A Detailed History of Installation Development
Photo By: Robbie Sweeny
Installation Development and Description: Liss Fain
LFD’s work expresses our personal responses to the events that shape our lives. I begin with an image, a concept, an emotional tone; then I imagine the architecture of the space, determine the text—both are integral to making and experiencing a piece. The movement, ideas, architecture, and sound develop together, to create a world the audience and performers inhabit together. There is no single front for the performers and audience who, by choosing and changing perspectives, are active viewers; they see each other as well as the performers. And the performers see and feel the audience responding to the work. In choosing how close or far to be, when to move and change perspective, each audience member’s experience is a combination of their own unpredictable movements and the set choreography. The audience adds a final, unpredictable layer to the work.
Perception intrigues me; how it’s different for each person, how it’s shaped by the physical space. In 2010 I left proscenium work for evening-length installations, to work directly with the changeable dynamic between audience, performers, and choreography. Dance became the focal point in a hybrid performance—dance, architecture, sound, language, visual design.
The installation environments often comprise separate, contiguous areas, with movement happening in some or all spaces, and with the audience able to see multiple spaces from any perspective. The environments create a sense of place, a context, through their architecture and defining elements. Through their individuality, the dancers embody the singular ways each of us experiences the world.
The text, spoken by an actor and integrated into the score and performance, adds a cadence and a point of connection with the non-narrative movement. The text is drawn from literature, as well as from personal stories (spoken by seniors in their 90’s and teenage students), and letters. Over time, to let the audience absorb the language, the text has become sparser. The movement has become more personal.
Liss Fain has collaborated for many years with Matthew Antaky on set and lighting design, installation design, the directions the work will take, and with Dan Wool on the sound environments. Working together, they’ve extended the installations into gallery exhibits during the day. Visitors walk through and touch (with added elements to the set and sound environment), then attend a performance at night.
LFD has premiered 14 installation works; each with a unique physical environment and commissioned score embodying the underlying concept. The artistic collaborators with Ms. Fain are the dancers, installation/lighting/projection designer, composer, actors, costume designer.
LFD’s performance installations began with a performance in Dusseldorf, Germany, commissioned by Amerika Haus, at Beck & Eggeling Gallery. The commission for the Beck & Eggling gallery performance was fortuitous, a chance to explore a new structure. The three rooms of the gallery were in three separate buildings; the audience moved at will between the galleries, which had two or three dancers in each space. With the cast of performers also shifting between galleries, there were no repetitions in the choreography; each gallery contained a complete performance—whichever galleries were visited, in whatever order, became the viewer’s individualized performance.
The installation at Beck & Eggling Gallery, Dusseldorf was commissioned by Amerika Haus for the gallery’s three non-contiguous spaces. I chose to decide on my own, not consulting or referring to other installation work, how to use this configuration of galleries. Working through this was so interesting; I didn’t know what the gallery spaces looked like until I arrived. The conversations sparked by the performance were the impetus to continue onwards. This happened at the start of Internationale Tanzemesse, where LFD was performing what turned out to be our final proscenium piece.
Since then, LFD has made installations that have been remounted, with adaptations for different spaces. The company has brought two pieces to NY. The Water is Clear and Still, co-presented by Powerhouse (Brooklyn, 2013), with text by Jamaica Kincaid and co-publicized by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kincaid’s publisher. Ms. Kincaid attended a performance. The Imperfect is Our Paradise was co-presented by 3LD Art & Technology (NYC, 2016). The Mill Valley Library has presented, as part of its performance series, The False and True Are One (2011), The Water is Clear and Still (2013), Your Story Was This (2016). Remounting an installation in a different space necessitates adjustments and alters perspectives. It’s an opportunity to change my own perspective, think differently about it.
Beginning in the 1980’s in Boston, Ms. Fain has explored her interest in perception—how differently people experience and respond to their world—in proscenium and experimental works. She worked with video artists at The Media Center, M.I.T. on projects integrating video projection with dance. One performance placed dancers in various buildings on the M.I.T. campus, coordinating with each other via video, projected on the walls, of the other performers. She worked with photographer Karin Rosenthal—creating environments of overlapping structures with her abstracted images—with Mobius Theater Company, and with independent artists on site specific collaborations.
