Streaming Live on February 18 at 6PM EST at Live.NationalSawdust.org

Part of the 2021 Digital Discovery Festival: BODY / SPACE

Choreography by Gwendolyn Gussman

Music from Lisel (aka Eliza Bagg) and Booker Stardrum

The Vanishing Point – a collaboration between experimental musicians Booker Stardrum and Lisel (aka Eliza Bagg) and dancer/choreographer Gwendolyn Gussman – is a piece of music and dance conceived as video art and intended for the digital stage. Created across the distances of the COVID era, The Vanishing Point spirals in the anxious euphoria and isolation of our time. A lonely body in uncanny spaces is accompanied only by digital manipulations and iterations of her own form. The piece meditates on the chaos of cyberspace and the destruction of the oceans, atmosphere, and trees, and our own culpability in precipitating these events.
The work brings Stardrum’s textural electronic production and percussion together with the sweeping, ethereal world of Lisel’s “fractured, futurist pop” (WNYC). Lisel’s musical practice is grounded in her extensive career as a vocalist of renaissance, baroque and minimalist/post-minimalist singing styles, as she “disintegrates her voice into a euphoric, Auto-Tuned goo, emerging from the other side of the abyss an electro-pop alien” (NPR).

Gwendolyn Gussman is a performing artist, choreographer and movement teacher based between NYC and Colorado. She is also the founder and artistic director of HOLDTIGHT, an interdisciplinary and experimental dance theater company. The productions are often interactive, participatory, multi-sensory, rooted in psychology and curiosity.

As a vocalist, Eliza Bagg has collaborated across genres with many prominent experimental artists, from performing in Meredith Monk’s opera Atlas with the LA Philharmonic, to touring regularly as a member of the Roomful of Teeth ensemble or playing the role of Ape in Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta. As a vocalist, she has performed as a soloist with many of the world’s top orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has also worked with and premiered music by composers such as John Zorn, Caroline Shaw, David Lang, Julianna Barwick and more. Pitchfork compared her voice to "a lovelorn alien reaching out from the farthest reaches of the galaxy;” her unique sound is the basis for the otherworldly landscape of her own music, which she self-produces, usually beginning with manipulated vocal samples, processed vocal improvisations or patterns built from extended techniques.

Booker Stardrum is a performer-composer whose recent sculptural compositions are carved from the dense layering of instruments, a focus on pan-tonality and an intuitive approach to rhythm. Booker’s sophomore solo release Temporary etc. is a highly personal amalgamation of electro-acoustics, minimalism, ambient, jazz and contemporary experimental electronic music that The Wire stated “further solidifies Stardrum’s position as one of America’s most intriguing composers.”