RESIDUUM: suite for cello & trash

RESIDUUM is a performance-video-art piece by Aliya Ultan featuring cellist, Katinka Kleijn.

Program Notes:

No death for the digital native. Every impulse is floating on forever. The plastic has made a home in our blood, in our stool, in our water, in our children. So taking refuge in the dirty beaches becomes an act of resistance. Like having Christmas in the desert. Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate for the Midwestern winter. Another January summertime capsule. A cheap code. A life hack.

Reduce, reuse, remember. A hierarchy of waste. What you can't forget is that you can't forget; we are always taking it all with us and leaving all of it behind. Particle exposure therapy for a half-life of millennia. Every ounce of thirst is a single-use daydream. A problem for the future. A present from the past. To be united in isolation is not really a comfort. This is what happens when you take without giving. The plastic built a nest inside our organs and a summit in our oceans and a city in our conscience.

The process...

First I collected the materials necessary to make the sculptures/costumes through building life long connections with people organizing and saving bottles, cans, scrap metal, and other reusables on the streets of New York. With little to no budget, I traded money for their bags of plastic and aluminum to build the structures Katinka interacts with in this piece. 

After building a cape of over 400 cans and a nest of 200+ plastic bottles, our team schlepped to Far Rockaway. We were able to shoot the whole film in one day and I edited a rough cut in a week. The next challenge was creating the soundscore as we failed to capture any audio due to extreme wind issues day of the shoot. 

Thanks to the Avaloch Music Institute, me and Katinka spent a week at their Farm Residency in New Hampshire to record both the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds for the film. This reverse engineering of a process made it possible for the sounds of Katinka's movements to be exaggerated, tactile, ASMR-like and for the sounds of the environment to feel even more vast and strange. 

Although I was cursing myself from beginning to end with this project, I fell in love with approach and have used many of the skills I picked up along the way in other contexts. 

Related:

DOWN

Down is a performance piece in three parts created and performed by Aliya Ultan.

Part 1: destruction and burial of a cello (see video above), Part 2: the same cello resurrected two years later (see video below), Part 3: live performance of reassembled cello (images of performance below).

The core idea...

By dismantling the machines/instruments we use daily, we can engage with them more intentionally.

There is a physical truth to the cello: to go upward in frequency and volume, you must reach downward. Once I began to consciously practice this paradox, a new world opened up. It mirrored my own life—the realization that by digging deep, we encounter a core of being that burns and flows like the magma center of the Earth. I felt an urgent need in the Spring of 2021 to reach the literal core of the instrument. This desire led me to finding a cello I could take apart and bury. 

Silver Pony

Abstract narrative short film by Aliya Ultan featuring Webb Crawford.

Transmutation...

I use pink, yellow and orange plastics throughout this short to signify grotesquely human parts such as an umbilical cord, intestines, and the walls of a giant womb. The main location, a car, is transformed into a kind of monstrous mothership that both feeds and consumes a young woman.

Become a House

Musical theater piece for three vocalists-dancers and seven musicians by Aliya Ultan.

Score:

Program Notes:

Become a House takes a humorous and absurd approach to reflecting on the potential toxicity of heteronormative relationships. The "protagonist" exists as multiple bodies that encircle themselves as well as disperse in search for individuality within the confines of an out of balance relationship. Although the other person in this hypothetical relationship does not appear physically, the words are entirely from their perspective. By making the actions empowering and the words petty demands, my hope is to share a female's perspective as a continuum of contradicting phenomena that culminate in a wild and boundless world of possibilities.

Nova

Nova is a narrative contemporary circus show incorporating aerials, dance, physical comedy, acrobatics, original music, and cinematography to convey the story of a young girl as she passes into the world of sleep. This multimedia piece playfully investigates notions of childhood, companionship, metamorphosis, and loss.

Created by acrobat-dancer, Gabrielle Teddy Ment and composer-performer, Aliya Ultan.

a bird in its chest

a bird in its chest is a collaborative piece for large ensemble and three aerialists created by drummer-composer, Lesley Mok and cellist-composer, Aliya Ultan.

a bird in its chest is a reflection on love: young, unrequited, unconditional, enduring, and self-love. Shaped by ideas of supernatural grace, phantom wishes, ephemeral passions, and crazed disillusionment, this collaboration has emerged out of a desire to understand the expansiveness of love beyond its familiar expressions.