Past Resident
Laura Ann Samuelson
Laura Ann Samuelson (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist working in contemporary performance, sculpture, and writing. Their work follows the transmission of feeling across objects, sites, and bodies, searching for new strategies to help us bear impermanence, attachments to living, and to one another.
Laura Ann’s projects have been presented in Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, Germany, Sweden, and France, and they have been an artist-in-residence at the Denver Art Museum, Dance Initiative, Skogen Arts Sweden, and the Colorado Conservatory of Dance. Laura Ann currently collaborates with Ondine Geary and has worked extensively with Colorado-based performance groups such as Joanna and the Agitators, square product theatre, as well as Buntport Theater Company, and Screw Tooth Theater Company. They have toured as a performer with Michelle Ellsworth’s POST-VERBAL SOCIAL NETWORK.
In 2020, Laura Ann received an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado-Boulder, with secondary emphases in visual art and somatics, and a graduate certification in Emergent Technologies & Media Arts Practices from the College of Media, Communication, and Information. There, they received the Center for Arts & Humanities Graduate Fellowship & the Charlotte York Irey Scholarship for their creative work and research.
Additionally, Laura Ann holds a BA in dance & writing from Hampshire College and is currently a Feldenkrais practitioner in training under Alan Questel.
Q&A with Laura Ann Samuelson (Crosstown Arts newsletter, Jan. 27, 2021)
Former Crosstown Arts resident Laura Ann Samuelson is an interdisciplinary artist working in contemporary performance, sculpture, and writing. Their work follows the transmission of feeling across objects, sites, and bodies, searching for new strategies to help us bear impermanence and attachments to living and to one another.
Laura Ann’s projects have been presented in Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, Germany, Sweden, and France, and they have been an artist-in-residence at Crosstown Arts, the Denver Art Museum, Dance Initiative, Skogen Arts Sweden, and the Colorado Conservatory of Dance. Laura Ann currently collaborates with Ondine Geary and has worked extensively with Colorado-based performance groups such as Joanna and the Agitators, square product theatre, Buntport Theater Company, and Screw Tooth Theater Company. They have toured as a performer with Michelle Ellsworth’s Post-Verbal Social Network.
In 2020, Laura Ann received an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado-Boulder, with secondary emphases in visual art and somatics and a graduate certification in Emergent Technologies & Media Arts Practices from the College of Media, Communication, and Information. There, they received the Center for Arts & Humanities graduate fellowship & the Charlotte York Irey scholarship for their creative work and research. Additionally, Laura Ann holds a BA in dance and writing from Hampshire College and is currently a Feldenkrais practitioner in training under Alan Questel.
Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Laura Ann to discuss their work, collaborations, and the Feldenkrais Method (a system of gentle, mindful movements that are said to increase self-awareness).
Jesse: You have written about making work that connects the “gap between” intention and outcome. How did you come to realize this was the most fruitful place of creation for yourself? Did you come to this practice through your background in dance or was that a separate discovery?
Laura Ann: I think when I wrote about the gap between “what I was hoping for” and “what showed up instead,” what I was really attempting to do was orient myself toward questions surrounding the notion of what “meaning” might be — what makes something “meaningful” or “meaningless,” how meaning shows up and for how long, and what happens when meaning flees the scene.
My interest in these questions is definitely informed by working in dance. I tend to approach dance as a process of wrestling with the desire to express something unnamable about the experience of being in a body with the tools accrued from being in that body. And then also, I’m trying to understand what that attempt to express means within the social context in which that piece exists. I find the whole thing to be super slippery and hard to hold onto, which is part of what I love about it. I think that as a way of coping with all the slipperiness, I’ve learned to treat failure or the instability of my body, or just the disconnect between what I was going for and what I am actually doing as material. Michelle Ellsworth and Bhanu Kapil are two artists who have really helped me with that.
I think my interest in working this way has been equally informed by my experience of being a queer and nonbinary person, where, speaking solely from my own experience here, the thing you are often aiming for or longing for, whether that’s a way of inhabiting oneself or connecting with others or being in the world, might be just out of reach, or might not even exist yet, or exists in a way that you can’t quite hold onto. And so, you begin to use what does exist, what is available toward different aims. Sara Ahmed’s writing on queer use, and José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on queer futurity is coming to mind.