After moving to San Francisco, Fain collaborated with visual designer Matthew Antaky and video artist Peter Chang on Sojourn at Alexandria (1999), in association with Theater Artaud. Sojourn at Alexandria, the first of a two-part project exploring ways in which the Internet can interface with live performance, projected images of dancers who were on a stage in the lobby onto a front scrim and rear screen on the stage, creating a three-dimensional set with dancers between the scrims. Moving between the lobby and the main stage, the dancers continually altered the experience of the performance space. ZDTV filmed rehearsals and interviewed the artistic collaborators for a story that aired on their cable station. MRD Media web cast the dance and created a magazine-style story. This was followed in 2000 with Quarry, a collaborative work that used the Internet to stream real-time images of a sculptor (Richard Deutsch) working on a piece-in-progress in the Napa Valley into the theater. Demonstrating how technology can be used to reach out to a broad audience, Quarry was also live cast over the Internet on opening night, and streamed on demand for the next two months.
From 2001-2003, Ms. Fain designed and produced Frames of Light, concerts that integrated into an evening-length piece, without interruptions, works of several choreographers and unified by a set designed by Matthew Antaky.
In 2004, she collaborated with videographer Austin Forbord and Mongolian throat singer Ulziisaikhan Lkhagvadorj on Eclipse, integrating live dance performance with both video and live performance of Ulziisaikhan Lkhagvadorj.
Liss Fain Dance toured Europe from 2006 through 2010, performing and teaching at festivals and theaters, supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the US embassies in various countries, the festivals and theaters. During their 2009 home season at YBCA, Liss Fain Dance hosted the Lublin Dance Theater for an artistic exchange, featuring a performance of Towards a Good Silence. This event was supported by the Polish Cultural Institute of NY and the Adam Luskewitich Foundation.
Description of Installation Works
Open Time (2024) co-presented by Z Space
Open Time grew from a trip to the Arctic, where everything was dark or white, and quiet. Only water, ice and snow, rocks, birds, some whales. I came home looking for that boundarylessness, inside myself; and read an interview with Louise Glück describing stillness, endings, beginnings—waiting, mining the world around for new ideas. Her words struck me. They anchored my thoughts about solitude and spaciousness, how important these are for living in our imagination and the world.
The installation’s four rooms divided by translucent fabric, amplify the shifts between solitude, separateness, community. In Open Time, I’ve emphasized solitude. The audience moves through the walkways between the “rooms’; the dancers move unpredictably through the rooms and through the audience in the walkways, At one point, the dancers are all in the smallest space, and the audience surrounds them.
Here.Take It (2022) Z Space
Here.Take It is a very personal work about course corrections, crossing through our internal boundaries. The piece grew from many pre-dawn visits I made to Pierce Point Ranch, Point Reyes, watching the dark and the fog disappear. I began creating movement there, high up between the ocean and the bay, in solitude, walking through the rough grasses, lumpy ground, deserted ranch buildings. I wrote the text, spoken by Florentina Mocaneau. The piece begins with a three minute film of Florentina Mocaneau at Pierce Point Ranch, walking between the buildings and fields. The still and video projections in the performance are all shot at Pierce Point Ranch. The eighty-foot installation encompasses the entirety of Z Space, embodying the spaciousness of the actual ranch. The performance space is divided by translucent panels , at first into two sections and then the panels are moved to create an inner room within the larger space.
Close The Door Slowly (2019) Z Space
I am intrigued by how we leave what we know and navigate the unknown—when your things, your thoughts, that have been with you fall away. Close the Door Slowly traces a personal journey for me; how does one leave something dear? How do we confront, absorb, accept situations that propel us into a sphere without guideposts? And is there some information right there that we don’t see that sheds light?
