SAMUEL HERTZ & MARYANNA LACHMAN

BIO

Samuel Hertz and Maryanna Lachman are Oakland-based (US) collaborators working at the intersections of movement and sound. Together they have created and collaborated on a number of performances including Other Options (with videographer Chani Bockwinkel) — a generative video/sound installation environment — and have performed/presented work across the US. At Bains::Connective, they are simultaneously developing work for presentation in Belgium, as well as for premier at the San Francisco Center for New Music this coming spring.

FRAME OF RESEARCH

Can we tell a story in a plurality of registers? To write something by taking account of the multiplicity of the worlds that inhabits and surrounds us seems to me a fascinating task as much as impossible. The prism of our multiple identities is a space of contradictions, tensions but as well of associations and interactions. The question of what we are and what we are not doesn’t ask to be resolved but rather to be brought about.

The highly developed theories to explain the soul and the body within the course of history are countless andfeed on religion, mysticism, tradition, observation, reflexion and a lot of imagination. It is striking when one follows the flow of the ideas perceived as true and even authoritarian, when we observe their longevity, they death and eventually their rebirth, to sense their subjectivity. It is of course too easy to get this distance with ideas that are now obsolete. I would like to bring certain false ideas back to life and to make them dance for the time of a performance with those that dictate the real world. Because if we caress the idea of a being with plural identities, we find ourselves naturally at the core of the fundamental question of the true and the false.