative seeking, and family time travel in post-hippie spiritual milieus.
Once upon a time that never was and always will be, the softie science of time travel arrives at its new now. Looking back at the new age and considering familial slippage and skippage, Jesse Malmed offers an idiosymphonic drift forward and backward through the morass of time. A “guru kid” whose parents were “there then,” Jesse’s own accidental embodied and embedded anthropological approach to the strange scene of post-hippie spiritual seeking helps orient a broader if not specifically general drift through sanyas, beyond heroic super cosmics, the flows and flaws of cultural appropriation, crunchy co-ops, and the messiness of flake mishigas. A reading that’s a screening that’s a screed, like some kind of social meditation or a raga against the machine.
Commissioned by the DePaul Art Museum. Performed at DPAM (Chicago) and Microlights (Milwaukee).
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