Mallory Catlett travels back in time to remember the future
Remember the future? 2016 Creative Capital Grantee Mallory Catlett’s Nova Express is the final concert of her Creative Capital project DECODER, a sound and image cutup machine, that has been turning out concerts, digital transmissions, video art, and sound recordings for the last eight years. With two tape recorders and a microphone, performers Jim Findlay and cassette tape artist G Lucas Crane take you on an interstellar adventure into the prophetic imagination of William Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy, his 1960s space odyssey whose arch nemesis is a virus. Acting as both fictional characters and real-time systems operators, Nova Express’ time travelers cut internet debris into kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, prophetic pronouncements, and surreal routines that expose their complicity in the systems that control them. Created pre, mid and “post” pandemic, Nova Express is a fever dream turned time machine that confronts the physical sensation of living today by traveling back to a time when the political and ideological problems we now face, became unavoidable. Like an inoculation against a virus, DECODER: Nova Express seeks to strengthen your resistance to the media oversaturation that often tricks you into accepting injustice as normal and inevitable, and to escape the prejudices of the mind that keep you from a liberated experience of time and space.
Remember the future at Mallory Catlett’s Creative Capital project DECODER: Nova Express from June 24 — July 9, 2023 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, New York. More information here.
Read Catlett’s Creative Capital Artist Diary to learn about the path her project took her on, which includes a stop at a lemur sanctuary.
I am reading Burroughs’ Soft Machine, the first book of his Nova Trilogy. Just up the hill from the house is a barn, where my collaborators Keith Skretch (video) and G. Lucas Crane (sound) were working too. With my production company Restless NYC, I often reimagine nonlinear experimental novels for performance. I work across disciples to expand what the theater can contain, asking what else can time and language do? The kitchen is a space of relaxation and exchange for me. I love to cook with collaborators. You never know what will come up at the dinner table. We returned to Mount Tremper again in 2017 to work on and perform the second concert, Ticket That Exploded.
What excites me is the unexpected ways we have found ourselves in the world Burroughs predicted and how the work brings past, present, and future into convergence. It was in the woods around Mount Tremper (where we shot a lot of the original footage) tracking Lucas in the act of making field recordings that Keith found a critical visual thread that connected Lucas back to his college days when he first encountered the Nova Trilogy: “I realized that the power to break reality is within anyone’s grasp, and that the tech necessary to do so is cheaper and more plentiful than most think. It’s only a question of technique and mindset.” I hope the work challenges the Burroughs enthusiast and welcomes the newcomer. What confused Burroughs’ readers in the ‘60s and ‘70s — its language and techniques — is foundational today for an audience fluent in the ways and weaponization of social media.
My Creative Capital project is called M//F Future, which is, in fact, a pair of performances that were supposed to premiere together. It’s a dreamed-up conversation between Burroughs and Doris Lessing about human evolution and the diametrically different worlds they imagined. But DECODER grew from one concert to three, and COVID made the Lessing piece, a site-specific installation starring a 70 year old actress, impossible to complete within the same timeframe. Then, this past August my partner and collaborator suffered a severe stroke. Thanks to my longtime partnership with The Chocolate Factory who commissioned the work, we pushed the premiere back. In a year of impossible odds, we can celebrate the culmination of 8 years of work. These setbacks have taught me to listen to the world around you — it’s a guide, not an obstacle. And that asking for help is a gift — a mutually enriching experience — filled with surprises.
As a full time caregiver right now, I am enjoying being back in the rehearsals, spending time with my long time collaborators. I forgot how much I love being in the room. I look forward to being in the theater.
We are attempting the difficult task of putting three concerts together — Soft Machine (at Vancouver International Push Festival and at Lamama in 2016), Ticket That Exploded (Mount Tremper Arts in 2017 and Pioneer Works in 2019,) and Nova Express, which we have been exploring during the pandemic through sound recordings, video pieces, and streaming experiments.
Creative Capital has supported an 8-year process that has allowed us to engage audiences at every stage of development. But it has also funded pure research. In 2015, I took a trip to the Duke Lemur Sanctuary where Jim Findlay (performer/designer) and I had a private tour and shot footage. Unlike monkeys, lemurs love eye contact. This matriarchal species, on the brink of extinction, captured Burroughs’ imagination. How different would we be if we had evolved from them? At the end of his book Ghost of Change he urged his readers to give to the Duke Sanctuary.
At the Watermill Center in 2019, dramaturg Alex Wermer-Colan and I had access to Robert Wilson’s archive of Burroughs’ photographs and visual art work while working on Nova Express.
I am most excited about putting it all together — textually, visually, and musically. We have developed the piece with a pretty minimal setup for touring but at The Chocolate Factory we will perform on a fully-realized set by Jim Findlay who notes: “My approach is to create the craft in which Burroughs’ message has traveled here to us. His cut-up technique is exactly that, a technique. And our stage aesthetic should likewise be a technique. A machine that delivers the past which is creepily and accurately our present.” With Burroughs, there is this mix of dead seriousness, crazy paranoid conspiracy theory, and an uncensored energy in the language that breaks down your defenses and lets you laugh at the monstrosity. It’s inspiring to invite people into the energy of this language — to laugh at the darkness. It’s a form of resistance that is sometimes difficult to remember.
Remember the future at Mallory Catlett’s DECODER: Nova Express from June 24 — July 9, 2023 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, New York. More information here.