I began Close the Door Slowly with the image of charting a course, finding the kernel of what matters and moving forwards. The installation environment is an old study—desk, books, lamp, chair, stool—a place for solitude, imbued with the lives of its’ s past inhabitants, where imagination and thoughts unfold. The objects embody the memories, obstacles, supports we carry with us through our lives. Until we let go.
A Recomposition I Don’t Know and Never Will (2018) Z Space
Last June I received a letter from someone who was a part of my life years ago, who touched me in a way few people have. It was in answer to a letter I’d written months before. His letter was not dramatic or emotional or personal. Still, reading it was a visceral experience; it took me back in time, it hit me in the heart. That letter was the genesis of A Recomposition.
A Recomposition is a drastic restructuring of the ideas underlying I Don’t Know and Never Will, a piece which grew out of the deeply personal contact my friends and I created in the letters we wrote and received years ago. A Recomposition is in the present. It asks “How does each of us connect the past to the present? What does one hold onto?”
I Don’t Know and Never Will (2018) co-presented by ODC Theater
The installation is three “rooms”, or areas, separated by a y-shaped corridor made of a mesh-like material. Inside the corridor is an abundance of soil; at the end it is spread throughout the space. The commissioned score by percussionist Jordan Glenn is played live by three musicians form platforms placed over the theater seats.
My memories of a friendship from decades ago are kept vivid by letters. Speaking excerpts of the letters, actor Val Sinckler is inside the installation alongside the dancers .These letters, written without editing or premeditation, with immediacy and forthrightness, juxtapose descriptions, observations, and feelings so acutely one can see, feel, hear and smell it all. I Don’t Know and Never Will is the most personal work I have made.
I’ve asked people from the community to write notes describing something they wished they had done and did not. Their voices from today are incorporated into this piece. At each performance, one of the notes is read. by Val Sinckler, with the dancers and musicians improvising.
Known Once (2017) Z Space
Known Once is about personal stories, memory and perception. The installation for Known Once, with a wall behind and a moving wall in front, represents a life expanding and contracting. The choreography reaches into the past and enfolds the range of emotions and experiences we carry forwards.
The project began with intensive workshops with students at 826 Valencia and seniors in their nineties at The Redwoods telling and writing personal stories and creating movement. They dove into this project with openness and energy, letting us into their hearts and giving us stories that we treasure.
The piece is in part choreographed directly to these stories and movement, and in part I worked with broader concepts of memory—what remains important to us over time and how these deep undercurrents and fragments of images shape the trajectory of our lives.
Tacit Consent (2016) co-presented by YBCA at the Forum
Tacit Consent originated with composer Dan Wool’s concept for the score, of the lines between what is private and what is public. The work is about personal privacy—what we choose to share with the public, what is shared with limited or no consent, and where and how we separate public from private. To see and hear everything you must walk about. As you move through the installation’s rooms, the sound environment changes. Live video projections from one area are projected into another, found conversations are embedded into the score, dancers pass through a cramped courtyard to get from room to room. Concurrent scenes, some you can see and some are obscured, intrigue you to explore. Dan Wool's score interweaves found conversations. Matthew Antaky's installation—four separate rooms with projections and live video feed on the walls—allows the audience to walk between the rooms. I created the choreography using their constructs and the images of watching other people, being watched and being completely alone. We watch other people all the time--in restaurants, stores, buses etc. When does watching cross a line and become intrusive?
Your Story Was This (2015) ODC Theater, Mill Valley library
Your Story Was This grew from themes of migration and unknowability, articulated in three poems by Jane Hirshfield. Migrations, internal and physical, are the root of the choreography, and emphasized by the installation’s two differently sized and barely connected spaces.. Where your life will land, making choices and diving into the unknown, and the impossibility of understanding fully another person. The poems, spoken in repetition by three actors as voice over in Dan Wool’s score, have an astute balance between seeing and describing, feeling and accepting. Her quiet, carefully aimed thrust of emotion is magnified by the spare and powerful images and the finely crafted structure that frames her thoughts.
