PEAK HD a moment in time
This video introduces both Anne Bogart & Elizabeth Streb’s FALLING & LOVING and PEAK HD—two revolutionary projects that collide in an explosion of poetry, breathtaking physicality, and technical prowess in the PEAK HD presentation of the avant-garde titans’ collaborative work. Here, PEAK Performances’ Jedediah Wheeler (Arts + Cultural Programming) gives an inside look at how PEAK HD captures the dynamism, nuance, and exhilaration of live performance.
PEAK HD, a partnership between PEAK and WNET’s ALL ARTS formed last year to broadcast performances produced at PEAK Performances’ state-of-the-art home, launches with this presentation of FALLING & LOVING, captured on 12 cameras of various sizes and purposes. The PEAK HD broadcast offers audiences anywhere the opportunity to see this performance Gia Kourlas in the New York Times called “both straight-up beautiful and incredibly funny,” and to experience a work from two of contemporary performances’ most groundbreaking companies: STREB Extreme Action and the SITI Company, which recently announced its final season would take place in Fall, 2022.
In the video, Streb and Bogart both speak, from remote locations in never-before-seen interviews, about FALLING & LOVING, which intersected their companies’ radical approaches to action and theater, respectively, through a response to texts by playwright Charles Mee. FALLING + LOVING, Streb describes, takes as its subject “being out of control,” activating this idea quite literally through a series of accidents—as performers navigate and push past the normal human responses to gravity and various materials falling on them from a “Guck Machine” at the top of the stage. Being out of control, says Streb, is the “most critical and magnificent event that could possibly happen.” This is paralleled by Mee’s textual exploration of love, in all its destabilizing properties.
The act of hurling oneself towards the impossible is at the heart of the collaboration itself. As Bogart tells Wheeler in the video, “When [Elizabeth and I] met, neither of us knew how it would turn out of what we were going to do.” But that made them all the more compelled to “say yes to this impossible thing.”
Presented months before COVID-19 altered the fabric of society and shut down live performances across the globe, FALLING & LOVING examined a spectrum of human reaction to elements of life that we cannot predict. As she looks back now, during this period of COVID-19 where a “real political and cultural rupture is happening,” Bogart says, “I’m so proud of this work. Because it is visceral, it asks us to challenge every imaginative obstacle we might possibly face—and we’re all facing a huge obstacle.”
Music by GRAND BAND, Julius Eastman's Gay Guerilla
PEAK HD: Preview courtesy of WNET’s ALL ARTS