Performance: Sophie Jung, Dramatis Personae

Dramatis Personae
A performance by Sophie Jung

Saturday, February 16, Doors 7:00pm, Performance 7:30pm
Sunday, February 17, Doors 7:00pm, Performance 7:30pm

Public Program: Sunday, February 17, 12pm
Conversation with JOAN Director Summer Guthery and the Artist Sophie Jung and cast members. 
*Light brunch provided

Cast (in alphabetical order):

Zan Crawford
Sahil Kaur
Joshua Rodriguez
Emily Ann Scott
Keegan Smeza
Katherine Washington
Jacob Zelonky

JOAN is pleased to premiere Swiss artist, Sophie Jung’s Dramatis Personae, an open-ended collaborative performance installation in which a group of professional actors respond to their experience of typecasting within the film industry. Jung’s performances weave together fragmented narratives around found objects, using these objects and their attributes as a trigger to produce a text that undoes their single story and derails categorical structure.

In Dramatis Personae, latin for the masks of the drama, she has worked closely with the actors on a set of scripts, which tease out and dramatically complicate the socially prescriptive roles they most often find themselves cast into based on appearance and IRL identity markers. Be it the  bubbly side-kick, the sex-worker, the nerdy scientist, the sassy best friend, or the more loaded gang member, these types are all built on grim social-scripting, enforcing the assumptive onto the presumptive.

Her approach, generally process-oriented and anti-conclusionist, has led to a week-long workshop, in which speech acts, movements, and attributes are established through a variety of methods, only to collectively confuse, joyfully trouble, and earnestly merge them again. These typecast roles act as a foil for Jung and her actors to investigate internalized and externalizing otherness and figure out how much or how little is needed to draw up gated identities or to celebrate our porous selves.

Sophie Jung (b.1982) lives and works in Basel and London. Using words, gestures and found(ed) objects, her practice addresses the politics of representation, both culturally as a system of disguised and shifting signs and personally as a way to track and record life. She has a deep trust in temporary definitions, to be sculpted while lazing on the apron-proscenium, the pre-stage, as a fluid messenger between reception and production of time-lined purport.

Jung received her MFA from Goldsmiths, London (2015) and her BFA from the Reitveld Academy, Amsterdam (2011). She was the recipient of the Manor Art Award (2018) and the Swiss Art Award (2016), and was a 2015 resident at ISCP in New York. Her work has been included in projects and exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, Kunsthalle Basel, Hester, New York, and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and she has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Blain Southern, London, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna, and Kunstraum, London. She is currently working on a year-long text intervention for the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, a performance piece that will debut at Kammerorchester Basel in April 2019, and a solo exhibition set to open at Casino Luxemburg in 2020.