Making Space

Making Space For Community Performance

Part III of Making Space—for home, for preservation, for performance, for community.

A musician plays the flute on the open air porch of the traditional Korean house in front of a seated audience Three people play in the icy field in front of the traditional Korean house

Anna Cybele Paschke ’98

In 2004, I discovered this abandoned hanok—a traditional Korean house—in Chungju, South Korea. It was crumbling, situated between rice paddies and a hillside dotted with apple trees. In 2012, I bought the property on which the house sits. The house, never registered, was free. I had the house restored to become what is now the Ureuk World Music House. Where once there was an open-air porch, now there is a stage that brings musicians from all over the world to bless it with song.

Two people in yellow hazmat suits stand on top of a graffiti-covered concrete structure on the beach

Willa Carroll ’97, MFA ’11

“Project Hazmat”, a collaboration between Willa Carroll BA ’97, MFA ’11 and filmmaker Andreas von Scheele, investigates toxic exposures and environmental threats through video, text, performance, and installation. The project emerged out of Carroll’s first book of poems, Nerve Chorus (The Word Works, 2018). Dancer and choreographer Susannah Keebler ’98 contributed to the project.

A performance installation where people move white, wheeled half-sized walls Two artists move two mobile half-sized walls
An artist moves one of the white, wheeled, half-size walls around the performance space while the audience watches from the sides An artist moves one of the white, wheeled, half-size walls around the performance space while the audience watches from the sides

John Eagle ’09

Before I made it, Sound House, a performance installation piece conceived and developed with Janie Geiser and Cassia Streb, had no sound and no house. The sound space is created and controlled by the physical space it inhabits. It is a completely modular system, built and programmed (with the aid of creative technologist Eric Heep) to respond to the acoustics of the given space it is in and the performers’ movement. It consists of eight mobile and modular half-size walls, each equipped with a microcomputer, sensors, and speakers. Throughout the performance, the walls shape and reshape the performance space. This project was later developed in residencies and performances with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Automata Arts, and Los Angeles Performance Practice. The wall system itself was used as an original instrument for a concert of new works by LA composers on the Dog Star Orchestra 14 Festival.