A Space Divided (2015) Z Space
A Space Divided originated with the company’s decision to have Matthew Antaky determine the architecture and underlying concept of the installation, rather than have the visual environment develop as a response to the choreography.. Three choreographers—Liss Fain and guests Amy Seiwert and Christian Burns—made work based on Matthew Antaky’s concepts and design—a 60’deep space divided into four areas by clear plastic walls. The three pieces are connected by short movement “joints” and presented as a continuum.
The Imperfect is Our Paradise (2014/2016) ODC Theater, 3LD Art & Technology
The Imperfect is Our Paradise integrates text from William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury into Dan Wool's commissioned score. The installation is a jagged space, with alcoves that allow the audience to move between the dancers and be almost uncomfortably close. The projections on the set are images of Faulkner's south. The work began with my interest in the way the trajectory of history shapes people’s lives: how they adapt to, push back against and get pulled into the personal, political and social forces that create their environment. The title—from a line in the Wallace Stevens poem “The Poems of Our Climate”—sums up, to me, the circumstances of our lives. The Imperfect is Our Paradise is structured around relationships. The unanticipated juxtapositions of duets, solos and groups throughout the work establish the underlying questions and energy that infuse our lives with excitement, introspection, courage, sorrow and resolve. Faulkner constructs sentences that rip open the emotional core--memory intrudes into the narrative unexpectedly, in mid-thought, and time exists on multiple levels simultaneously. There is seldom punctuation to the memories. The sentences and fragments have no real beginnings or endings. The reader feels exactly like they are in the character's mind, experiencing the rawness, relentlessness of his emotions. That rawness, introspection and fearlessness became the source of the structure and the movement of The Imperfect is Our Paradise.
After the Light (2014) Z Sapce
After the Light, is structured as a large open performance space surrounded by a series of archways of graduating height, reminiscent of a medieval cloister. After the Light opens as a quiet installation and unfolds into a dance. The installation accentuates the intensity of people looking inwards at their lives and relationships and outwards at their friends. After the Light interweaves passages from Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves, into the choreography and the score. The Waves, written as interior monologues by six people whose lives intertwine from childhood through old age, follows their lives, shifting relationships and changing perceptions of themselves and each other. The text, spoken by two actors and integrated into the score, feels both present and mysterious, real and indefinable. The choreography, the score, and the visual design of the piece reflect the intricate mix of frustration, joy, tenderness, resolve, and solitude in Virginia Woolf’s writing.
The Water is Clear and Still (2012/2013) Z Space, Forum at YBCA, Mill Valley Library, Powerhouse, And Solid Ground
The Water is Clear and Still grew out of the text of Jamaica Kincaid’s sharp-edged and beautiful short story collection, At the Bottom of the River. The set—a winding river in a eerie and surreal grove of trees—and the immersive sound environment encompass the entire theater space. Video projections of branches cover the grey Marley floor, adding texture and depth. The audience is among the trees. The rhythm of Kincaid’s writing and her descriptions that shift suddenly from gentle to harsh are the source of the movement. The dance, the spoken stories, the sound environment and the set create an intricate portrait of a woman and a place.
The Water is Clear and Still was remounted at the Forum YBCA. I added a prologue, Solid Ground, using text from Kincaid’s recently published book, See, Now, Then.
The False and True are One (2010/2011) Z Space, Forum at YBCA, Mill Valley Library, And Art Is Not in Some Far-Off Place
The False and True Are One was my first installation piece in SF, presented at Z Space. An architecturally designed set of translucent screens and an immersive sound environment encompass the performers—the seven dancers move within the four “rooms” of the set; an actor is at a desk on a raised platform in the center speaking short stories of Lydia Davis. Davis’ stories of seeing things from multiple angles—interesting, intriguing, mutable, funny, sad, frustrating, etc.—not knowing where the truth lies are reflected in the choreography where different aspects of the same ideas occur in different spaces. The audience members, seeing a piece from various viewpoints, see different aspects of the work. Solos, trios, duets occur concurrently; the audience moves freely between these areas.
The False and True Are One was remounted at the Forum YBCA, where I added a prologue, Art is Not in Some Far-Off Place that used another of Lydia Davis’ stories.