Lars Jan, Early Morning Opera

California
Performance/Choreography/Dance
Artist in Residence, 2016
↗ www.EarlyMorningOpera.com

Artist Statement

I am a sculptural image-maker working across visual and performance disciplines while maintaining both solo (photography, video, installation) and collaborative (performance art, theatre) practices.

I lead Early Morning Opera (EMO), a Los Angeles-based, genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience, while reflecting my background in progressive activism. I use extended periods of development to create multiple works in varying mediums that fall under the same conceptual umbrella. These works have integrity in and of themselves, but when viewed together create richer constellations of meaning by reflecting and refracting one another. Most often, these constellations orbit central pieces of ephemeral performance.

Developed through multi-year processes, EMO projects don’t look much like one another. This diversity of output is attributable to the investigative, experimental nature of our process, reflected in the maxim: Art is Research, Performance is a Lab.

While At Headlands

At Headlands, I’m working on two different projects at very different stages of development. The first, Pandæmonium, is a cinematic dance performance created in collaboration with Philly-based Nichole Canuso Dance Company. For two weeks I’ll be joined by several of the co-creators (performers and composer) of the piece as we were work towards the premiere of the piece this September in Philadelphia and then New York.

Next, I’ll collaborate with my partner, actress Mia Barron, on our very first explorations of a text—Joan Didion’s essay, The White Album—which we’ve just recently received the rights to develop a performance around. We’ll use the residency to do some research relevant to the essay in the Bay area, and begin development of the project which won’t premiere until 2018.