Thursday, September 29
7:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90057
Tuesday, October 4
12:00 PM
University of California Irvine
Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL)
Contemporary Arts Center
Building #721 on the UCI Campus Map
Wednesday, October 5
11:30 AM
Cal State Fullerton
Department of English + Program in Environmental Studies
SGMH 2205
Thursday, October 6
6:00 PM
Scripps College
Vita Nova Lecture Hall
385 East 9th Street
Claremont, CA 91711
Tuesday, October 11
6:00 PM
LANDING
1409 Pacific Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Thursday, October 13
7:30 PM
Hope Theater
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97401
Monday, October 17
12:00 PM
CalTech Program in Visual Culture
(attendance limited to the Caltech community)
It’s humbling to be on the cusp of bringing “My Electric Genealogy” to the stage after a two-and-a-half year Covid delay during which climate change went from being a thing “out there” to an undeniable reality of every day life – even as the US response still tends to obscure its racial capitalist and settler colonial dimensions.
For nearly forty years my grandfather designed, planned, and supervised the network of transmission lines connecting Los Angeles to its distant sources of power. The electric grid was his second family: when he died, he left behind boxes of snapshots that mixed birthday parties and family Christmases with portraits of power plants and transmission towers. Years later, I learned his legacy also included some of the most polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in the country—much of it located out of state, on Indigenous land. This solo performance combines storytelling with moving images, movement, and an original score to reframe the power grid as a dynamic entity connecting unequally vulnerable communities. Weaving together signal moments in Los Angeles history, episodes of my grandfather’s life, anxious fantasies about a climate-challenged future, and stories of resistance and reinvention, “My Electric Genealogy” is an essayistic working-through of energy infrastructure as a personal and collective inheritance.
All performances free, although tickets may be required and Covid protocols vary.
I hope to add Midwest and East Coast dates soon.
