Starts promptly at 8pm

Asher Hartman with Michael Bonnabel and Philip Littell,

It’s Better to Start Out Ugly is day five of a year-long project with performers Michael Bonnabel and Philip Littell, written and directed by Asher Hartman. Two men, one room, shared illness, shifting bodies, putrid, hateful, delusional, and bound are John and Alfred, two futureless cis-gendered white gay men with strange politics and unreasonable desires. This is a scene, an excursion into ugly acting, into early writing, into shaping a play on an actor, into testing, falling, edging homonormativity into blah-scapes of wow.

Maria Maea

Maria Maea is a weaver, a pile of leaves, a singing palm, a shadow and a sound.

Emily Mast with Ryat Yezbick, Reza Arzanian, Joe Seely

IFIF is a secular, group ritual in the form of a game that employs chance, dance and trance. It is one of many exercises that was born out of a methodology Emily Mast began developing during the pandemic. Mast and her collaborators employ hypnosis, tantra, dom/sub dynamics, emotional attunement, physical movement, free writing, and theatrical techniques to invent consent and boundary frameworks that engage the subconscious and mine it as a tool for creation and transformation. IFIF is one of many aesthetic frameworks that reveal the messy, vulnerable side of their process. It is being shared with an audience here for the very first time.  

Jasmine Orpilla

Jasmine Orpilla’s 5-minute BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION is ripped directly from the American-supremacist gaslighting language of the titular proclamation of 1898, which prefaced the psychotic “k*ll-and-burn” policies of the Philippine-American colonial war. A near-invisible ‘first cut’ into an operatic body of sound being composed for installation in 2022 by Jasmine Orpilla, this concentrated drop of BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION will be sung live for an adult audience contained only within the safe space of the HRLA lobby, for the duration of 5 minutes and 30 seconds. The main gallery cracks open afterwards to reveal ‘refreshment’ and/or optional banter around the issues of race underlying fantasies of power play throughout history, or the future of art performance in L.A., for example. *Warning of possible loud volumes for the highly sensitive.