Filmed by Danny Carroll and Iki Nakagawa

Video footage by Danny Carroll

Gerard & Kelly Kiss Solo 2012 Four-channel video and audio installation Kiss Solo explores the choreography of desire. The work consists of a multi-channel audio and video projection, shown on four screens suspended by a series of crossing wires. Each video in Kiss Solo depicts a solo dancer enacting both the male and female roles of an erotic encounter. Illuminated against a white screen, the dancer shifts and combines pronouns and positions in response to a spoken text of choreographic directives. Weaving throughout the four screens and beneath suspended speakers, viewers are guided into their own choreographed role as audience, watching the individual dancers as both a single performance and together as a group. Kiss Solo re-engages score-based procedures to explore alternatives to the heteronormative couple, reconsidering the pictorial tradition of the embrace and representations of intimacy. A certain physical and aural stuttering abounds as each dancer interprets Gerard & Kelly’s broken rendition of an amorous choreography refracted into multiple translations passed from one to another, similar to a game of telephone. Kiss Solo is the final iteration of a cycle of works by Gerard & Kelly that arose in response to the 2010 exhibition of Tino Sehgal’s Kiss (2002) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in which rotating male/female couples enacted a prolonged embrace in the lobby. Sehgal prohibited any documentation of his work and limited the experience of the performance and its afterlife to the audience’s subjective recollections. Curious as to the mechanisms of the performance, Gerard & Kelly visited the exhibition multiple times and clandestinely documented the performance by recording a spoken narration of each of the gestures. In doing so, they discovered Kiss was a tightly choreographed twelve-minute loop. Using this spoken transcription as a score, they repurposed and re-inscribed its gestures into a series of performances, videos, and photographs.

REUSABLE PARTS/ENDLESS LOVE (2011) is a score-based, interactive performance for a rotating cast of four dancers, presented on a potentially infinite loop. Situated in the nave of a church fractured by mobile walls, this manifestation of the work propels spectators and performers to wander beneath a grid of overhead speakers. The rules of the score are structured like an elaborate game of telephone. Dancers transmit and transform the instructions for a kiss between a man and a woman into a machine-like production of unscripted representations of intimacy. Performers: niv Acosta, devynn emory, Yve Laris Cohen, Todd McQuade, Roger Prince, and Jose Tena Documented at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, New York, NY, November 2011