Beyond the Grave: A Performance Series

What happens where the line between the living and the dead grows thin? Join us for the third year of Beyond the Grave, a site-specific series at the historic Evergreen Cemetery to find out. Featuring performances by Ghost Ensemble, LuLing Osofsky, Tasting Menu, and Isola Tong

A Ghost—geist, spirit—is a trace that is left over from a history. It lives through the collapse of vision and hallucination, of memory and invention, of the collective history of a site and of the subjective experiences and trauma of an individual. Through performances evoking the personal and the sociological, the historical and ever-present hauntings, the four artist-ensembles engaged with Writing Ghosts explore what happens when a no-longer-present entity is written, fixed. These artists encompass musical practices dependent on writing, language, and phonography, written accounts of trauma, and a meditation on the physicality and ghostliness of Chinese script.

Performance Dates:
Friday, May 12 • 5-6pm
Saturday, May 13 • 5-6pm
Friday, May 19 • 5-6pm
Saturday, May 20 • 5-6pm

Ghost Ensemble engages in the Deep Listening practice of composer Pauline Oliveros, in which participants are instructed to listen both inside and outside themselves, to sounds real and imagined. This practice dissolves the boundary between objective (exterior) and subjective (interior) listening. Ghost Ensemble leads attendees in one of Oliveros’s many Deep Listening exercises in order to attune to the surrounding space and develop awareness of one’s interior soundings.

LuLing Osofsky writes of a former relationship with an individual later killed in a police shootout. She asks: In the name of the ghost, is there a kind of ethics? Weaving this narrative together with written police reports, flashbacks, and a meditation on her mixed Chinese-Jewish heritage, Osofsky considers the Chinese ghost in the frame of memory—something to be tended to, not dispersed, not exorcised.

Tasting Menu develops and deploys a ghostly history of the surroundings and sounds of Evergreen Cemetery. Through the manufacture of speculative historical phonography, field recording, and live territorial improvisations, the trio evokes a collapsed and simultaneous history of the surrounding area.

Isola Tong enacts the performativity of Chinese script, and the haunting of Chinese ghosts as it relates to the early histories of Evergreen Cemetery. In a discussion of Chinese script, the philosopher Jacques Derrida writes: “Nonphonetic writing breaks the noun apart. It describes relations and not appellations.” Tong transforms her body—trans-femme, bi-cultural Filipino-Chinese—into an instrument of this writing, bringing these ghostly spirits into relation with the living.