Sophie Seita

REVEILLE

A collaboration with Naomi Woo
Performance

be gone

leave no trace

be lost to view

pass out of sight 

REVEILLE is a multi-media performance piece and homage to Korean-American filmmaker and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). In this durational performance, Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo recreate Cha’s poetic piece, Reveille Dans La Brume (1977) and from Vampyr, using spoken dialogue, projectors, tape recorders, choreography, lights, shadows, and analogue sound.

Cha’s original description of Reveille dans la Brûme reads: ‘The title itself, “Awakened in the Mist” alludes to “elsewhere”; source, or multi-gradations, levels in what seems singular in our perception, to articulate, to speculate upon dimensions made visible to us through suggestion, through induction, attempting to find a collective key, associations, that would result in a kind of transformation in the audience, as well as the performer.’

Our performance takes this description as a guiding light in re-presenting Cha’s work. ‘Awakened in the mist’ of Cha’s elsewhere, we transmit her original work in a new way. Going beyond pure re-enactment, we allow ourselves to ‘speculate upon dimensions made visible to us through suggestion, through induction’. 

This form of engagement with the past—which includes re-creating the original transparent slides while adding our own materials—allows us to create an environment for new, embodied, and altered forms of knowing. Our added materials include small pull lights which are both sources of light but also musical instruments, enabling the ‘collective key’ Cha describes. We are inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of ‘temporal drag’—a capacity for queer, non-linear engagement with time and the past. We quite literally ‘drag’ Cha’s text, slides, and our other props across the performance floor, in order to choreograph and transmit alternative queer modes of history and thought. The slides and simple props evoke the history of mail art (which Cha used herself), street works, and early performance art, but also emphasise the collective nature of performance and recreation. In sharing this work—and our re-made props—with Cha, each other, and audiences, our objects become extensions of feminist kinship, then and now.

lumiere  ombre

Part of an ongoing project in which Sophie and Naomi re-stage, re-imagine, or performatively translate work by neglected female artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers, whether their work was intended for performance or not. 

Performances:
Cafe Oto, London (2022)
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2018)
Yurt Space, London (2018)
De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (2019)