PERFORMANCE: ALISON O’DANIEL, SKATERS’ SCORE

SKATERS’ SCORE
A performance by Alison O’Daniel

Friday May 17, 6pm
Saturday May 18, 6pm
Lincoln Heights Skatepark
3846 Selig Place, Los Angeles 90031

JOAN is pleased to present SKATERS’ SCORE, a new performance and site-specific musical composition by Alison O’Daniel, set in the Lincoln Park Skatepark. Bringing together five Deaf skateboarders from across the United States, four Los Angeles based hearing musicians, and an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, Skaters’ Score utilizes the sonic vocabulary of skateboarding to explore the tactile, spatial, and visual aspects of sound. Musicians and skaters will build an aural vocabulary informed by visual and sonic cues, multiple modes of communication and response, as well as by the architecture of the skatepark itself, participants’ movement through it, and the ambient sounds of the park and its public. The performance re-prioritizes music and listening away from the ears to more inclusively acknowledge the role of sight and physical sensation, how sound can be described through ASL and visual cues, as well as the ways that sound travels across space. Skaters’ Score is a collaboration between O’Daniel, a Hard of Hearing artist, and Deaf skater, surfer and two-time US Deaflympic snowboarder Darrick De La O. They are joined by hearing composer and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi.

Directed by Alison O’Daniel. Composed by Patrick Shiroishi. Skaters: Darrick De La O (Los Angeles), Napo Lank (Phoenix, AZ), Brian Estrada (Minneapolis, MN), Alex Brand (Phoenix, AZ), Bryan Ramos (Austin, TX). Musicians: Ken Moore (upright bass), Pauline Lay (violin), Dylan Fujioka (accordion) and Patrick Shiroishi (saxophone).

Combining film, performance, sculpture, and installation, O’Daniel’s work is structured as a call-and-response between mediums. Cinema, performance, sound-dampening textiles, sculptures, mobiles, and large-scale installations foreground process, collaboration, and material. She collaborates with hearing, Deaf and Hard of Hearing composers, performers, athletes and musicians in order to highlight the loss or re-creation of information as it passes through various channels, and to build a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary as a means to tell stories inspired by events that are both historic and quotidian.

Her projects, screenings, and performances have been included in Made in LA 2018, Hammer Museum; The Infinite Ear, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Performa, New York; Exchange Value, Los Angeles Nomadic Division; and Louder than Words, the Zuckerman Museum, Atlanta, GA. Solo exhibitions include The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Studio 13-16 project and screening at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Art In General, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France. She is a recipient of grants from Creative Capital, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation; California Community Foundation, and more. She will be included in the upcoming exhibition The Infinite Ear, CentroCentro, Madrid.

Skaters’ Score was commissioned by JOAN with support from the Mike Kelley foundation and the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles.