Artist-in-Residence Jesse Hewit

July 6-11 at Mechanics Plaza. Jesse Hewit’s works attempt to unsettle dominant ideas about things like power, narrative, safety, and beauty through re-imagining sociological contexts of the body. The project he will be working on during his residency will be composed of a series of durational practice sessions that interrogate a different way of having, giving, or showing faith. As part of his project, he will invite a range of artists to collaborate on the sessions, including daily sermons, singing practices and visual-art projects.

• Monday – 10:00am – 3:00pm: Hewit will be working on an alt-language cycle, where he will go into 30 minutes of improvised movement followed by 15 minutes of writing, followed by 15 minutes of speaking and then back to 30 minutes of movement, 15 minutes writing and 15 minutes of speaking, etc. for four hours. There will have explanations of what he is doing and why on posted papers, and there will be invitations for others to join in certain parts or in ways of thinking about language in the body. Hewitt will also be inviting people to observe/watch through specific lenses, ie: watch as if he is dying in the next hour, watch as if he is a very good old friend who you have not seen in a very long time, etc.
• Tuesday and Wednesday: Improvisation
• Thursday – 11:30am – 1:30pm: Staged reading of COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN with Brontez Purnell, Monique Jenkinson, Travis Santell Rowland, Zinzi Buchanan, Tessa Fleming, and himself. This play is about women living in Texas (near Marfa) in the early eighties who develop an organized religion around the devout worship of James Dean.
• Friday – 10:00am – 1:00pm: Melecio Estrella, Karl Cronin and I will do two things at once: we’ll work on the singing of 4 sacred songs in three part harmony, AND we’ll be working on the construction of fictitious ancestors and new gods through visual mediums like costuming, drawing, and sculpture. this pairing of activity is to explore the collision of revisionist cultural creation alongside a fanatic adherence to form.
• Saturday – 12:00pm – 3:00pm: Sara Shelton Mann will lead Hewit, Larry Arrington, and Jose Navarette through a 3-hour cycle of dancing titled SOLO/NEUTRAL/FOLLOW, after which they will write about and discuss the poem of the form in public as a reflection/translation of socialized bodies/people and their experiences of sensitivity and de-sensitivity to other bodies/people.