Under my project name Kinlaw, I will be fundraising for Bigger Than U (working title), which is a performance culled from my forthcoming music album. I’ve created an album that functions as a script or outline which is performed in a highly cinematic yet minimal setting. The set is composed of minimal props, and lighting plays a primary role to produce affect, narrative, and move through imagined rooms and settings. Thematically, Bigger Than U explores the parasitic relationships between grueling performance standards and its concomitant psychological manipulations. Broadly, the work shows the effects of mental and physical overload that are becoming more and more prevalent in the United States. The performance forefronts labor but also creates an opening for the exuberance, joy, and play that are undercurrents of potential societal shifts to come. The structure of the work pushes back on the conditions that artists face, while also breaking down the silos of genre to imagine how seemingly disparate forms could come together. Bigger Than U is an album in the crit space, performance as lecture, conceptual art in the music venue—the movement and sound pushes so big that it teeters on the edge of collapse, rejecting the need to make movement and vocalization look effortless during performance.
Fundraising will help me further my methodologies in movement and sound into a global arena. I create works that can hold multiple interpretations, that play with subtle shifts to dislodge narrative or preconceived notions. The fellowship would support my work with more subtle power-dynamics; the personal, interpersonal, familial—while shifting away from the shock and awe of immersive theater to create performance work that is more concerned with addressing preconceived notions of experience to create an opening for audience members to settle in, be present, open up, and engage on their own terms. This multi-tiered project that, after a decade of working with movement and music as curious subjects that wanted to weave together, have become so synthesized through me. I am the conduit.
Bigger Than U is set to premier as a large-scale performance work at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. It will go on to be performed throughout the US and Internationally in 2025 and 2026. The scalable performance is set to have twenty-five larger-scale key iterations. Venues I’m in discussion with in the US include: Human Resources in LA; Performance Space, New York; MOCA, LA; and Park Avenue Armory. I’m in discussion with TED Talk to lecture on my process, more specifically the ways I think about the incorporation of movement with the voice. Outside the US, I am speaking with curators in Shanghai, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy. I will be working with European-based Swamp Booking for European music venues and festivals booking while simultaneously solidifying showings, residencies, and lectures in museums, schools, and fine arts institutions.
The set is composed of minimal props, and lighting plays a primary role to produce affect, narrative, and move through imagined rooms and settings. The performance moves through psychological states such as memories popping in like ping-pong balls, mulling an interaction over and over at home alone, seemingly never-ending run in the rat race of life, near collapses, and exuberant recoveries. A searchlight plays with metaphor for the personal as well as larger themes and typical pop structures. Bigger Than U is scalable and can be performed in a small room to a grand scale like Pioneer Works.
