Spring 2015 Honorary Fellow
Fellow: Lise Brenner
Project: Vox Populi
About Vox Populi
With Vox Populi, Lise was interested in the way choreography and performance can bring attention to street corners as intersections of time, space and embodied activity. Lise's project specifically looked at the neighborhood of Dutch Kills, Queens and sought to give voice to the network of stories and shared meaning that make up the place. Lise engaged locals in the telling, documenting, and sharing of their stories and connection--both individual and collective--to the neighborhood.
News & Updates
Live Events and Installation in Artifacts and After Effects
The items displayed in The Neighborhood Registry of Important Places reflect approximately 2 years of frequent visits to Dutch Kills, with side excursions to Long Island City, primarily Hunter’s Point. The point of the project was to make a record of associations; a map of collective knowledge housed in things like a grape arbor, ironwork fence, an abandoned construction site, a former firehouse. All the information and objects presented were gathered through personal connections and referrals, a network of relationships that Lise started in 2014 by going to the Dutch Kills Civic Association meeting and asking people to tell her about one thing in their neighborhood they especially love.
StreetWalks
On July 10, 2015 Lise Brenner celebrated the opening of a photography show, StreetWalks, at Our Coffee Shop in the Dutch Kills neighborhood of Queens as part of her multi-part project Vox Populi. Lise Brenner and Salvador Espinoza curated the show and it featured the work of Clare Maxwell, Connie Murray, Eva Weiss, Lise Brenner, Martha Williams, Nikita Chan, and Salvador Espinoza.
Lise and Salvador collected photos into contact sheet format so that viewers could take virtual 'walks' through collections of photo documentation of Dutch Kills taken by resident photographers who make a practice of shooting regularly in the neighborhood.
Artist Bio
Lise Brenner/Movement Artist makes location-specific interactive pieces. These “street dances” reveal pieces of hidden history and/or illuminate what is current and thriving but often unnoticed.
Lise draws from cartography, botany, a love of dates and ‘facts’ and imagining the ‘real’ story, travel, questions of translation. She makes conceptual work through embodied situations in forms that are seemingly simple and intrinsically fun in order to draw participants from a wide range of backgrounds.
Everything Lise makes is informed by her history as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Her pieces are journeys within predefined areas with clear beginnings and endings, spatially and in time. Lise is delighted by repetition, visual and auditory rhythms, the overlapping durations of different activities. Her pieces are games that guide participants to see that: every site is a series of moments for person(s), place and time(s) to intersect. Every place is dynamic. Even in the most highly staged and rehearsed situation, nothing is truly predictable (daisies in the cracks of the sidewalk, laundry in the luxury high rise window). Improvisation is everywhere.
Her goal is to build physical experiences that make audiences fall in love with the place they are exploring, that operate through iterative, interactive processes; and generate documentation as part of the process.
Every place is sacred. The question is, where, why, and to whom?