Coping with COVID: Livestreaming for Artists

Watch the livestream video today at 4pm on our website.

This workshop is presented by Creative Capital and produced for the HowlRound platform.

In this uncertain time, many artists are left with no outlet for their creative practice. The liveness of theater/performance, in person exhibitions, and screenings could never be replaced. However, there is a whole world within the platform of livestreaming that can provide an alternate frame of experience that carries with it (especially now) a great amount of community, freedom, vulnerability, solidarity, and possibility. Whether it’s translating a previous work onto a livestream platform, creating new content within this digital venue, or using it as a way to process or workshop a feeling, place or idea, this panel will asses how livestreaming can serve as a powerful tool for artists that are currently looking for ways to maintain their artistic practice and livelihood.

Organized by Yara Travieso and Brighid Greene of La Medea— a Creative Capital project that, as an immersive musical and simulcast film, re-imagines Euripides’ myth into a Latin-disco-pop-feminist variety show— the panel will focus on livestreaming for artists and art institutions from creative, curatorial, and technical perspectives. We will specifically frame the conversation around the personal sustainability, creative possibility, and artistic agency that can take place right now without the typical pressures associated with product and presentation. This is an opportunity to reset the tone of art making, providing us with a low stakes creative freedom and a chance to restructure art hierarchies that could last beyond the times of quarantine.

Read Travieso and Greene's guide to livestreaming for artists.

Questions for the panelists can be directed through twitter using Creative Capital's handle @creativecap.

HowlRound is a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide that amplifies progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and facilitates connection between diverse practitioners. HowlRound functions as a “commons”—a social structure that invites open participation around shared values. All of the content (essays, videos, podcasts) on HowlRound comes from the theatre community who chooses to participate.

Do you have any questions that you would like the panel to address? Send them to workshops@creative-capital.org or tweet us at @creativecap

Bios:

Yara Travieso is a Latinx Brooklyn based writer, director, filmmaker, choreographer and educator. She is a 2019 United States Artist Arison Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, a winner of The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant via The Ford Foundation, and a YoungArts alumni. Her genre bending productions have been featured in NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, Joe’s Pub at The Public, The High Line Park, Madison Square Garden, Opéra National de Lorraine France, and Vizcaya Museum amongst others. Her film works have been featured at Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Miami Film Festival, SXSW, Museum of The Moving Image and commissioned by Hermes of Paris, GQ, Glamour, I Am An Immigrant, Conde Nast among others. Travieso co-founded the Borscht Film Festival in 2005 and named “the weirdest film festival on the planet” by IndieWire and received the prestigious Knights Arts Grant. VICE describes La Medea, Travieso’s touring live film experience as “A modern-day Medea is mythology’s 'Nasty Woman’.” In 2018 another one of her live films, EL Ciclón took over half a Miami city block and soon after her production of Sagittarius A. reframed EMPAC’s concert hall in a 360 immersive film. She is currently a professor at The Juilliard School for an original new media and creative incubator course. Travieso is a speaker, leading conversations, masterclasses, or workshops, with The Ford Foundation, The Park Avenue Armory, MoMa, BAM, SXSW, MCA, National YoungArts Foundation, NYU, Fordham University, The New School, and Ghetto Film School, among others. Travieso received a Dance BFA from NYC’s The Juilliard School in 2009 and received a HSD from New World School of the Arts in Miami, FL.

Brighid Greene is a film, theater, and dance artist. She produced Yara Travieso’s La Medea, a genre-bending multidimensional feature film and live theater show that dismantles Eurpides’ popular myth; and CROWDS by Sarah Friedland, a dance film installation that meditates on the slippage between crowd typologies. She spends a handful of months in Wilmington, NC working for the Cucalorus Festival, teaches Super 8mm filmmaking with Mono No Aware, assists filmmaker Lily Baldwin, and was a longtime performer in Then She Fell by Third Rail Projects. She choreographed for Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, which premiered at Sundance, and had an ongoing creative somatic process with Cori Olinghouse. Her own work, recently shown at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, is a collage between film and movement that reflects the curvatures of reality and their intersection with our inner worlds. Brighid is from California, and lives now in Brooklyn, and is a graduate of NYU with a BFA in dance and a double major in religious studies.

Vijay Mathew is the Cultural Strategist and a co-founder of HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College, Boston, USA and is privileged to assist a talented team by leading HowlRound's development of commons-based online knowledge sharing platforms and the organization's notions of cultural innovation. Prior to his current position, he was the Coordinator for the National Endowment for the Arts (USA) New Play Development Program, as well as a Theater Communication Group (USA) New Generations Future Leader grant recipient in new work at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Vijay has a MFA from New School University, New York, a BA from University of Chicago, and an artistic background as an ensemble-based filmmaker and theatremaker. He is a board member of Double Edge Theatre located in rural Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA.

CultureHub is a global art and technology community that was born out of decades of collaboration between La MaMa and the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Korea’s first contemporary performing arts school. These two pioneering institutions sought to explore how the internet and digital technologies could foster a more sustainable model for international exchange and creativity. Now in its 10th year, CultureHub has grown into a global network with studios in New York, Los Angeles, Korea, Indonesia, and Italy, providing connected environments for artists to critically examine our evolving relationship to technology. Through residencies, live productions, and educational programming, CultureHub advances the work of artists experimenting with emerging technologies in search of new artistic forms.

Billy Clark is CultureHub's founding artistic director and Mattie Barber-Bockelman is the programs and projects manager.

Nel Shelby is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of dance through excellent documentation and streaming of live performances, the creation of smart and engaging marketing videos, and the making of original documentaries and films covering a variety of topics in the field.

Her New York City-based video production company, Nel Shelby Productions, has grown to encompass a diverse list of dance clients. The entire team has training in movement – so they understand dance from both sides of the lens.

Nel produced and directed New York Emmy-nominated PS DANCE!, an hour-long documentary about dance education in NYC’s public schools, created with Jody Gottfried Arnhold and Joan Finkelstein and narrated by veteran television journalist Paula Zahn. Nel is currently co-directing No Dominion: The Ian Horvath Story with Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer Margaret Mullin, and other films include Where Women Don’t Dance featuring Nejla Y. Yatkin; "Folie a Deux,” a short film with Adam Barruch; and The Altitude of Dance, about Vail Dance Festival.

Since 2004, Nel has served as Video Producer for the internationally celebrated Jacob's Pillow Dance in the Berkshires. She also serves as Video Producer at Vail Dance Festival.

Nel has a long personal history with movement – she has a B.F.A. in dance and is a certified Pilates instructor. In addition to her dance degree, Nel holds a B.S. in broadcast video. She lives in New York City with her husband, dance photographer Christopher Duggan, and their kids Gracie and Jack. nelshelby.com