Ahead of the stream of Beneath the Surface, a collaboration between Constellation Chor (Marisa Michelson) and multidisciplinary artist Miriam Parker, the collaborators talked with Justin Frye about process and presence.
By Justin Frye
“Beneath the Surface is a performance video work-in-progress by Marisa Michelson and Miriam Parker, two co-fellows from National Sawdust’s season-long collaboration with the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. The project was developed in residence at Pioneer Works and will be presented online by National Sawdust and Pioneer Works at 6 P.M. this evening.
In March 2021, during an onsite residency at Pioneer Works, Constellation Chor (Marisa Michelson) teamed up with multidisciplinary artist Miriam Parker to collaborate on an undetermined project that would bridge Constellation Chor’s ethereal vocal and body-based performance with Miriam Parker’s movement exploration and vivid imagery. Through their collaboration and experimentation with each other, they created Beneath the Surface, a visual and sonic document that explores process as source and “the visual and aural space between form and no-form, sound and no-sound, material and immaterial.”
After they completed the current iteration of the work, I joined Marisa and Miriam on a Zoom call to record their interpretation of this collaboration and how their process became their concept, to provide creative context for the virtual presentation of Beneath the Surface.”