How to Walk Through a Door
Performance
How to Walk Through a Door
Performance
“How to Walk Through a Door” is a live performance using guitar, video, radio and software. In the performances fourth movement, I pull a spool of wire through the strings of an electric guitar, its velocity and pitch modulating the erasure and reappearance of archival footage from 1960s Acapulco, Mexico. A couple locked in an embrace emerge and dissolve while a woman pushing a stroller carrying their child remains visible in the background. At that time, class and economic differences widened in Acapulco, which had become the center of Hollywood’s Golden Age, an era of Elvis, John Wayne, and Johnny Weissmuller’s 1950s “Tarzan.” My performance becomes one of intermediation that disrupts the interdependence of sound and image, using the aesthetics of nostalgia to bring attention to the hidden labor, the labor that props up the performance of the white, heterosexual nuclear family, enabling a floating world for the upper middle class and rich.