How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself (Reading/Performance)

Presented by Inga, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will premiere in Chicago with cast of seven Chicago-based artists, performers, and educators: Bryan Saner, Katharine Schutta, Amira Hegazy, Thomas Huston, Luke Joyner, Sungjae Lee, and Anders Zanichkowsky. This occasion marks the first time that the work is presented by performers who themselves are not in the publication, offering a unique exploration of empathy that's motored by language, voice, and personal experience.

 

Admission to the event is free, but attendees may choose to make a donation - all donations go to the performers. While walk-ups and passersby are welcome, RSVP is strongly encouraged, as the work is spatially sensitive and it is important to know how many attendees are expected. A limited number of editions of How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will be available for purchase at Inga.

 

More specifically, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself is a performance arranged for print that uses choreography, writing, photography, and design to trace the inner and outer contours of five people under pressure. Each person appears upon the same slab of concrete at different points in time. All engage a single gesture, including its approach and its undoing. Time is scarce, bodies pry. Meditations on gender, determination, solitude, and pain build and seep from within an exacting loop of structure and sensation.

 

How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself was conceived by Matty Davis and arranged for print by Matt Wolff and Nilas Andersen. It was performed by Holly Sass, Matty Davis, Matt Shalzi, Nile Harris, and Bobbi Jene Smith, with photographs by Jonah Rosenberg.

 

Following Knee Balance, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself marks the second work in a series of performances by Matty Davis that are arranged for print by Matt Wolff. Distinct in content and form, and featuring contributions from artists of various disciplines, each work weaves together spatial, temporal, and empathic possibilities unique to performance and printed matter. How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself was published in an edition of 150 and bound using fragments of clothes worn by the performers.

 

Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer whose work uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy to locate and expand relationships to the self, other people, land, and histories. Unique and multi-faceted, each of these relationships, i.e., projects, is part of a broader orbit around perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. Davis was born in Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked in the steel mills and his dad’s plane crashed. He grew-up as a multi-sport athlete, which exposed him to visceral experiences of surface, injury, resilience, cooperation, and play that continue to influence his interdisciplinary work. Spanning sculpture, drawing, photography, and books, his projects predominantly manifest in performance and dance, which he values as shared space in which to be transformatively alive. His performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death.” For more information, please visit www.mattydavis.net