In the work “Same Signal, Somewhat Separate Mouth,” the viewer interacts with you as a disembodied voice projecting thoughts into their head. How do you discern what you are wanting to communicate with the viewer while breaking the intimacy barrier of one’s headspace and thoughts?
“Same Signal, Somewhat Separate Mouth” was an experiment informed by Laurie Anderson’s 1978 piece titled “Handphone Table.” In “Handphone Table,” two visitors sit at a table and place their elbows and hands over their ears in such a way that their arms conduct and transmit to their ears an otherwise inaudible sound score.
In “Same Signal, Somewhat Separate Mouth,” the audience member bites down on a piece of plywood covered in Saran wrap. There is a little tactile transducer attached to the plywood that is connected to a microphone in another room. As I speak into the mic, the transducer vibrates the plywood, and the audience member hears what I am saying through the vibration in their teeth.
When I began making “Same Signal, Somewhat Separate Mouth,” I had already made a series of dances that involved plywood as both a barrier and a connecting device between the dancers in the work. I wanted to try to find a way to connect with someone as directly as possible through the plywood. When I imagined the piece before I had built it, I thought I was building this super cool device where the only person who could hear what I was saying would be whoever was biting down on the plywood. I thought it was going to be this private experience, like whispering in someone’s ear, or passing them a note, or like Anderson’s “Handphone Table.” What actually ended up happening is that when I would speak, the little piece of plywood would vibrate so much that though it was quiet, anyone in the same room could hear it. It wasn’t what I expected, but I loved that it felt like the plywood itself was speaking. Someone would wander into the room, and then the little plywood square would ask for their attention and instruct them on how to wrap it in saran wrap and bite down. The text I ended up speaking to them through the plywood was a convergence of what I thought the plywood had to say, what I thought I had to say, and where I imagined we overlapped.
“Outside’s Insides” is a work you performed with Ondine Geary in 2019. In this work, bodies are flipped both physically and mentally and used as tools for the construction and deconstruction of plywood stages. How do you approach a collaborative work that focuses on endurance?
Ondine Geary is an artist I have collaborated with quite a bit. We have pieces we have co-authored together, and then we have pieces where one person is more overtly directing the project, so it really depends on the situation. While making this piece, I was in the director position. And yes, endurance definitely keeps showing up. I think that in both of our individual and collaborative work, we are investigating what happens to the body when it moves through something difficult. There’s an interest there in trying to build situations that ask something specific of us, something we have to physically navigate in that moment, so that isn’t just representing something somewhere else but is happening right there in the room.
You are studying the Feldenkrais Method with Alan Questel as well as teaching your own course, Testing the Mechanics. How do these practices inform the execution of your work, if at all?
Yes, both have a huge impact on my work. I really like the conversation between teaching and making, mostly because I love connecting with others around these processes, but I also often find myself working out questions that are coming up in my own work when working with a student. It just feels very interconnected. I often notice when I am teaching that I am actually giving myself advice! I try to notice when this happens, so I can be clear and keep my focus on the student’s project and not my own, but yes, I find teaching inordinately helpful.
Studying Feldenkrais has also profoundly shifted my thinking and approach to making work. Among other things, Feldenkrais is a method of attending to how the ways we move, think, feel, and sense ourselves all inform one another. I am studying to be a practitioner of the method, but in terms of art, it has allowed me to find more specificity and freedom in how I engage with my own process.
In your residency at Crosstown Arts, you worked on a longer piece, “to get under, you have to lose.” It is an intense work contemplating the mental anguish of commiting to the real and the desire to be good, as well as physically addressing the ground as a hollow labyrinthian maze and potential vertical monument. What are the beginnings of the process like for a project with such a large scope?
I have been working on this piece for about a year and performed one iteration of it last January. I definitely don’t know when I begin a project where it is heading. I am envious of artists that are able to know. For me, it usually starts with a deadline and then also a felt sense of some kind of connection between things that I haven’t been able to name. At the beginning of “to get under, you have to lose,” I was noticing that there was a convergence happening between the experience of mourning my dad’s passing the year prior and my experience internally negotiating my own queerness. I wanted to understand that convergence, and I wanted to find a way to communicate about it. Now the piece is making me ask different (though related) questions about how matter and mind make contact inside of expiring bodies and how those expiring bodies relate to what they house and transmit. I try to let the work teach me things I don’t know yet, and lucky for me, there is so much I don’t know yet.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, and we look forward to seeing how this work progresses!
